Bacon's Rebellion was an armed rebellion by Virginia settlers and their indentured servants and slaves, that took place from 1676 to 1677. It was led by Nathaniel Bacon against Colonial Governor William Berkeley, after Berkeley refused Bacon's request to drive American Indians out of Virginia. Thousands of Virginians from all classes (including those in indentured servitude and slavery) and races revolted against Berkeley, chasing him out from Jamestown and ultimately torching the settlement. The rebellion was first suppressed by a few armed English merchant ships from London whose captains sided with Governor Berkeley and the English loyalists, against the rebellious English settlers of Virginia, and their servitude/enslaved allies.
Government forces led by Herbert Jeffreys arrived soon after and spent several years defeating pockets of resistance and reforming the colonial government to be once more under direct Crown control. While the colonial forces did not succeed in the initial goal of driving the American Indians out from Virginia, it did result in Berkeley being recalled to England, where he died shortly thereafter.
Bacon's rebellion was the first rebellion in the British Thirteen colonies and North American colonies overall, in which discontented frontiersmen colonists took part. A somewhat similar uprising in Maryland involving John Coode and Josias Fendall took place in 1689. The alliance between European indentured servants and Black Africans (a mix of indentured, enslaved, and Free Negroes) under the English settlers of Virginia, had disturbed the European colonial upper class. They responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races (European servants and black African slaves), in an attempt to prevent subsequent united uprisings against them, with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705.
Prelude Starting in the 1650s, when high tobacco prices encouraged both tobacco planting and immigration, colonists began cutting forests as well as trying to farm tobacco on land already cleared by Native Americans. Whereas decades earlier, Native Americans had been able to trade foodstuffs which they had grown and captured for trade goods, colonists had learned to farm grain and raise livestock for themselves; furs (caught and prepared by natives or frontiersmen) became the new primary trade good. Tensions arose because native croplands were not only attractive to the colonists' generally free-roving pigs (which damaged their crops), but easily switched to tobacco. Because colonists' farming methods drained fields of nutrients (both because of erosion and because fertilization was rarely practiced or effective for more than another century), new fields were constantly sought. Furthermore, more emigrants were surviving their indentures and thus wanted to establish themselves with their new skills as tobacco farmers. In Virginia's Northern Neck (a relatively undeveloped area in the watersheds of the Rappahannock River and Potomac Rivers between cleared and farmed land in southeastern Virginia and cleared and farmed land in eastern Maryland), rather than rent farmland from their former employers, freed indentured servants and other European immigrants began clearing and squatting on land that the Crown had reserved for Native Americans since 1634. However, with the Restoration of the English monarchy following the English Civil War, the rate of emigration from England dropped as the internal conflict declined. Between the First Anglo-Dutch War and the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Crown adopted Navigation Acts, in particular a new rule that tobacco grown in the colonies could be sold only to English merchants and shipped to England on English ships. Since much colonial tobacco was of low quality and usually sold to Dutch traders or to the Continental market, English merchants had an oversupply of tobacco by the mid-1600s, and its price plummeted. Thus, while the Dutch had paid three pence per pound for tobacco and a small planter could grow 1,000 pounds in a year, English traders would pay only a half penny per pound or less.Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 (1957) pp. 5–6 online edition (unpaginated text file)
Virginia's governor, William Berkeley, had taken office and sailed to the colony shortly before the English Civil War began, and remained in office or with significant power for about 35 years. Berkeley had traveled back to England to fight (unsuccessfully) for King Charles before returning to the colony in 1645 after Natives had massacred settlers in 1644. He led military forces which captured the chief Opechancanough and suppressed the revolt. Berkeley also had a royal monopoly of the important beaver fur trade and charged fur traders in the interior a license fee for bringing furs which they or Native Americans gathered and which the traders then sold to Berkeley's company. Berkeley grew unpopular after the Dutch were defeated, in part because the tobacco boom had ended, as well as because of the conflict and more personal reasons. Like King Charles, Berkeley refused to call for legislative elections for more than a decade during the English Civil Wars (during part of which Puritan-leaning Richard Bennett, Edward Digges and Samuel Mathews had replaced him as the colony's chief executive during the "Long Assembly"). He also issued large land grants to favorites (of 2,000, 10,000 or even 30,000 acres) and was extremely wealthy compared to small planters (owning Green Spring Plantation outside Jamestown, as well as 5 houses in the colonial capital which he mostly rented out, 400 cattle and 60 horses, as well as several hundred sheep, valuable household silver and nearly a thousand pounds sterling worth of grain in storage).Wertenbaker pp. 1–3 Berkeley's favorites often commanded the local militia in various counties, as well as charging quitrents to smaller farmers who cleared and farmed the land on their vast estates. In 1662 Governor Berkeley warned English officials that the low tobacco prices did not even cover freight and customs charges, much less provide a subsistence income for small farmers, who grew discontent, and in 1667 several weather events caused the tobacco crop to fail. Nonetheless, after the Restoration of the monarchy, the king granted English-based favorites the Northern Neck Proprietary and the right to 11 years' worth of quitrents in arrears (which seemed like additional taxes). Discontent had become widespread by 1670, when most landless taxpayers lost the right to vote for representatives in the House of Burgesses.Brent Tarter, Virginians and their Histories (University of Virginia Press 2020 ISBN 978-0-8139-4392-3) p. 50 One set of aggrieved petitioners met at Lawne's Creek parish church across from Jamestown in December 1673,John Bennett Boddie III, Colonial Surry (Richmond: the Dietz Press, Inc. 1948) pp. 105–106 and in 1674 two rebellions in Virginia failed for want of leaders.Wertenbaker pp. 6–9
Meanwhile, Susquehannock peoples from Pennsylvania and northern Maryland had been displaced by the peoples aligned with the Iroquois Confederation and moved south into Maryland (where they were initially welcomed) and Virginia. Secocowon (then known as Chicacoan), Doeg, Patawomeck and Rappahannock natives began moving into the Northern Neck region as they were displaced from Maryland as well as rapidly settling areas of eastern Virginia, and joined local tribes in defending their land and resources. In June 1666, Governor Berkeley told General Robert Smith of Rappahanock County that Native Americans in the colony's northern part could be destroyed, in order to provide a "great Terror and Example and Instruction to all other Indians", and that an expedition against them could be funded by enslaving the women and children and selling them outside the colony.Morgan, "American Slavery American Freedom" p. 233 citing Wm&M.Q.(3d) XVI (1936) p. 591 Allowing enslavement of Native Americans (incorrectly called "Indians") for damages done to frontiersman had been permitted by the General Assembly in the case of John Powell of Northumberland County.Morgan p. 233 citing Hening II pp. 15–16 Thus, soon colonists declared war on the nearby natives. By 1669, colonists had patented the land on the west of the Potomac as far north as My Lord's Island (now Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington, D.C.). By 1670, they had driven most of the Doeg out of the Virginia colony and into Maryland, apart from those living beside the Nanzatico/Portobago in Caroline County, Virginia.
Motives
Bacon's rebellion was motivated by both class and ethnic conflict.
On the one hand, the Rebellion featured a coalition of both black and white laborers, including women, against the Virginia aristocracy represented by Governor Berkeley.
At the same time, the primary policy disagreement between Bacon and Berkeley was in how to handle the Native American population, with Bacon favoring harsher measures. Berkeley believed that it would be useful to keep some as subjects, stating, "I would have preserved those Indians that I knew were hoeurly at our mercy to have beene our spies and intelligence to find out the more bloudy Ennimies", whereas Bacon found this approach too compassionate, stating, "Our Design [is] ... to ruin and extirpate all Indians in General."Sakai, J. Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern, (2014) p. 30.
Rebellion Native American raids
In July 1675, Doeg Indians in Stafford County, Virginia, killed two settlers and destroyed fields of corn and cattle. The Stafford County militia tracked down the raiders, killing 10 Doeg in a cabin. Meanwhile, another militia, led by Colonel Mason and Captain George Brent, attacked a nearby cabin of the friendly Susquehannock tribe and killed 14 of them. The attack ceased only when someone from the cabin managed to escape and confront Mason, telling him that they were not Doegs. On August 31, Virginia Governor William Berkeley proclaimed that the Susquehannock had been involved in the Stafford County attack with the Doeg. On September 26, 1,000 members of Maryland militia led by Major Thomas Trueman marched to the Susquehannock stronghold in Maryland. They were soon joined by Virginia militia led by Col. John Washington and Col. Isaac Allerton Jr. Trueman invited five Susquehannock chiefs to a parley. After the chiefs denied responsibility for the July attacks in Stafford County despite witnesses having noticed Susquehannocks wearing clothing of some murdered settlers, they were killed without trial and despite the parley promises as well as a medal of Lord Baltimore and paper pledge from a former Maryland governor produced by one of the chiefs. Although the tribesmen in the fort continued to resist despite their leaders' unexplained disappearance, many ultimately managed to escape with their wives and children. Maryland authorities impeached Major Trueman, and Governor Berkeley expressed outrage when he heard about the massacre.Wertenbaker pp. 12–14
In January 1676, Susquehannocks retaliated by attacking plantations, killing 60 settlers in Maryland and a further 36 in Virginia. Other tribes joined in, killing settlers, burning houses and fields and slaughtering livestock as far south as the James and York River watersheds.Alfred A. Cave, Lethal Encounters: Englishmen and Indians in Colonial Virginia (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) pp. 148–161
Berkeley's forts and Bacon's raiders