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Bacon's Rebellion
In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led a revolt against the colonial government of Virginia because of ongoing hostilities with the local Native Americans (Frantz, 1969, p. v). The origins of the rebellion dated back some seven decades according to Michael Olberg (Wiseman, 2005, p. 1-10), with the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. During this period, the Virginia colony cycled through booms and busts economically, but inevitably at the expense of the local Native American tribes. The Natives would occasionally fight back by massacring hundreds of settlers, but by 1644 the English had subdued the local tribes.
The colony began to thrive and by 1660 the population had reached 25,000 (Wiseman, 2005, p. 5-10). The inevitable result was increased pressure on settlers to buy or steal land occupied by the local Natives. The Virginia assembly in 1662 sought to maintain peace by codifying an outright prohibition against this practice and any vigilante actions against Indians. With Dutch raiders destroying tobacco ships and a tobacco glut in Europe driving the price down, the colony was undergoing an economic crisis aggravated by war taxes.
The Rebellion
A squabble in July 1675 over stolen livestock was the spark that triggered the rebellion (Wiseman, 2005, p. 12-14). From the perspective of the Doegs and the Susquehanok, they were cheated by a dishonorable settler...
Matthew responded by killing several Doegs. The Doegs and Susquehanok then killed several of Matthew's servants and his son. The escalation that followed involved the local militia killing over a dozen Doegs and Susquehanok, then the Virginia militia laying siege to a Susquehanok fort. When several Susquehanok tribal leaders were executed during a parley, they dispatched a killing party. One of those killed was the overseer of Nathaniel Bacon's plantation. Berkeley, the Virginia governor, decided enough blood had been spilled and ordered the militia to return to the settlement.
The governor's decision to cease hostilities against the Natives was viewed by the settlers as a betrayal (Wiseman, 2005, p. 15-17). The combination of high taxes, no land, and no protection created conditions favorable for a revolt, but Bacon was an unlikely leader of the rebellion, because he had ample land well within the protection of the settlement and was a member of the ruling elite.
In May, 1676, Bacon appealed to the governor of Virginia for a commission to fight the Indians and was refused (Wiseman, 2005, p. 16-18). When Bacon was not deterred, the governor declared him a rebel on May 10. The governor dissolved the Virginia assembly the next day to force new elections, but in the meantime, Bacon orchestrated a land grab…
References
Wiseman, Samuel. (2005). Samuel Wiseman's Book of Record: The Official Account of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia M.L. Olberg (Ed.). New York, NY: Lexington Books.
Zinn, Howard. (1999). A People's History of the United States, 1492 -- Present. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
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