Nathaniel Bacon\'s Document (See External Link: \"Proclamations

¶ … Nathaniel Bacon's document (see external link: "Proclamations of Nathaniel Bacon") as a primary source, what do you consider were the main complaints that Bacon presented against the government of Virginia?

Bacon's Rebellion occurred in the Virginia Colony in 1676. Arguably, Bacon was the precursor of racists and people such as the Ku Klux Khan who sought to annihilate all who were different than them. Socio-economic differences had always existed amongst people. Racist distinctions were now introduced, and Nethaniel Bacon, with his maraud against the Indians introduced racism into the country.

Bacon's main complaint was that the government of Virginie was allowing the Indians to take advantage of them and not doing anything about it. In this way, they were therefore, indirectly involved in rebellion against their country.

The Indians, he tells us, are not worthy of the protection that government ordinarily should give people, nor are they deserving of doing commerce with us. Certain Governors and citizens, he tells us, erroneously think that:

all those neighbour Indians as well as others to be outlawed, wholly unqualifyed for the benefitt and Protection of the law, For that the law does reciprocally protect and punish, and that all people offending must either in person or Estate make equivalent satisfaction or Restitution according to the manner and merit of ye Offences Debts or Trespasses (p.58)

In other words, that people must be penalized and dealt with only according to their merit and deeds. The Indians, however, have, according to Bacon, been "unjustly defended and protected these many years" (58) by American officials who overlooked their many subterfuges and languages. By protecting them and allowing them to function peaceably within their territories, the settlers were not only allowing the natives to take advantage of them but were also, therefore, indirectly ruining the Government. For indeed they allowed the Indians "now in all places Burne Spoyle and Murder" and "prosecuted their evill Intentions Committing horrid Murders and Robberies in all places" (59). For that, Governors, such as that of Virgina, were to be considered traitors for they allowed the existence of "a very formidable Enemy who might with Ease have been destroyed & c." (ibid)

how did Bacon's rebellion helped change relationships between the rich and poor; blacks, Indians, and whites; free and unfree?

The Indians had been largely peaceably accepted by their neighbors and seen as people who had lived on the land before they came. Even though the settlers thought themselves to be superior to the Indians (thinking them to be primitive), they still respected them as per humans and accorded them the same Law as they applied to themselves -- namely that they would be treated according to their merit and protected. Bacon, however, was an early social Darwinist and eugenicist who rated some races as not meritorious of existence since he saw them as sub-humans and duplicitous. For the settlers' own existence, therefore, he advocated that the Indians be wiped out. He therefore organized a militia and destroyed a band of raiders in 1676 and continued to do so with other villages disobeying Berkeley's orders.

Bacon was a forerunner of the Klu Klux Kahn and possibly one of the earliest of militant racism on the shores of the New World. He organized colonists to fight against the Indians. By making people distrust the Indians, and by creating conspiracy theories that painted the Indians as a demonic dangerous other, he would plant ideas in people's heads that perhaps individuals of other foreign races also shared dangerous and threatening traits that were harmful to the colonists' existence.