This episode looks again at the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion in light of what we have now learned, before turning to the region of the Chesapeake in the years after the Rebellion.

There are two big themes in the post-Bacon Chesapeake. The first, the subject of this episode, is geopolitical. After Bacon, what changed in intercolonial affairs, in the relationship between the Chesapeake colonies and England, and between those colonies and the indigenous nations? The second theme, for part 2, is essentially domestic. How did Virginia itself change politically, economically, and socially, with a special emphasis on the terms of labor and the types of people performing it?

Along the way we look at the crazed conspiracy theories that roiled not only Virginia and Maryland, but England, how they affected the various protagonists, led to the negotiation of the “Covenant Chain” between the Iroquois and New York and the other English colonies of North America, and how the end of Bacon’s Rebellion unleashed explosive growth of the trade in enslaved Indians from the Carolinas and points south.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

Josias (Josiah) Fendall

Other episodes mentioned

Notes on Virginia 1644-1675

The Free County of Albemarle

Rogues and Dogs and Fendall’s Rebellion

It is late January 1677 in Virginia. Loyalists under the command of Governor Sir William Berkeley had suppressed Bacon’s Rebellion just after New Year. Now Berkeley was prosecuting the surviving leaders of the rebellion, and loyalist units were looting the estates of wealthy Baconistas to recover losses they had suffered during the war.

Then a fleet from London materialized at the mouth of the James, carrying three royal commissioners and a thousand “red coats,” English regular infantry. Their mission, per Charles II, was to suppress the rebellion – which Berkeley and his supporters had already done – and to discover the root causes of the rebellion. They were not prepared to intervene in a peace they had not fought for, which peace Berkeley was determined to shape to the advantage of his faction. Berkeley’s first interest was in justice for himself and his allies, the loyalists who had defended the government of the Crown; the commissioners were focused on the fiscal priorities of the Crown, and were therefore intent on moving beyond the war – bygones – and getting Virginia back to the important work of growing tobacco.

There would be consequences.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia

Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence

Wilcomb E. Washburn, Review of Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence, Pacific Historical Review, May 1985.

John M. Murrin, Review of Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence, The William and Mary Quarterly, January 1986.

Last episode ended with Sir William Berkeley, on the deck of a ship in the James, watching Jamestown burn to the ground in the wee hours of September 19, 1676. The rebels under Nathaniel Bacon were ascendant, and Berkeley resolved to return to his refuge on the Eastern Shore and plot the next phase of his increasingly desperate war. Little did he know that the tide of the war was about to turn again in his favor.

This episode begins in London in the summer of 1676, where Crown officials were just beginning to figure out what to do about the turmoil in Virginia, over which they had incomplete and very emotional news. Charles II made some decisions with long-term consequences for Virginia.

At about the same time, in a stroke of luck – good or bad, depending on one’s point of view – Bacon died rather horribly. He had done a good job building an organization with an orderly succession plan, but the rebellion had lost its most charismatic leader.

A few weeks before Bacon died, at the end of September, the first of several armed merchant ships arrived in the Chesapeake, and after learning about the revolt their captains pledged their service to Berkeley. They would provide crucial support in an amphibious war against rebels along the James and York rivers. One of the captains, Thomas Grantham of the powerful 500-ton Concord, emerged as a courageous and wise diplomat, and would do more than anyone to end the rebellion in early January, 1677.

At the end of the war, Berkeley mopped up, and prosecuted and executed most of the leaders of the rebellion. Richard Lawrence, however, disappeared, and was never seen again.

The episode ends with the arrival of royal commissioners and a thousand English regular infantry at the end of January, which would be more bad news for Sir William Berkeley.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia

Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690

Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia

Virginia Governor Sir William Berkeley has fled to the Eastern Shore with a small group of loyalist planters and a detachment of perhaps only fifty armed men. Nathaniel Bacon has occupied Berkeley’s estate near Jamestown, and dispatched men to capture loyalist ships anchored there. Bacon’s “navy” has out in search of Berkeley, but Berkeley turned the tables in an audacious amphibious attack and grabbed control of the Bay and the rivers. While Bacon was mucking around in the Dragon Swamp hunting notionally allied Pamunkeys, Berkeley recaptured Jamestown. Loyalist victory seemed at hand, but Bacon forced Berkeley to retreat from Jamestown a second time in part by grabbing the wives of loyalist planters and using them as human shields, and this time the rebels burn it to the ground.

At the end of the episode, it appears that the rebels had the upper hand. Little did they understand that the loyalist cause was far from lost, and the rebellion was, unbeknownst to anybody, on the brink of disaster.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia

Various authors, for the National Park Service, “Mapping the Dragon:
AN INDIGENOUS HISTORY OF BACON’S REBELLION” (pdf)

Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690

Nathaniel Bacon and his army of volunteers have returned from beating up on the friendly Occaneechees (Occaneechis) on the Roanoke River in southern Virginia. It is election day, and Henrico County will elect Bacon and his sidekick, James Crews, to the Virginia Assembly, which has been called into session on June 5, 1676. This episode describes the dramatic session of that Assembly, which began with Bacon’s arrest and ended with he and his army holding the Assembly at gunpoint. Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, demonstrates his own flair for the dramatic along the way, but by the end of this episode has taken refuge with other loyalists on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Oh, and there is a “manifesto.” Never a good sign.

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My Substack

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Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans

Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia

Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

Nathaniel Bacon, “Declaration of the People,” July 30, 1676

Nathaniel Bacon, “Bacon’s Manifesto,” July 1676

The Susquehannocks, having successfully escaped from their beseiged fort on Piscataway Creek in Maryland, fled through the Virginia Piedmont to set up winter quarters on the James and Roanoke Rivers. In January 1676, they launched a measured counterattack. The settlers on the frontier panicked and evacuated. Rumors of war spread. The horrors of King Philip’s War loomed large, especially in the thinking of Sir William Berkeley, the governor. A fundamental debate over how to respond to those Susquehannock attacks set up the confrontation between Nathaniel Bacon and his populist – and it should be said, hard-drinking – frontiersmen on the one hand, and Berkeley and his loyalist supporters on the other. Along the way we consider Governor Berkeley’s background and the experiences that shaped him, and the political challenges that he now confronted. The episode ends with Bacon’s massacre of the Occaneechees (Occaneechis), heretofore allies of Virginia, on their island in the Roanoke River.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia

Various authors, for the National Park Service, “Mapping the Dragon:
AN INDIGENOUS HISTORY OF BACON’S REBELLION” (pdf)

The year is 1675, and we are in Virginia. All kinds of social, demographic, fiscal, and economic pressures have been building for decades, and the common people are restive. There have been a string of small revolts and disruptions in the years since 1660, but they all failed for lack of effective leadership. The “masterless men” in the colony needed a leader, and the leader, when he arose, would need a cause.

Nathaniel Bacon, a ne’er do well son of a wealthy gentleman in English, would be that leader. He arrived in Virginia in 1674 with a fat bankroll, sent there by his father after he got in a scrape with the law. By 1675 he owned two plantations, one of them at the falls of the James River, just at the edge of Indian country.

The spark that would set off the chain of events that would lead to Nathaniel Bacon stepping forward as the leader of a rebellion would be the theft of some hogs by Indians in Northern Virginia who had been stiffed for payment in an ordinary trading transaction. The English colonials would blow their response, and blunder into war. Waging that war would be Nathaniel Bacon’s cause.

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Map of relevant indigenous nations c. 1675 (Credit Matthew Kruer) :

Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia

Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690

We are back in Virginia, finally! In my defense, offered in response to the many listeners who have asked for “more Virginia,” the thirty years before the Third Anglo-Powhatan War and Bacon’s Rebellion are almost blank spaces on published timelines of Virginia history, most noting only the legalization of slavery in 1661. Well, we are now on the brink of the civil war known as Bacon’s Rebellion, which was ramping up as the tide was turning in King Philip’s War in the spring of 1676. To understand that sorry state of affairs, however, we have to step back and look at the evolution of Virginia in the years between 1644, the onset of the last Anglo-Powhatan War, and 1675. How was it that civil war broke out among the English of Virginia during the tumultuous 1670s? This episode explores the root causes of the civil instability that led to Bacon’s Rebellion, and will therefore be more thematic than narrative. Along the way we consider the severe gender imbalance in Virginia, the sorry state of indentured servants, the persistance of a brutally high death rate into the second half of the century, the relentless efforts of Virginia’s great planters to control the growing population of “masterless men” who roamed the colony, and the arrival in the region of the Susquehannocks, much reduced from the peak of their power mid-century, but still a formidable military force.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

“The Sadder But Wiser Girl For Me” (YouTube)