The story of Bacon’s Rebellion is well known to Virginians, but its causes are still subject to much debate. Whiggish history tends to identify Bacon’s Insurrection as a foreshadowing of the American Revolution — a convenient 100 years later — an American precursor to those liberty-minded forefathers who gave us our independence. Revisionists are wont to classify Bacon as a land-hungry bigot with an irrational hatred toward Indians. And the neo-Marxians, of course, view the whole affair as a class struggle between the landed aristocracy and the deserving commoner. While neither a thirst for liberty, a revulsion toward Indians, nor a desire for equality can satisfy the complexity of the causes of such a momentous occasion, each can contribute to an understanding of Bacon’s actions.
True, Bacon was dissatisfied with the royal governor and marched upon his capital forcing him to flee, but his dissatisfaction was not because of a quest for philosophical liberty. Rather it was because the governor would not compel Virginians to join his war against the Indians, but did compel Bacon to maintain the official policy of peace.
True, Bacon’s Rebellion began as a quest to hunt and kill Indians, but it was initially done with the cooperation of other Indians, and was in many respects a quest of vengeance for the Doeg’s and Susquehanna’s murder of Virginia settlers and theft of their livestock.
True, property had consolidated into the hands of the few, while the many struggled for possessions; however, it was not simply the commoners’ desire for land that caused dissatisfaction. Mercantilist economics had driven down the price of tobacco, prohibited trade with other countries, and caused wars in which the Dutch had burned large amounts of Virginians’ tobacco and perpetually threatened the invasion of their plantations. Many, Bacon included, sympathized with the large plantation owners; and in a neo-Platonic hierarchical society that was derived from English civil and ecclesiastical law, there was little or no sense of equal property entitlement like we today impute to our predecessors.
It is also true that the General Assembly enacted many laws during the “Baconian” Assembly, but they were hardly revolutionary, and Bacon himself was absent for most of the legislative session he is credited with fomenting.
The details of the insurrection are fascinating, but do not belong here. It is true, however, that Bacon’s Rebellion had ended before it was over, for Bacon himself perished shortly after burning Jamestown to the ground, and shortly before the governor’s soldiers had dispersed the remaining rebels into oblivion.
While the attacks upon the Indians were willful disobedience of the governor’s orders, the attacks upon the governor himself amounted to treason. It is in this sense that Bacon and Washington shared a fate, should their ventures have both proved unsuccessful.
Some have marked the end of the Rebellion as January 22, 1677, since this is when Gov. Berkeley returned to his plantation at Green Spring. Indeed, the practical end of the rebellion is hard to pinpoint, since it was more of a slow dissolution than an abrupt beheading. However, legal evidence shows that the Assembly and the governor considered the 16th of January to be the final date, for it was this date the General Assembly chose as their cut-off for their Act of Pardon in 1680. Upon the king’s instructions, the General Assembly pardoned any Virginian who had engaged in or supported Nathaniel Bacon between May 1st, 1676 and January 16, 1677. Such a gracious extension of mercy for such a blatant violation of the most serious of laws was completely undeserved, but certainly much appreciated.
The consequences of Bacon’s Rebellion meant very little for American liberty or independence; and it did nothing to help Virginia’s economic situation; but what the Rebellion did demonstrate was that Virginia, in a legal sense, was stable.
Despite the social upheaval and martial tumult during the Rebellion, Virginia’s Assembly and her courts carried on with business as usual without so much as a mention of Bacon, his followers, or treason against Berkeley and the king. Wills were settled, patents issued, deeds transferred, taxes collected, debts ordered to be reconciled, marriages and baptisms performed, and legislation having nothing to do with the crisis at hand drafted, lobbied for, and passed. There are hundreds of times more records between May 1676 and January 1677 that would show nothing out of the ordinary had occurred than are extant records that chronicle Virginia’s famous insurrection.
Those records are boring, mundane, banal events that we would skim over without so much as a first glance, much less a second. But they are indeed exciting and they should not be overlooked! For they show in a very real sense that Virginia, for the first time, could survive though her governor and government were under imminent threat.
