The Rebellion after Bacon

Royal Proclamation Concerning Bacon’s Rebellion

On October 27, 1676, unaware that Bacon was already dead, Charles II signed a proclamation for putting down the rebellion led by “Nathaniel Bacon the Younger.” (Bacon’s elder relative of the same name was a longtime member of the governor’s Council and adamantly supported Berkeley. He reportedly had offered his kinsman a portion of his estate on the condition that “hee would lay downe his Armes.”) While offering to pardon Bacon’s men, the king ordered a thousand soldiers, under Colonel Herbert Jeffreys, and a fleet of ships, under Sir John Berry, to Virginia along with a three-man commission to investigate and report on the disturbances in the colony. Joining Jeffreys and Berry on the commission was Francis Moryson, Virginia’s lobbyist in England. Berry and Moryson sailed on November 19, while Jeffreys, accompanied by Berkeley’s wife, Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley, who had been in England on her husband’s behalf, weighed anchor on December 3.

The most bitter and sustained fighting of the rebellion commenced in November. There were local struggles between neighbors in northern Virginia and on the Southside, and a series of loyalist raids on the York River garrisons that brought back dozens of rebels to hang or languish in jails on the Eastern Shore. Despite these raids, however, rebels retained control of nearly all of Virginia outside the Eastern Shore.

Map Showing Green Spring Plantation

Then, late in December, the loyalists gained the upper hand, first routing a garrison of rebels on the Southside on Christmas Day, then convincing the two main rebel commanders to switch sides. Although the fighting continued, the holdouts increasingly were comprised of leaders who expected to hang if captured, or of servants and slaves who did not wish to return to servitude. When Berkeley at last returned to Green Spring on January 22, only a few rebels remained.

Royal commissioners Berry and Moryson sailed into the mouth of the James River on January 29, and Jeffreys arrived on February 11 at the head of the English troops. The commissioners’ instructions assumed that the rebels had taken control or that the fighting was still underway, so there was a brief pause while they considered the situation. Friction between Berkeley and the commissioners began almost from the outset. Although they sat with Berkeley as a court, condemning the last eight of the twenty-three rebels to hang, they castigated him for his harshness in suppressing the rebellion.

As their mutual dislike intensified, the commissioners began to favor an interpretation of the king’s instructions that would require Berkeley to leave immediately for London, leaving Jeffreys as governor in his place. By late March they had concluded that “those who stile themselves the Loyall Party are the onely chiefe Disturbers and Obstructers of the Peace and Settlement of this calamitous Country.” The trouble, they said, was that Berkeley and his men had tried and punished rebels using wartime rules of military justice even though they had been captured after the rebellion, had hanged men who fell under provisions of the king’s pardon, and had looted the estates of alleged rebels with no pretense of due process.

For his part, Berkeley noted that the commissioners incorrectly dated the end of the rebellion to late December, so that confiscations during the last month of fighting did not count, for them, as wartime actions. He also denied enriching himself with confiscated goods, insisting that the proceeds had fed loyalist forces fighting for the king.

Letter from Lady Berkeley

Personal slights and insults increasingly crept into correspondence between Berkeley and the commissioners, culminating with an April 22 incident in which the commissioners visited Green Spring to say farewell to Berkeley. As they prepared to leave in Berkeley’s coach, they recognized their driver as the “Common hangman.” Noticing that Lady Berkeley was watching through the window, presumably to judge their reactions, the men chose to walk the several miles to their landing on the James rather than endure the insult.

Berkeley sailed for London several days later, vowing to tell his side of the story to Charles II. He had been in poor health for some time, however, and the voyage did him no good. On June 16 he was invited to see the king, but was already “so unlike to live,” the bearer of the invitation reported, that it would have been “inhuman to have troubled him.” He died on July 9 without telling his version of the past year’s remarkable events.

Moryson and Berry arrived in London later that summer, submitting a final report that included “A True Narrative of the Rise, Progresse and Cessation of the Late Rebellion in Virginia.” The report glossed over the deeper causes of the rebellion in favor of a story that blamed a few bad men, such as Bacon, for misleading “the giddy-headed multitude” during the crisis in Indian affairs. This, along with their account of Berkeley’s alleged misconduct in aftermath of the rebellion, became the official version of events. Jeffreys, still serving as interim governor, died in office two years later, having made himself profoundly unpopular with Virginians during his term in office.

Legacy

Shining Shafts Engaged and Disengaged in Lightninglike Play

From the American Revolution to the 1950s, the most common understanding of Bacon’s Rebellion was that it was a precursor of the American Revolution, a premature revolt against British tyranny that represented but a temporary setback for American liberty. Best encapsulated in Thomas Wertenbaker’s Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon’s Rebellion and Its Leader (1940), this interpretation still enjoys some popularity. Since the 1950s, however, historians have soundly rejected this interpretation for the simple reason that there is no evidence to support it and much evidence to the contrary. Bacon himself worked hard at presenting his rebellion as being in the king’s interests, repeatedly representing it as an uprising against a corrupt governor and his followers, who were the real traitors against the Crown.

The causes and consequences of Bacon’s Rebellion were not so simple. Considered from the perspective of the Pamunkeys, Occaneechis, and Susquehannocks, it was obviously about Indians. It was sparked by conflicts with Indians, and Bacon and his followers devoted considerable energy to pursuing Indians. Although the rebellion was suppressed, subsequent governors generally heeded the call of Bacon and his successors for a harsher Indian policy. As Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood summarized the situation, “a Governour of Virginia has to steer between Scylla and Charibdis, either an Indian or a Civil War,” for Bacon’s Rebellion was caused by Berkeley’s “refusing to let the People go out against the Indians.” Not coincidentally, Virginia Indians’ fortunes declined precipitously in the generation following the rebellion.

The History and Present State of Virginia

Considered from the perspective of Virginia society, the conflict brought to a head problems that had been brewing long before the rebellion. In his History and Present State of Virginia (1705), Robert Beverley Jr., the son of a loyalist officer who was at the forefront of the fighting during the winter of 1676–1677, attributed the rebellion to three major causes in addition to “the disturbance given by the Indians”: First, The extreme low price of tobacco, and the ill usage of the planters in the exchange of goods for it, which the country, with all their earnest endeavors, could not remedy. Secondly, The splitting the colony into proprieties, contrary to the original charters; and the extravagant taxes they were forced to undergo, to relieve themselves from those grants. Thirdly, The heavy restraints and burdens laid upon their trade by act of Parliament in England.

In short, Virginians faced a combination of falling tobacco prices and a heavy tax burden. Beverley’s “splitting the colony into proprieties” referred to the granting of the land on the Northern Neck to private individuals, which prevented the colony from selling it. Faced with this loss of revenue, the General Assembly dispatched agents to London to argue for the grant’s revocation. This cost money. So did the General Assembly itself: as the royal commissioners recognized, taxes to pay the members’ expenses during frequent assemblies were “Grievous and Burdensom.” So too did the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), when the Crown had forced Virginia to build a useless and expensive fort at Point Comfort.

Berkeley frankly acknowledged the discontent among the populace, particularly among the small planters who could least afford these extraordinary taxes. Much of the discontent, however, focused not on Berkeley but on the local elites who controlled county governments, which actually levied most of the taxes. When the royal commissioners solicited grievances from the counties after Bacon’s Rebellion, they were met by a torrent of complaints about high local taxes that did not seem to benefit the people at large and could only be paid in tobacco—a crop the large planters had in abundance, but which others could produce only with great difficulty.

Under these circumstances, Berkeley’s plan to build frontier forts struck many frustrated and frightened planters as unhelpful. They figured that it would be cheaper, and perhaps more satisfying, to simply attack Indians wherever they could be found. Bacon’s success came largely because of his ability to direct these people’s fear and anger toward two targets: Indians and Berkeley, who was, according to Bacon’s wife, Elizabeth Duke Bacon, “the Indians’ friend and our enemy.” Although Virginia’s elites were divided over the rebellion and provided the leadership for both sides, small planters who were disproportionately threatened by the Indian war and burdened by taxes tended to lean toward Bacon’s side in the conflict.

After Bacon’s Rebellion the planter elite consolidated its power over the colony, but there were winners and losers even among the gentry. Losers in the struggle tended to be newer men, like Bacon, who had not been in the colony long and who may have resented the power and privileges of established elites. Those who gained the most were an older gentry who had helped found the colony decades earlier or, most importantly, royalists who had fled to Virginia in the 1650s following the English Civil Wars. These members of the Washington, Randolph, Carter, and Lee families, to name a few, would dominate Virginia for many years to come.

The rebellion had also taken place in the midst of a fundamental shift in Virginia’s labor force, several decades after leading planters had collectively decided to replace white indentured servants with more easily controlled enslaved Africans, but roughly twenty years before the supply of slaves would make that possible. By 1700 the slave population had soared, British immigration had slowed, and many poor whites had either become better established or had departed the colony. At the turn of the century white Virginians were increasingly united by white populism, or the binding together of rich and poor whites through their sense of what they considered their common racial virtue and their common opposition to the interests of Indians and enslaved Africans. Thus Bacon’s Rebellion was, as one writer has put it, a critical element in “the origin of the Old South.”