Nathaniel Bacon and the Spirit of the Nation
This work draws significantly from the work of Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (Harvard University Press, 1985)
In 1676, Jamestown was burning. Virginia had seen the first of several conclusions to a roiling civil war. The forces of Nathaniel Bacon had taken the capital, brought their demands before the aged and increasingly truculent, governor, Sir William Berkeley, who had been instrumental in securing the colony against the Powhatan confederation and entrenching a semi-autonomous oligarchy of large tobacco planters. Now, Governor Berkeley had his back against the wall, with the House of Burgesses assembled to pass through a battery of legislation that would create a near republican government in Virginia and conduct a no-holds-barred struggle against the looming threat of Indian invasion. Sir Nathaniel Bacon had brought his war to the very heart of the colony, and he would attempt to bring a reckoning to those men whom he, and many others, believed had almost sold out their country. In a day and age where Americans have a tendency to think of the Declaration of Independence as an abstraction, a set of principles that are universal in scope and pacific in nature, it is better to root the ideas of the Founding generation in an era exactly one-hundred years before. To understand America is to understand the men who backed Nathaniel Bacon to the hilt, men who were, in the reputed words of one Baconian, William Drummond, “in over boots” in a crusade for law and order.
Bacon’s Rebellion does not pertain strictly to the man who would stamp his charisma on the movement. An upwardly mobile squire with a Cambridge degree and admittance to practice law in Restoration England, Bacon squandered his position through a financial scam and found himself packed off to Virginia to start over. Bacon was wealthy and quickly ascended the ladder of Virginian society, being elected to the House of Burgesses nearly within the moment he had arrived. He acquired property, servants, and dabbled in casual irreligion and skepticism. Bacon was not a particularly virtuous figure in himself or in his attitudes, but he was animated, some said by ambition and others by justice, to correct the severe problems that threatened to crush Englishmen below the faction around Berkeley that ruled in Jamestown.
What drove Bacon’s Revolution found its root in deeper problems afflicting Virginians. Firstly, Indians menaced the colony’s continued existence. Concepts of “whiteness” were intensified through exposure to alien races, and many Virginians found themselves with a sense that their back was to the wall against a foreign people who could be unpredictable. Governor Berkeley had broken the back of the Powhatan confederation, but the future of Virginian prosperity, for him, was in the wealth of the fur trade (particularly deer and beaver), and this trade depended on an alliance with the mighty Susquehannock, the “people of the falls,” who ruled the buffer area on Virginia’s northwestern border.
By 1676, another, more domineering and vicious people had come to break the Susquehannock. The Iroquois Confederacy was a monster power that would dominate the northeast of continental North America, famous for their “Mourning War” raids to seize trophy slaves and their smoke-filled longhouses. As five fingers rolled into a fist, the Confederacy waged wars of expansion and subjugation. The French had secured an alliance with the Iroquois after having screwed up in backing their enemies, unaware of the power differential. Now the Susquehannock were beaten to a pulp, and the Virginians were caught in the crossfire (3).
It is important to emphasize a few things about these racialized politics. One, the alliance between Virginia and the Susquehannock was practical and involved trade. There was little strong feeling on either side, and Virginia’s Indian allies did not mind seeing English blood every now and then to keep the balance of power. Second, not all Virginians benefited from this relationship. The ruling authorities of Jamestown controlled the lion’s share of the trade, which meant that this relationship with a foreign power was not primarily oriented towards humble Virginians, either freeholders who lived cheek by jowl with nations like the Susquehannock or the English servant class that was increasingly locked out of advancement. Some of the latter were themselves seasoned soldiers from the Civil Wars, having fought for Parliament and the promises of a representative government against a royal tyrant that was willing to use a horde of foreigners (in this case, the Irish) to repress criticisms of his reign from men with office and title (6-9).
It was for this second cause, the grinding poverty of those outside the inner circle, that provoked ire. English servants in Virginia suffered seasons when they could not eat meat for three days out of the week, while many small farmers struggled to eat more than Indian corn, garnishing their diet with pork and the occasional pigeon. In this instance, English servants in Virginia had a poorer diet than African slaves in the West Indies. These small planters were not simply struggling to survive, but they were bilked through increasingly onerous taxation for useless projects. Out of fear of a Dutch invasion, Charles II had ordered Virginia to construct fortifications along the bay and rivers, fortifications that were not only functionally useless but never used. These defenses required extreme levels of taxation, close to 50% of the tobacco harvested, which coincided with the ruling faction at Jamestown being tax exempt (20).
Bacon had attempted to do something about these problems in his upstart, flashing way. He had confronted the Susquehannock and the Iroquois, involving himself in the ruthless destruction of a Susquehannock village after disagreements and the killing of both Englishmen and Indians began, and demanded recognition. Governor Berkeley refused, fearing a blow to his own rule and the destabilization of the colony. However, Berkeley had created many enemies through his geriatric decay. Some Virginian elites were quite aware that the shipments to and from London were not untouched, with the governor helping himself to royal profits, turning a man like Giles Bland to support Bacon and offer him his naval capabilities. Additionally, the Lady Berkeley was quite rapacious, perhaps turning the old goat even more stubborn, vain, and, later on, vindictive. It was Lady Berkeley who had stonewalled calls for a militia commission to fight Indians on the frontier, primarily from haughty spite (138).
Virginia blood continued to be spilled in intermittent warfare, and the taxation broke the backs of small farmers. It was not against the king, but this localized oligarchy, that the Baconians took up their leader’s banner and marched to Jamestown to enact reform. Unopposed, Bacon, in Cromwellian style, marched into the assembly to call for a series of new bills, which the House of Burgesses, some of whom were favorable to the fellow and former assemblyman, passed in the June Assembly. They declared war against the Indians, eliminated the governor’s monopoly on trade with the Indians, junked the fort scheme, and took a number of other measures designed to rein in corruption.
The Baconian desire was to wage an Indian war to establish Virginian (English) dominance, acquire lands for the landless, reform the government to prevent a tax-exempt oligarchy, and create greater means for humble Virginians to participate in self-rule. Of course, the first and foremost issue was that Nathaniel Bacon received a commission to legally command Virginia to fight the Indians. Bacon required an oath to swear to uphold these reforms and marched out to secure Virginia’s southern and western borders. However, Bacon’s ability to wage this war and maintain these reforms depended upon sea power. The Loyalists to Berkeley remained in control of the rivers and coast, and Bacon ultimately failed to defeat them. He had the capital, but he could not rein in the governor’s forces still at large. So, after a brief foray against the Pamunkey, Bacon returned to Jamestown and made his ultimatum to burn the capital to the ground, ashes that would cement his legacy as an enemy to the crown (64).
Bacon returned to his camps, but succumbed to dysentery, perishing on October 26th of 1676; his revolution continued without him. Soon, the crown itself, receiving reports of renewed Indian warfare all throughout North America, would intervene to stop the bloodletting and chaos. A significant portion of the blame was placed on the aged governor. English naval captains made peace entreaties to Bacon’s forces, many of whom believed the crown’s general policy of pardon and oblivion. Berkeley, attempting to bury London’s peace, engaged in waves of judicial terror, executing Baconians in order to seize their property. Charles II would step in again, revoke all the legislation of 1676 through a royal veto, and subsequently rearrange Virginia’s assembly to be under greater royal control, reducing the power of local elites and subjecting them further to the king, an effort to prevent the return of a figure like William Berkeley (129-130). The result was a more royalist Virginia, one that, for the time, repressed the desire of yeomen, servants, and adventurers for an independent commonwealth of Virginia.
Bacon’s Revolution shared many features with its progeny. These same concerns would animate Americans, particularly Virginians, one-hundred years later. The sacrifice of small freeholders and the landless to imperial governance, high taxes, alliances with foreigners for the enrichment of a few, Baconians were, in not a few ways, predecessors to American patriots. Self-governance and economic subsistence went hand-in-glove with the feeling that a ruling government had sold out its most vulnerable and volatile in a bid to maintain a transnational order of trade. Bacon led a revolution not simply to remove the corruption and misuse of the law among a clique in the capital, but also to assert the rights of Virginians to the land that they had claimed through their blood and labor. When greater royal oversight was able to accomplish this feat, which would soon coincide with the later “benign neglect” under King William and carrying on through the reign of George II, the pressure had dissolved. However, the French and Indian War would reignite these concerns, leading a young Virginian colonel, bunkered in Fort Necessity, to fan the flames of a world war with France and its Iroquoian allies. It was this spirit that galvanized Nathaniel Bacon, as much as the later ancestor of John Washington, a firm ally to Bacon, that defined the beginning of independence. Not in the birth of a new world, but the reemergence of the English spirit, a commonwealth of a people predestined to build a garden within a wilderness, a national fire that persists as embers within the sooty contemporary United States. Thus, Andrew Marvell concludes, on a not so dissimilar bolt of lightning that carried that American spirit upwards:
But thou, the war’s and fortune’s son,
March indefatigably on;
And for the last effect
Still keep thy sword erect;
Besides the force it has to fright
The spirits of the shady night,
The same arts that did gain
A pow’r, must it maintain.
