3 pages essay
Title:
Database: Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political
Culture of Seventeenth-Century Virginia. By: TARTER, BRENT, Virginia
Magazine of History & Biography, 00426636, 2011, Vol. 119, Issue 1
America: History and Life with Full Text
Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the
Political Culture of Seventeenth-Century Virginia
The first of the warships bearing the thousand or more soldiers that King Charles II sent to
Virginia to suppress Bacon's Rebellion and the three commissioners he sent to ascertain
its causes arrived at the end of January 1677 -- January 1676 by the old calendar. By then
the rebellion had collapsed, and Nathaniel Bacon, its namesake leader, was dead of
dysentery and other loathsome afflictions. Governor Sir William Berkeley and men loyal to
his administration had rounded up most of the remaining leaders, and Berkeley had tried
them before courts martial and hanged them. He had put down the largest and most violent
uprising of white people that took place in any of England's North American colonies before
the one that began exactly a century later. He was old, tired, angry, partially deaf, and very
perplexed at how such a bloody rebellion could have broken out in the colony that he had
governed with success for twenty-six of the previous thirty-four years -- almost 40 percent
of its entire history. Berkeley was a bitter man when he climbed aboard the flagship of the
fleet to greet the commissioners and the commanders of the force that arrived too late to
help.
He knew one of the commissioners: Francis Moryson had lived in Virginia in the 1640s
during Berkeley's first administration as governor, was speaker of the House of Burgesses
in 1656, compiled one of the first printed digests of the colonial laws, sat on the governor's
Council early in the 1660s during Berkeley's second administration, and was acting
governor of the colony from the spring of 1661 to the autumn of 1662. In 1677, though,
Moryson was the king's agent and no longer the governors ally. The other two
commissioners had no personal knowledge of Virginia and were strangers to Berkeley. Sir
John Berry was a career naval officer and commander of the fleet that the king sent to
American Accen t
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regiment that the king also sent.[1]
Berkeley got on poorly with them. The commissioners brought the king's order summoning
the governor back to London to report to him in person and empowering Jeffreys to
supplant Berkeley as lieutenant governor. The old governor may have interpreted that as a
royal rebuke or statement of no confidence. Berkeley did not leave for three months, until
well after his relationship with the commissioners had deteriorated to exchanging insults,
some veiled, some not. He was frustrated and angry about everything that had happened
since the previous spring, and he soon grew frustrated and angry about the officious
behavior of the commissioners, who undermined his authority and issued orders as well as
asked questions. Berkeley's deafness made his initial discussions with the commissioners
difficult. They had to shout at him to be heard, and like many hearing-impaired people, he
probably shouted at them, too, unaware of how he sounded to them. They acted as if angry
with each other even before they were.[2]
When Berkeley met with the commissioners aboard the king's warship on the first day of
February, he read through the voluminous papers and royal instructions that they brought,
and on the next day he wrote a long and detailed account of his handling of the rebellion
for the information of his king and of his king's ministers. On the third day of the month, the
governor addressed a letter to each of the twenty county sheriffs, sending them the
commissioners' request that they "make enquiry after the aggreivances of his Majesties
Subjects in Virginia to rectify the said abuses, administring equity to every man without
respect of persons, and to report the same to His Majestie."[3]
The commissioners also interviewed and received complaints from a significant number of
individual Virginians about the governor's violent suppression of the rebellion and his rough
treatment of the rebels and their families. Later in the spring when the commissioners
prepared their long report -- known as Samuel Wiseman's Book of Record, named for the
commissioners' secretary whose handwritten copy survives -- they included the texts or
summaries of many of those individual complaints and interviews, preserving much
evidence about Berkeley's bad behavior in the aftermath of the rebellion; but even though
the commissioners also included a long section that appeared to be derived from the
county grievances, as they were called, that summary is not much more than a skeletal
tabulation. It is extremely sketchy and misleading and omitted the most important parts, the
testimony about conditions before the rebellion that contributed to the widespread violence
of 1676. Officials in England who read the report consequently learned more than enough
to condemn Berkeley for his actions in suppressing the rebellion, but they did not read or
learn anything about the civil discontent that explained how and why a perceived threat
from the Indians became a widespread revolt against the king's governor.[4]
Most historians of Bacon's Rebellion have overlooked or neglected the county grievances.
Some may have taken at face value the commissioners' statement that the county
grievances contained no explanation for the rebellion and therefore did not regard the
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questions that the commissioners propounded were merely leading questions that adduced
nothing more than additional evidence of Berkeley's heavy-handed suppression of the
rebellion. The leading narrative interpretations therefore missed or neglected to take full
advantage of a rich documentary source that preserves the perspectives and also the
revealing language of hundreds of middling and lower-class white men, the very class of
men who joined Bacon in rebelling. If the full, difficult manuscript texts of all of the county
grievances, the majority of which have never been published, are considered in the context
of the institutional and political history of Virginia, the important and neglected evidence
that they contain about conditions in the colony on the eve of the rebellion and about the
attitudes of people who joined the rebellion suggests different interpretations of the causes
and of some of the episodes of Bacon's Rebellion.[5]
Historians of Bacon's Rebellion have suggested different causes and consequences for
the event. Robert Beverley published the first narrative history in 1705 and confessed that
the causes remained cloaked in mystery. A century after Beverley wrote, John Daly Burk
likened Bacon's Rebellion to the American Revolution that began almost miraculously one
hundred years after Bacon's Rebellion, a romantic assumption that allowed Burk to
magnify the roles that Virginia and his own patron, Thomas Jefferson, played in the
Revolution by adducing a supposed precedent. Burks interpretation influenced most of the
other writers on Virginia's colonial and revolutionary history throughout the nineteenth
century and into the twentieth century.[6]
Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker's Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon's
Rebellion and Its Leader (1940), one of the worst books on Virginia that a reputable
scholarly historian ever published, portrayed Bacon as a proto-Thomas Jefferson and the
rebellion as a rehearsal for the American Revolution. Wertenbaker repeatedly referred to
Berkeley as tyrannical, dictatorial, and despised during the years previous to the rebellion
without once citing any sources for those adjectives, which fly in the face of much of the
evidence in the sources that he employed. He resolutely ignored other evidence in those
sources that contradicted his portrayal of Bacon. Wertenbaker described Bacon's attacks
on friendly Indian tribes as great victories against Indian enemies and did not admit that all
but one of the attacks he launched were against friendly Indians. Wertenbaker did not
make much use of the county grievances and scarcely mentioned them in his
bibliographical essay.[7]
In what is still the best narrative of the events of the rebellion, Wilcomb E. Washburn, in
The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacons Rebellion in Virginia (1957), exploited an
abundance of manuscript material in England that no previous writer had consulted. He
interpreted the outbreak of the rebellion as largely a response to Indian attacks on the
frontiers. Washburn began his account with frontier conflicts in 1675 and did not look
further back in time in search of other reasons than danger from the Indians that could
have provoked people into joining Bacon in the summer of 1676. He did not make
intensive use of the county grievances, which might have alerted him to some of the long-
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Washburn's work thoroughly discredited Wertenbaker's, it did not adequately explain the
origins of Bacon's Rebellion.[8]
Bernard Bailyn's influential 1959 article, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia," blamed
"a profound disorganization of European society in its American setting" for the occasional
outbreaks of violence and the small-and large-scale rebellions that occurred in most of the
English colonies during the seventeenth century. Englishmen in England and in England's
colonies shared a long tradition of rioting under stressful conditions, and stressful social
instability and unrest persisted in Virginia, Bailyn wrote, until the final decade of the
century, when native local elites and a few families of wealth and prominence were finally
able to dominate both county and provincial governments and impose social and political
stability on the lower orders of society.[9]
Edmund S. Morgan's equally influential American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal
of Colonial Virginia (1975) made some effective use of the county grievances in a short
section on the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion, which he portrayed as a logical
consequence and an extreme example of the chronic social and political instability in the
colony that Bailyn had described. Morgan's detailed study of seventeenth-century Virginia
treated the unruly behavior of servants, slaves, and landless young men as evidence that
the colony's planters and institutions of government were ineffective in imposing order and
maintaining control.[10]
Midway between the publication of Bailyn's essay and Morgan's book, Warren M. Billings
made what is still the most thorough and careful analysis of the social structure and the
nature and extent of social problems in Virginia at the time of Bacon's Rebellion. His 1968
doctoral dissertation demonstrated that indebtedness and local taxation rates produced
widespread discontent, especially among the small farmers and the landless men in the
colony. In two scholarly articles that he later published, Billings suggested that the
development of strong parish and county governments weakened the central authority of
the provincial government and contributed to the inability of Berkeley, his Council of State,
and the General Assembly to ameliorate local problems or to stem the tide of revolt once it
gained headway and drew discontented lower-class Virginians into the rebellion.[11]
While Billings was later writing a biography of the governor and compiling an edition of
Berkeley's papers, he modified his belief that an accretion of power in the county
governments was at the expense of effective political leadership in Jamestown. His revised
view reflected the substance of several excellent studies that appeared beginning in the
1980s of families, communities, and counties and of the operations of the General
Assembly and other institutions of provincial government that disclosed that socially and
politically the colony was not so poorly served as Bailyn had suggested and Morgan had
supposed. The new scholarship demonstrated that Bailyn erred in assuming that there was
no class of wealthy, influential, and respectable native-born elites -- a mini-aristocracy for
Virginia -- capable of overseeing the working classes during the decades between the
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In fact, the colony's leading landed families handed down their property and their prestige
from generation to generation through marriages of daughters and widows to ambitious
immigrants, preserving but partially concealing those families' continuing social dominance
through a succession of surname changes. Moreover, the colony's political institutions
developed into stable and well-functioning organs of local and provincial administration.[12]
The authors of the social and institutional studies did not offer an explanation for Bacon's
Rebellion or provide a convincing alternative to Morgan's interpretation of the rebellion as a
logical consequence of chronic unrest in the population of people who participated in the
rebellion. Nor did they provide additional evidence for or in any way refute Stephen
Saunders Webb's 1676: The End of American Independence (1984), which cited the
county grievances several times but only for some compelling incidents and not to adduce
the rebellion's causes. Webb appeared to locate the root cause of Bacon's Rebellion in the
new empire's weak and ineffective administration of its overseas colonies.[13]
Billings's 1968 warning not to neglect the county grievances, which he accurately
described as "the only corpus of information about those issues agitating some colonists to
the point of rebellion," has gone largely unheeded. Taking the county grievances seriously
permits a reconsideration of the causes of the rebellion and the significance of some of its
events and also offers insights into the political culture of seventeenth-century Virginia. It
was in the interactions of men in the localities, as both Bailyn and Billings separately
suggested, that men and women found reasons to join Nathaniel Bacon in the summer of
1676, although not entirely for the reasons that Bailyn and Morgan advanced.[14]
In the decades between the meeting of the first General Assembly in 1619 and the
outbreak of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, Virginia changed remarkably. It became the
English king's first royal colony in 1625, and its population increased by a factor of several
times and spread over much of the land on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay and along
the rivers as far west and north as the tides flowed. Two deadly Powhatan attacks in 1622
and 1644 temporarily retarded but did not halt that expansion, and following the second
attack the colonial government so overwhelmed the Indians that English-speaking
Virginians cultivated their tobacco in comparative peace. The governors and the assembly
delegated authority over many day-to-day matters to local military and civil officers,
creating the first of the counties to which Berkeley sent the commissioners' request for
information. In each county, parish vestries oversaw the religious and moral welfare of the
people, and a county court, presided over by justices of the peace whom the governor
appointed, settled local disputes and maintained order. The county sheriffs served writs,
arrested miscreants, collected taxes, and occasionally conducted elections; the clerks
recorded deeds and wills and kept the county's public records; and the surveyors marked
property boundaries and drew plats, guaranteeing to the tobacco planters their titles to their
valuable land. Those parish vestries and county courts, and the comparatively prosperous
men who sat on them, created twenty local polities and sets of leaders from whom the
county's voters from time to time elected the county's burgesses.
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2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... After Berkeley's decision in 1643 to have the burgesses sit apart from the governor and
Council members in a bicameral legislature, the landowning tobacco planters in the House
of Burgesses, supported by their neighbors and relatives at home and on the county
courts, became the representatives of their class and their interests. Together, they and
Berkeley fashioned public policies that promoted landownership, attempted to regulate the
behavior of indentured and enslaved laborers, protected commerce with English and Dutch
merchants, and sought high prices for the leaf tobacco that was the principal source of
income for them all. In 1662 the assembly instituted in Virginia the old English practice of
requiring the parish churchwardens to assemble all of the landowners every fourth year to
perambulate their property lines, renewing marks and renewing individual and collective
memories in order that everyone's property be known and secured.[15]
By such means the owners of land, who were nearly all white and for the most part male,
avoided disputes among themselves as much as possible and created a political system
that reflected the social and economic systems and gave a measure of security and
stability. As if to fortify the relationship between tobacco planters and the government, in
1670 the General Assembly adopted a law that restricted the suffrage to those
"ffreeholders and housekeepers who only are answerable to the publique for the levies."
That is, the assembly declared that only men who owned taxable property were sufficiently
invested in the welfare of the country to be allowed to take part in its governance, just as in
England where, as the new law explained, English laws "grant a voyce in such election
only to such as by their estates real or personall have interest enough to tye them to the
endeavour of the publique good."[16]
Until the rebellion broke out in 1676, it had all seemed to work. The colony escaped most
of the convulsions that plagued England during its civil wars, even though white Virginians
experienced occasional episodes of violence on the frontiers, persistent and annoying local
problems with laborers of the kind that everyone had everywhere, and some frictions
between churchmen and Puritans or Quakers. At the middle of the century some merchant-
planters began acquiring a larger proportion of their labor force from the African slave
trade, allowing some trading and planting families to prosper disproportionately; but so long
as most or all of the tobacco planters shared the same objectives and hazards, Berkeley's
policy of regulating the Indian trade so as to reduce chances of frontier violence and his
participation with them in the tobacco economy created what appeared to them to be
practical and generally profitable political and economic systems.[17]
The rebellion that Nathaniel Bacon led broke out early in 1676 and was a complete
surprise, not only that it happened at all but also that it swept up in it a great many people
in eastern Virginia -- including tobacco planters, indentured servants and enslaved
laborers, and even women -- who did not appear to be immediately threatened by its most
evident cause, which was fear of renewed Indian attacks on the margins of the western
and northern settled areas. Scattered fighting between colonists and Doegs and other
tribes on the edges of the frontier in 1675 and 1676 and receipt of news early in 1676 of
fighting in New England (known as King Philip's War) caused Nathaniel Bacon and other
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attacking Indians and demanding that the governor raise a force to defend the colony.
Berkeley summoned the General Assembly back into session in March 1676, but it could
do little more than create a mobile army of 500 men and plan to erect and man a few posts
on the frontier. A drought had ruined the tobacco crop, plunging people into debt, and taxes
were already high in the colony for two reasons: the governor's proposal to buy out the
proprietors of the Northern Neck (the land between the Potomac and Rappahannock
rivers), which the king had granted to a set of court favorites; and huge expenses that the
governor and assembly had undertaken during two recent wars with the Dutch when the
king and his ministers commanded that a large fort be built at Point Comfort at the mouth of
the James River, a fort that could not possibly be of any practical use because of the
breadth of the river and the shallowness of the near-shore water.[18]
Bacon raised a volunteer army in the spring, and fighting between that army and the
Indians, as well as threatened violence between that army and the government, led
Berkeley to call for an election and summon a new assembly for June 1676. There, late in
the session, he faced down Bacon in a dramatic scene. The governor literally bared his
chest and invited the rebel leader to shoot him. Berkeley vacillated between trying to
protect the frontier settlers and not disturb the generally peaceful trading relationships he
had fashioned with the tribes in the interior. The June 1676 assembly created a thousand-
man army, one-fifth of which was cavalry, and specified how many men each county's
militia commanders were to recruit or impress into the service. When Bacon threatened
the governor he also threatened the assembly members and in effect extorted from them a
commission as the general of the new army. The law so named him, and the governor,
against his better judgment, reluctantly agreed. "How miserable that man is," Berkeley
grumbled a few days after the assembly adjourned, "that Governes a People wher six parts
of seaven at least are Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed and to take away their
Armes now the Indians are at our Throats were to rayse an Universall mutiny."[19]
In the end, Bacon's impetuous leadership of thousands of frightened men overwhelmed
Berkeley's irresolute prudence and plunged the colony into a full-scale civil war that
resulted in scores or perhaps hundreds of people being killed and the capital city of
Jamestown burned to the ground. Men loyal to Bacon and other men loyal to Berkeley
(and some who switched sides) plundered their enemies' farms or ran amuck and
plundered at will. Most surprisingly of all, once the rebellion began to gather force, men and
women who lived far from the settlements where Indian raids were a possibility also took
sides with Bacon against Berkeley's government. It appeared that the widespread
participation of people in the rebellion involved more than fear of Indian attacks. But what?
And how seriously were they (and are we) to take the implications of Bacon's public
pronouncements against the governor to which he signed himself "General, by the consent
of the people"?[20]
Virginia politicians and imperial administrators then as well as historians ever since have
debated the many answers that those questions produced. Had Samuel Wiseman's Book
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thoroughness that it reported on the complaints about Berkeley's actions in suppressing
the rebellion, royal officials in the seventeenth century and historians and their readers in
the twentieth century would have understood that important event in different ways. The
commissioners casually dismissed the grievances contained in the reports from the
counties as "soe few and Triviall" that they could not have set off the rebellion, and they
shifted attention to Berkeley even before completing the report by complaining "that if the
Governour and his Party would leave off their depredations, and Answer to those matters
hee by his Majestie is Instructed and by us desired to doe, Wee can see noe urgent
occasion to stay a fortnight longer upon the Place." That conclusion, which the
commissioners reached after being in the colony for two months and coming to
loggerheads in their dealings with Berkeley, indicates that the commissioners were by then
inclined to blame Berkeley and his adherents for the colony's problems both before and
after the rebellion rather than to blame the leaders of the rebellion for beginning it or to look
and listen carefully for the sources of discontent. The commissioners either suppressed --
or more likely missed entirely -- the import of much of what the county grievances
contained.[21]
One thing that the commissioners did not report, either from hearing the county grievances
or the numerous personal complaints of colonists, was widespread dissatisfaction with
royal government per se, although that is how some later writers interpreted Bacon's
rebellion against the king's governor. The first complaint that the commissioners heard
about on their arrival and the only complaint in the county grievances that they seriously
regarded afterward was that the governor had summoned the General Assembly too often
and that county taxpayers were consequently overburdened paying what they
characterized as exorbitant rates of compensation that the assembly members voted
themselves for their attendance at the annual meetings. The commissioners merely
recommended that the General Assembly pass a law specifying that it meet every other
year and no oftener and that burgesses' expense allowances be reduced.[22]
The commissioners did not comment on Berkeley's not calling for new elections of
members of the General Assembly at any time since 1660, shortly after he was restored to
the governorship and Charles II was restored to the throne. Whenever a member of the
House of Burgesses died or resigned or got promoted to the Council or moved out of his
county, the governor called a special election to fill that seat, so from time to time the men
of every county selected a new burgess, even though there was no general election at all
for sixteen years. It is unclear whether landowning Virginians or the men who were
disfranchised in 1670 believed that frequent elections were important or essential features
of their representative government. By the year of the rebellion, though, Berkeley
acknowledged that some people felt aggrieved by the long continuance of the assembly --
known in the literature of Virginia's history as the Long Assembly, as if it were equivalent to
the Long Parliament of Charles I -- and in May when he ordered a general election he
stated as much in his writ that the secretary of the colony sent to each of the county
sheriffs who conducted the election.[23]
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2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... Had the commissioners looked beneath the surface of the county grievances and the
personal complaints and paid closer attention to the recent history of the colony, they might
have come closer to discovering the causes of the rebellion or developed a more sensitive
appreciation of the reasons other than fear of the Native Americans that drew people into it.
But it is entirely possible that the three royal commissioners were as deaf to the nuances of
the language of the common men of Virginia as the old governor was to the actual voices
of nearly everybody.
The commissioners' report took no notice that the county grievances exhibited interesting
similarities and differences that revealed some important information about the complaints
and the men who complained. Some of the county grievances were signed, and some
were not. There are no extant records describing the gatherings at which the texts were
agreed to or subscribed or any indication for most of the counties how many men
participated. (None contains the signature or mark of a woman.) The documents with a
small number of signatures may have been authenticated in that manner, but those with
dozens or scores of autographs and marks may possibly represent a broader support for
the assertions than the documents that only a few men signed. Surry County residents
submitted two differing sets of complaints, and two groups of men in Isle of Wight County
submitted competing documents. From Nansemond County the commissioners received at
least three, perhaps four, sets of grievances. The commissioners' report cryptically
characterized the substance of that county's grievances differently than in the transcription
that Samuel Wiseman authenticated of an unlocated manuscript and also differently than in
the two extant originals, one bearing forty-one signatures and seventy-two marks and the
other from "his Majtie. Poor butt Loyall Subjects of Nansemond," which has thirty-four
signatures and twelve marks.[24]
The commissioners received or preserved no record of grievances from Middlesex County,
residence of Robert Beverley, one of Berkeley's most active allies in suppressing the
rebellion and father of the historian; and they received nothing from Charles City County
until the middle of May, fter they had completed the bulk of their report. The submission
from Accomack County, on the Eastern Shore, bore ten signatures and made an unusual
request. Its authors declared that "Whereas wee are Sensible of the vast Charge this
Unhappy Warr and Rebellion hath put the Country to: and it must be Expected to be
defrayed out of the Country wee desire wee may bee Excluded from all and Every parte of
the same (Wee being no way the Cause of it)."[25]
Nearly all of the county grievances complained that the governor called the assembly into
session too often and that the burgesses voted themselves large per diem allowances and
tavern bills that the county's taxpayers had to pay. Most of the county documents also
charged that other taxes were too high. The assembly had long placed an export tax on
tobacco, at the rate of two shillings per hogshead (a cask that held about a thousand
pounds of compressed leaf tobacco), to defray the ordinary expenses of the colony's
government. The colony also provided a large plantation for the governor and a smaller
one for the secretary of the colony, the assembly had long since exempted members of the
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2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... governor's Council of State from paying taxes, and county courts and parish vestries also
routinely exempted from taxation elderly and infirm people who were not economically
productive. Men from nearly all of the counties complained about the high taxes assessed
for constructing the obviously useless and ruinous fort at Point Comfort and another that
was never even completed at Jamestown; and some of them mentioned other taxes levied
for purposes that they claimed not to know -- probably for erecting public buildings in the
capital and for attempting to buy out the proprietors of the Northern Neck. No set of
grievances complained about the land tax, called a quitrent, that all property owners paid to
the king or about any of the customs charges and duties that acts of Parliament required
be collected at the colony's port of entry. A few men complained that the defenseless state
of the colony could be attributed in part to the failure of royal customs officers to collect
what were called castle duties, gunpowder and shot that captains of ships were to supply
when clearing through port.
The similarities among the documents rather than the differences impressed the royal
commissioners and may have diverted their attention from asking an important question:
whether the differences suggested that at least some of the causes of the rebellion were of
local origin. High taxes that the General Assembly levied with little or nothing to show for it
were a common complaint, but the commissioners ignored the almost universal complaints
in the county grievances about local taxes. The men of most counties also complained
about high county and parish taxes and the manner in which the county courts levied them.
All of the taxes were levied at a rate of so many pounds of tobacco per poll, or person: that
is, every head of a household and every laboring man (called a "tithable" because each
was required to pay the parish rates as well as the county taxes) was assessed the same
amount, and every paid or indentured or enslaved laborer, whether white or black, male or
female, was also assessed the same amount, the employer or owner being responsible for
payment. Those taxes paid for the construction and maintenance of courthouses and jails,
and parish taxes paid the expenses of churches, ministers' salaries, and for taking care of
the poor and the orphaned. Several sets of grievances requested in strong language that
when justices of the peace met to set the annual tax rate they not be allowed to go into
secret session. Some even requested that a few popularly selected taxpayers be permitted
to take part in the public assessment of the local taxes. Throughout the complaints about
local taxation ran two themes: one was about how high the taxes were without benefiting
the people at large; the other was that the manner of taxation appeared to benefit the
people with property -- the tobacco planters -- at the expense of people who owned little or
no land or raised little or no tobacco but were required to pay high taxes in tobacco,
anyway.
Most of the complaints, particularly those with large numbers of signatures and marks,
singled out the county poll tax as the most serious complaint and recommended that all
taxes be assessed on the land that people owned as a more nearly fair method of raising
taxes. "We humbly propose," the James City County complaints (and several others)
suggested, "the raisinge of our taxes & Cuntry dues, to be by a Land tax, & according to
the estate & abillity of the Inhabitants of this Collony." The Isle of Wight County document,
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2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... perhaps the least literate of them all, also complained about how poor people were at the
mercy of wealthy and well-connected people. Their scribe wrote, "Whereas ther are some
great persons both in honor, rich in estat and have severall ways of gaines and profitts are
exempted from paying Leavies and the poorest inhabitant being compelld to pay the great
taxes which wee are burdened with having a hogshead or two of tobacco to pay for rent
and near two hundred yearly for Leavies having a wife and two or three children to
maintain whether our taxes are not the greater by such favour and privileges granted them
which wee desire to be safe of by their paying of Leavies as well as wee they having noe
necessitie from being soe exempted." The poorest, unsurprisingly, resented being taxed or
overtaxed when the wealthiest were untaxed or undertaxed.[26]
The men from Henrico County, where Nathaniel Bacon resided, also objected that local
magistrates acted against the interests of the people and in their own interest. They
complained, "It is a very greate Greevance that wee have these many years laine under
heavy & unsupportable taxes officially Sixty pounds of tobacco for each tithable for 2 years
following… . Wee are much Greeved that the major pt of the Commissioners of our County
Court are men of a Consanguinity, and wee farther Report that noe County or Parish leave
bee levyed without at least six of the Comonalty such as the County or Parish shall make
Choyse of to sit with the Comissioners when the same is levied." That at least some of the
justices of the peace -- who were sometimes called commissioners of the peace -- were
"men of a Consanguinity" -- that is, closely related to each other -- made their actions
appear even more devious and self-serving.[27]
Some Surry County residents likewise requested "that for the future the Collectors of the
Leavy (who Instead of Satisfaction were wont to give Churlish Answers) may be obliged to
render Account In writing what the leavy is for to any that Shall desire it." Other residents of
the same county declared "That itt has been the custome of the County Courts att the
Laying of the Levy to withdraw into A privat Roome by means the poore people not
knowing for what they paid the levy did allwayes admitt how theire taxes, should be so
high." From Northampton County came a pair of recommendations on that subject: "That
no person may be sett tax free" unless by a vote of a full bench of justices of the peace;
and "That our County Records may be free open for Every man to Search and Require
Copies as there oca-sions from time to time shall and may Require … paying the Clerk his
Just fees."[28]
What was wrong, the men who agreed to most of the county grievances complained, was
not just that taxes were too high and that the assembly met too often, which is what the
commissioners heard and reported, but that the class of landed men who made the laws
and ran the parish and county governments were unfairly taxing the poor and the landless,
who since passage of the 1670 act limiting who could vote were without a voice in selecting
the men who levied the colony's taxes. Because the governor appointed members of the
county courts, usually following recommendations from the justices of the peace,
themselves, no taxpayers had a voice in who made local government decisions and set
local tax rates, either, and none had effective leverage to force changes in local officials'
Page 11 of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... behavior or policies. The county grievances reveal strong and widespread discontent with
the county governments, not with the governor or his administration or with the king and his
royal authority within the new empire. That essential fact is missing from the standard
interpretive narratives of the rebellion.
Those were not new complaints, nor were the differences in perspective between landed
and landless colonists new or surprising. The surviving records of every county for almost
every decade in the colony's history contain evidence of resentment at what some people
regarded as high-handed actions by officeholders and wealthy men who appeared to act
as if they believed they were entitled to govern -- and to govern however they pleased. The
language in which that resentment was expressed and the manner in which the county
courts attempted to regulate it or to suppress it exhibit the values and perspectives of both
groups. There were degrees of dignity among free men, just as there were differences in
degree between men and women and differences in degree between free men and their
servants and enslaved laborers. Suggesting that a man had risen above his natural level or
degrading a man below it were both serious offences because they undermined the social
hierarchy that the structure and processes of government reflected and protected. The
distinctions between the landed and office-holding class and the laboring and landless
class were conspicuous and openly acknowledged.
Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan in the twentieth century interpreted the many
complaints and the often-turbulent insubordination as evidence that the planters and
justices of the peace and governor could not control a rootless mob of malcontents. The
royal commissioners in the seventeenth century neglected the complaints and
insubordination and therefore did not attempt to interpret them at all. That was a serious
oversight. The complaints that appeared in the county grievances in 1677, which white
men of all but the very highest and very lowest classes endorsed or wrote, employed a
peculiar late-medieval English vocabulary that suggests evidence of class-consciousness.
They called themselves the commons of Virginia or the commonalty to distinguish
themselves from their wealthier or more powerful or more privileged neighbors. Earlier
Englishmen and some men as late as Cromwell's time had used the word commonalty to
identify people who were not of the landed gentry or the nobility. The word had virtually
disappeared from use in England by the 1670s, but it was in use in Virginia then because it
was exactly the right word for the lower orders of white residents to use to identify
themselves and their own interests. Those distinctive words and phrases appeared in five
of the sets of county grievances -- including in the Henrico County recommendation that "at
least six of the Comonalty" be permitted to join the justices of the peace in setting the
county levy -- and elsewhere, and variants on them or their essence appeared in many
other documents, including Bacon's declarations that he signed as "General, by the
consent of the people."[29]
Actions and words of lower-class white men that were consistent with the language of the
county grievances of 1677 predated Bacon's Rebellion. In Surry County early in January
1674, the county's magistrates arrested and interrogated fourteen men who had met twice
Page 1 2of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... in December, first in the church of Lawne's Creek Parish and later in a place called the
Devil's Field, charging that they conspired to refuse to pay their local taxes because the
taxes were unjustly laid. The men who attended the meetings readily admitted that they
had met and discussed and condemned the method that the county court had used to
assess the taxes that they were supposed to pay.[30]
That the justices of the peace had them all arrested and interrogated indicates that the
magistrates, who for the most part belonged to the wealthier, landowning part of the
community, believed that it was seditious for lesser men to question or even to discuss
their official actions. The two principal justices of the peace who conducted the
interrogations wrote a preface for the collected documents in the case when they were
copied into the county's public records. Justices of the Peace Lawrence Baker and Robert
Spencer wrote "Of how Dangerous consequence unlawfull Assemblyes and meetings have
bin, is Evident by the Chronicles of our Native Country wch are occasioned by the Giddy
headed Multitude, & unless repressed may prove the ruin of a Country." The two justices
described the fourteen men as "a Company of Seditious & rude people" who by "theire
Contemptuous behaviour & Carriage, not respecting Authority" deserved to be arrested
and prosecuted under the Riot Act.[31]
The justices of the peace fined the men and bound them over to appear before the next
session of the General Court in Jamestown, at which time, in April 1674, it fined Mathew
Swann, "the ringleader of them," two thousand pounds of tobacco and required all of the
men to pay court costs. The following September the governor remitted Swann's fine "and
alsoe the fines of the other poore men," provided that they "acknowledge there fault in the
said County Court, and pay the Court Charges." The governor did not so much pardon
their actions as mitigate their punishment for the sake of preventing further disorder, and
he appointed Justice of the Peace Robert Spencer to the office of county sheriff the
following November. That was how Berkeley had governed, keeping order by incorporating
as many of the colony's white men as possible into his political orbit and system through
obligation or conspicuous shared interest. Not so, the Surry County justices of the peace.
That even discussion of the propriety of their actions appeared to them to warrant
prosecution reveals a good deal about their values and how they believed that they were to
be respected. The county's records also do not disclose that any of the men acknowledged
fault or paid court costs, which reveals what the other poor men thought about their local
government officers.[32]
That episode has been exaggeratedly referred to sometimes as the Lawne's Creek
uprising. It is moderately well documented, but it was not the only event of its kind. Later in
1674 some taxpayers in New Kent County also threatened to resist collection of the local
taxes, and in 1675, Berkeley "appeas'd two mutinies … raysed by some secret villaines
that wisphered amongst the people." There is no other surviving documentary evidence
concerning those three events than Berkeley's passing references to them, but the
governor and county officials worried that small farmers and tradesmen might mutiny, just
Page 1 3of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... as they worried about unrest among indentured servants and enslaved laborers and about
real criminals.[33]
When it appeared in the mid-1670s that the Indians had suddenly become a danger to all
of the English-speaking inhabitants of Virginia, disfranchised men and overtaxed small
farmers complained that the most wealthy and most politically powerful of their neighbors
were overbearing, exploitive, and abusive and that by their actions they also endangered
the safety of everybody.
One of the three extant sets of 1677 grievances from Nansemond County, the one that
exists only in transcription, includes a vivid narrative that dramatically brought all of the
complaints about taxes and favoritism into focus. "Yor. Honrs. are sensible," the men of
Nansemond informed the commissioners, "there was a rising in This part of the Country in
May last," yet another of what at the time were called mutinies, "occasion'd by the grevious
taxations & burthens wee lay under for many years before & to increase our pressures the
militia would have Houses built intitul'd Forts under the pretence of destroying the
Heathen." The authors of the grievances charged that the militia commanders had directed
that the forts "be erected upon their owne lands which wee well perceived would have
been the utter ruine of us the poore Comonalty & only self interest to themselves wee see
& knowing the Heathen must be destroy'd by a moving force, and the charge of these forts
would have gone beyond our ability either to maintaine or build." The militia commanders
ordered the complaining militiamen "to assemble together," but at that muster the men
"roared them down by a generall roar of Commonalty." Common militiamen shouting down
commissioned officers! That must have been astonishing and frightening, a humiliating and
potentially very dangerous exhibition of insubordination. The soldiers must have been very
angry, indeed, to be so bold. That episode, which is described in only the one unpublished
document, was much more serious than the so-called Lawne's Creek uprising.
"Yet," the men of Nansemond County continued, "our Militia order'd all manner of
necessaryes as Axes, hoos, Halborrds, provisions & the like fitt for the worke & seeing
ourselves in this sad condition the Heathen hourely expected to come upon us the
excessive tax likewise that wee did readily account needlesse, and unnecessary," they
asked permission to take their case to the governor. The commanding officers prudently
"caused us to assemble ourselves together and every man to make his complaint
personally." The militia commanders, either frightened or perhaps cautious, may have
emulated Berkeley in giving their disaffected men an opportunity to state their complaints,
as if understanding the principle of the safety valve long before the invention of the steam
engine. "And that it might be thought noe tumult," the men's narration continued, "(as God
knowes wee were with noe tumultuous Intensions) wee chose five men to goe to his
Honr.," but Berkeley, who made several trips into the interior of the colony in the spring of
1676 to ascertain what Nathaniel Bacon and his men were doing, was "not at home" when
the men from Nansemond County reached Jamestown. They related how "his Lady writ to
his Honr: on our behalfes, and sent a Coppie of the letter downe to us, which was such a
Satisfaction to us, that wee every man return'd to his owne home, for his Honr had
Page 1 4of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... appointed an Assembly to be on the fifth of May" -- it was summoned for the fifth of June
1676 -- "& issued out Warrants for the chusing Burgesses &C every free borne mans voat
was hear'd in Election. Against which Assembly wee drew up our Grievances & sent by our
Burgesses who gave us great Satisfaction at their returne most of our grievances being
satisfied."[34]
The list of grievances that they "drew up" in 1676 is extant. That document is one of
several unusual things about the June 1676 meeting of the General Assembly that deserve
mention because they have been overlooked or misinterpreted. The contents of the county
grievances of 1677 illustrate and explain those events and the sources of the complaints,
but none of the historical narratives of Bacon's Rebellion thoroughly exploited the evidence
of pre-1676 discontent to explain with accuracy the importance of what the June 1676
General Assembly did. That discontent was as important a reason for the governor to call
for the election of a new assembly as the necessity to prepare for war with the Indians. The
two causes converged, as the Nansemond County narrative and other events indicate, by
an accident of timing. When Berkeley, who was out west in Henrico County, issued his writ
for the election of a new assembly "for the better security of the Country from our
Barbarous Enemies the Indians and better settling and quieting our domestick disorders
and discontents," he also requested that "at the Election of the said Burgesses all and
every person or persons there present have liberty to present freely to their said Burgesses
all just Complaints as they or any of them have against mee as Governor." He also
promised that he would "gladly joine with them in a Petition to his Sacred Majestie to
appoint a new Governor of Virginia and thereby to ease and discharge mee from the great
care and trouble thereof in my old age." Berkeley specifically requested that the men
elected to the House of Burgesses "discharge that duty of their owne personall charge for
the ease of the Country" and not require the county taxpayers to pay their expenses. As
the men from Nansemond County and elsewhere understood the writ for election, they not
only had the right to submit all of their grievances to the assembly, but they also believed
that the governor had allowed all free men to vote, ignoring the law of 1670, and many of
them, in fact, voted.[35]
The undated document (internal evidence clearly indicates that it was drafted in the spring
of 1676) to which the 1677 Nansemond County grievances refers and which in parts
closely resembles their 1677 grievances, began, "Considerations upon the present troubles
in Virginia," and opened, "The great oppression the people complaine of is the great taxes
Levied on them Every yeer and the Unequall way of taxing them by the poles for that a
poor man that hath nothing to maintain himself wife & child: pays as much for his levie as
he that hath 2000 acres of Land." The men of Nansemond County, either as petitioners
addressing the General Assembly or as electors instructing their burgesses, requested that
county sheriffs (who kept part of the tobacco they collected to compensate them for their
work) not be permitted to serve more than one year at the time (as in England, and they
cited English law on that point). They complained that the annual meetings of the assembly
cost every free person in the county more tobacco than most could afford, not only to pay
the expenses of the burgesses but also the 400 pounds of tobacco that the secretary of the
Page 1 5of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... colony charged each county for sending out the writ of election. Because of these "burdens
the people began to Mutinie in the year 1674." This was shortly after the Lawne's Creek
disturbances and at about the same time that the taxpayers in New Kent County
threatened to withhold their tobacco. The authors of the Considerations of 1676 therefore
recommended that burgesses and other officials not be paid large salaries, that local
officers do their jobs without pay to keep down taxes, and that such taxes as remained
necessary "be levied by a land tax, which seems to be the most Equall Imposition, and will
generally take of the complaints of the people, although perhapps some of the worst sorte
wil not like it who hould greater proportions of land then they can make use of."[36]
The Considerations of 1676 and many of the grievances of 1677, in spite of the submissive
form and tone in which they were phrased, bristle with resentment against local
magistrates, sheriffs, militia officers, burgesses, and tax-exempt elites. The commissioners'
formal report contains not one syllable about any of those dramatic events or serious
complaints or any hints that the commissioners recognized their significance. Historical
narratives that have provided the principal interpretations of the rebellion have missed
almost all of those events and their significance. The county justices of the peace and the
militia officers, not the governor or the king, were the primary objects of the most serious
complaints.
The reformers elected to the June 1676 assembly passed laws to solve several of the most
important domestic problems. The assembly required annual rotation in the office of sheriff;
it forbade the holding of more than one local office at a time; it regulated fees and practices
in the secretary's and the county clerks' offices; it authorized representatives of the people
to be selected to meet with justices of the peace when the county taxes were laid; it
required that vestrymen in each parish be elected every third year; it rescinded the tax
exemption for members of the governor's Council; it quashed all legal proceedings
instituted against participants in the "many unlawfull tumults routs and riotts in divers parts
of this country"; it repealed the 1670 law that limited the vote to freeholders and
housekeepers; and it permanently disqualified two wealthy men from Charles City County,
Edward Hill and John Stith, from all public offices as a consequence of their bullying
behavior and "stirring up the late differences and misunderstandings that have happened
between the honourable governor and his majesties good and loyal subjects."[37]
Many of the people's grievances that could have fueled the spirit of rebellion were fully
redressed at the June 1676 assembly that dealt with much more than the threat from the
Indians. The laws of that assembly suggest that the political system over which Sir William
Berkeley presided could respond effectively or even justly to pressure for redress of
grievances; but that does not answer the questions why those grievances grew to such a
height that riots or mutinies took place in more than one-fourth of the counties before they
could be redressed or why, if they had been redressed in June, Nathaniel Bacon was able
to enlist a great many Virginians in his revolt against Berkeley's government in August.
Page 1 6of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... What happened between 28 June when the assembly adjourned and 31 July when Bacon
began issuing proclamations against Berkeley? The events of July 1676, while Bacon and
the county militia officers were recruiting the new army, are poorly recounted in the
contemporary narratives of events or in later recollections.[38]
It is quite likely that the reforms of the June assembly were imperfectly known in much of
the colony before the end of July. There being no printing press in Virginia, laws were
published by being read out loud to the people -- first on the statehouse steps on the day
that the assembly adjourned and later at each courthouse when the monthly meeting of the
county court took place.[39] If full handwritten sets of the laws of June 1676 were available
for every county as early as their respective July court days -- which is possible but by no
means certain -- only those people who were present and sober and paying attention
throughout the long readings would have learned precisely what the laws contained. Other
people may have learned little or nothing or heard about them only vaguely or piecemeal
and therefore retained their grievances unabated. That would account in part for the appeal
that Bacon's declarations carried.
At the end of July, Bacon issued The Declaration of the People against Sir William
Berkeley, the first of his proclamations challenging the right of the governor to govern. The
first in its long list of complaints was that the governor "having upon specious pretences of
publick works, raised unjust taxes upon the Commonalty for advancing of private favourites
and other sinister ends," and the second was that he had "abused & rendered
compemptible his Mties: Justices by advancing to places of Judicature Scandalous &
ignorant favourites." Those and other specifications epitomized some of the numerous
individual complaints contained in the county grievances of 1677 and blamed them all on
Berkeley in 1676. Bacon attempted to supercede Berkeley as governor of the colony by
appealing to men and women, in addition to the thousand-man army that he legally
commanded, by repeating their complaints about county officials' misconduct and stating
that they were the results of Berkeley's maladministration that introduced corruption and
favoritism everywhere and consequently left the colony defenseless in the face of its
enemies.[40]
That is exactly what parts of the belated Charles City County grievances that the
commissioners received in May 1677 appeared to state. The grievances recited a number
of Bacon's charges against Berkeley and indicated that those charges appealed to "a
handfull of poore ignorant and unlearned people, whose unskillfullnes in the law, may
Easilye lay us open to divers failings." The men of Charles City County asserted that they
were "seduced into beliefe" that Berkeley aspired to tyrannical government and that he
appointed unqualified sycophants to office and raised taxes to support them and perverted
the course and courts of justice. The Charles City County protest also included a long list of
specific complaints about abusive and allegedly illegal behavior of Edward Hill, whom one
of the June 1676 laws had barred from public office for those very acts. Berkeley had
nevertheless appointed Hill to the command of the county during the rebellion, and it is
entirely possible that Hill obstructed or delayed the compilation of the county's grievances
Page 1 7of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... in the spring of 1677. After it was clear that Berkeley was leaving Virginia, removing all
official protection from Hill, angry residents of Charles City County compiled and submitted
their list of grievances, which is much the longest of any of the county documents. It was
easy for the commissioners and for readers of the belated Charles City County grievances,
which scarcely resemble any of the others and are also among the few to have been
published, to be seduced also into believing that Berkeley's misrule was the cause of the
rebellion and that he and men like Hill had obstructed reform.[41]
It was also easy for royal officials in England and for later historians to read about the
assembly's actions in June 1676 and believe much the same thing. Bacon's having
extorted a general's commission from the assembly, the king and his ministers evidently
believed that the entire budget of laws was of Bacon's doing. In the autumn of 1676, when
the king issued instructions to the three royal commissioners, he required that all of the
laws of the June 1676 assembly be annulled, which the assembly did when it next met,
which it did while the royal commissioners and the governor were getting at each others'
throats in February 1677. In fact, although Bacon was elected to the June 1676 assembly
from Henrico County, he did not attend it except to threaten it, and if he had a reforming
agenda in June 1676, he never presented it. A good many supporters of Bacon's policy of
waging aggressive war against the Indians were legal members of the assembly, and it
was they who proposed and adopted the laws of June 1676 but in a legitimate
parliamentary manner and with the consent of the governor and in the best tradition of
representative government. In fact, the burgesses who passed the reform laws and also
elected Bacon a general refused to endorse Berkeley's request that they join him in
petitioning the king to replace him with a younger and more vigorous governor.[42]
An unidentified person at an unidentified time later added the words "Bacon's Laws" to the
sole, surviving manuscript text of the laws of the June 1676 session. When the laws were
published early in the nineteenth century in William Waller Hening's Statutes at Large, the
editor, no doubt having read John Daly Burk's history, also erroneously believed that
Bacon had imposed the principal laws on the assembly and incorrectly identified the laws
of that session as "Bacon's Laws," perpetuating a misinterpretation that may have also
misled some historians.[43]
The county grievances of 1677 and other evidence clearly show otherwise. The grievances
disclose that the conditions that the laws of June 1676 remedied were under lively
discussion before Bacon's Rebellion began and were not Bacon's work. The ill-informed
king and his ministers did not understand that and ordered them repealed. Residents of
Virginia knew the facts, however, even if the king and his commissioners did not. The
Gloucester County grievances of 1677 specifically requested "That whereas Their were
severall Grievances presented to the Assembly in June last, in order to prevent many
exorbitant fees, & other Disorders in Governmt; upon which, many good lawes were
consented to, & agreed upon by that grand Assembly; before the Rebell Bacon came to
interrupt the said Assembly: We beg that those good & wholesom Lawes, may be
confirmed."
Page 18 of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... But a similar request included in one of the sets of grievances from Nansemond County
that a great many poor men made their marks on, to reinstate the work of their "Burgesses
who gave us great Satisfaction," brought from the commissioners a tart response:
"Impudent and mutinous to aske seeinge his Majestie has by his instructions and
proclamation declared all that assemblys Laws null and void, because of Bacons force att
the time upon the Assembly then sittinge."[44]
The documentary record of Bacon's Rebellion, and particularly the county grievances of
1677, disclose that it was the actions of county officials, against whom county residents
had no legal mode of redress, that created much of the anger and resentment that gave
Bacon's declarations their appeal in 1676. Those local officials, integral and essential
functionaries in the government of colonial Virginia, were not responsible to the people they
governed and seldom had to answer to provincial officials who appointed them. Distrust
and resentment were almost certain to result. As in England, Virginia's society and
economy were conspicuously hierarchical, and people at or near the bottom often believed
that they had reason to resent people at or near the top; and people at or near the top often
believed that they had reason to distrust or fear people from below. The one group under
such stressful circumstances was prone to riot or rebel, and the other group feared riots
and rebellions. The attitudes of the men near the bottom are readily apparent in the
language of the county grievances.
The attitudes of the men nearer the top are equally evident in their words. In 1676 and
1677 they used contemptuous language about the poor and laboring men that wealthy
planters and government officials employed routinely during the seventeenth century. For
instance, William Sherwood, who already was or soon would be attorney general of
Virginia, wrote at the beginning of June 1676 that Bacon's first volunteers were "indigent &
disaffected persons" and "rabble." Following the appearance of Bacon at the head of
several hundred armed men later that month to wrest a general's commission from the
General Assembly, Sherwood repeated the word "rabble" and wrote that Bacon's men
were "the scum of the Country." Another influential merchant-planter, Nicholas Spencer,
when describing Bacon's followers at the beginning of August 1676, wrote, "hee is
sufficiently strengthened with the Rabble, of which sort this country chiefely consists, wee
serving as A sinke to drayne Engld of her filth."[45]
Edward Hill's self-justification, which has been published and often-quoted, breathes the
same contempt for his underlings. About the time that his friend Berkeley left Virginia, Hill
composed a long and indignant response to the Charles City County grievances, filling
both sides of fourteen large sheets of paper. Hill was utterly contemptuous of the men of
his county who accused him of misbehavior, and he did not spare his words even when
criticizing women. "Sarah Weeks," he wrote, was "an Idle infamous slutt to the highest
degrees, of robing, thieving, & whoreing, &c." To be accused by those people was the
worst possible insult. "I cannot but with trouble & sorrow consider," Hill began his response
to the county complaints, "that to be called to a barr, & to be charged wth Severall Crimes
& misdemeanors, & clamour'd against by a route of people, how base, mal-licious, envious,
Page 1 9of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... & Ignorant soever, it is still a lessening of reputation & darkening of good fame let ones
Loyalty, inocency, Justice, & integrity be never so great." Hill also wrote that Governor
Berkeley "by the Judgmt of the moste wise of this Country … hath been thought to have
governed this thirty odd years wth the moste Candour, Justice, wisdome, & integrity, that
was possible for man to governe, and more especially considering whome he had to
governe."[46]
Berkeley's close friend Philip Ludwell also described the members of Bacon's army as "the
scume of the country." He characterized them as "men, whose fortunes & Inclinations
being equally Desperate, were ffitt for the purpose there being not 20 in the whole Route,
but what were Idle & will not worke, or such whose Debaucherie or 111 Husbandry has
brought in Debt beyond hopes or thought of payment these are the men that were sett up
ffor the Good of the Countrey; who for the ease of the poore will have noe taxes paied,
though for the most part of them, they pay none themselves, would have all magistracie &
Governmnt taken away & sett up one themselves, & to make their Good Intentions more
manifest stick not to talk openly of shareing mens Estates among them selves." Ludwell
also took pains to point out that not only did Bacon acknowledge no "Law of God or man,"
but he also frequently uttered many "new Coyned oaths of wch. (as If he thought God was
delighted wth. his Ingenuite in that kind) he was very liberall."[47]
Other contemporaries also commented on Bacon's swearing. The governor was a devoted
churchman and was especially disgusted at Bacon's profanity. "His usual oath," Berkeley
wrote, "which he swore at least a Thousand times a day was God damme my Blood,"
language that other contemporary witnesses also reported (and that Thomas Jefferson
Wertenbaker deliberately excluded from his commentaries on Bacon's character,
purposes, and actions). Berkeley continued, "and god so infected his blood that it bred lice
in incredible numbers so that for twenty dayes he never washt his shirts but burned them.
To this God added the Bloody flux and an honest minister wrote this Epitaph on him[:]
Bacon is Dead I am sorry at my hart / that Lice and flux should take the hangmans part."
Berkeley, too, on occasion referred to Bacon's followers as rabble, but for a man charged
with abusing his powers as governor, he was surprisingly and generally sympathetic to the
plight of the people he governed, "considering," as Edward Hill had written and he, too,
might have believed, "whome he had to governe."[48]
Berkeley departed Virginia for England late in April 1677 but died before he was able to
explain himself in person to his king. That closed the political career of an extraordinary
man who lived and governed too long for his reputation, which the rebellion and his
conduct during its aftermath permanently sullied. His widow remained in Virginia and made
their Green Spring plantation the rallying point for the Virginia planters and politicians who
strove to preserve the political and economic institutions and practices that were Berkeley's
legacy. That legacy, which was firmly in place long before the rebellion challenged it, was a
government of the tobacco planters, by the tobacco planters, and for the tobacco planters.
Page 20 of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... Even though the February 1677 General Assembly reenacted many of the laws of the June
1676 session, it did not reenact the most significant reforms that the king had ignorantly
ordered repealed: restoration of white adult manhood suffrage, authority for the
commonalty to participate in levying local taxes, and triennial election of vestrymen. In spite
of all the sharp public criticism of the poll tax, the landowning men in the General Assembly
and on the county courts never replaced it with a tax on land.
They did not increase taxes on themselves, even though during subsequent decades the
men who owned increasingly large numbers of enslaved laborers did have to pay more
taxes on that part of their property. The complaints that Virginia men recorded in the county
grievances remained largely unmet. The county elites lost or yielded nothing to the
commonalty.[49]
The insulting language of Berkeley's adherents leaves a very different impression of
Bacon's followers than their own language as recorded in the county grievances, and the
dismissive language of the commissioners' narrative offers yet another perspective. The
self-consciously literary chroniclers John Cotton and his wife Ann Cotton, who wrote in the
immediate aftermath of the rebellion, and Thomas Mathew, who wrote his memoir of the
events in 1705, recorded their own distinctive portraits of the people and events of Bacon's
Rebellion. Historians who have employed those different sources more or less
indiscriminately have risked jumbling disparate interpretations and characterizations
together without regard to the perspectives or purposes of the men or women who created
them. And that the historians have nearly all disregarded or substantially neglected the
language of the class of men who rebelled certainly weakened their narratives and
undermined their interpretations.
The substance and the language of the county grievances, with their complaints about the
conduct of local officials that are echoed in many other documents of the time, offer
additional reasons why the interpretation of Bacon's Rebellion in Thomas Jefferson
Wertenbaker's Torchbearer of the Revolution as a democratic, home-rule antecedent of the
American Revolution cannot be maintained. The documents contain language that
Wertenbaker might have cited to good advantage had he focused on the substance of the
complaints and who got blamed, but they were directed at local Virginia officials and not at
royal officials or even at the old governor. Had Wilcomb Washburn made full use of the
county grievances in The Governor and the Rebel, he would not have missed or under-
appreciated the pre-1675 events and might therefore have been able to explain better why
fighting that began when outlying settlers took matters into their own hands in the face of
perceived threats from the Indians then spread throughout the colony and became a
rebellion in which hundreds or thousands of people participated for reasons that had little
or nothing directly to do with the threat from the Indians. Had Edmund S. Morgan devoted
more attention to the language of the county grievances in his American Slavery, American
Freedom, he might have had to modify his characterization of the local elites as exercising
insufficient control over the unruly lower classes to suggest that some of the lower classes
believed that they were over-rather than under-governed. Had Stephen Saunders Webb
Page 21 of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... employed the county grievances more systematically in 1676, his interpretation of the
subsequent Stuart crackdown on colonial governments might have been enriched with
examples of how colonial governors and colonial assemblies had brought into being and
nourished self-sustaining and irresponsible local government institutions that allowed
discontent to arise and ripen into rebellion. The grievances demonstrate, as Warren M.
Billings suggests in his biography of Berkeley, how the old governor became the
unfortunate residual legatee of the local consequences of county government structures
and practices that were in place and functioning when he first arrived in the colony thirty-
four years earlier.
Fine modern scholarship on seventeenth-century Virginia's social history indicates that
during the final years of the seventeenth century and into the first decades of the
eighteenth century the tobacco planters ruled their households and their colony rather like
the commonalty of Virginia in the 1670s charged that the justices of the peace had
dominated the counties. In their households and in their tobacco fields, those men ruled as
they believed they were entitled to rule, and they governed the colony as if they believed
they were entitled to govern it. Other scholarship on the development of the slave economy
suggests that economic, commercial, and agricultural considerations, not primarily the
ease of regulating laborers, as Morgan in part suggested, motivated the planters'
subsequent rapid shift from indentured to enslaved labor. The laws that their
representatives in the General Assembly enacted exempted them from most of the
restraints on how they managed their enslaved black laborers, legal and contractual
restraints that governed and had governed their management of their white indentured and
paid laborers, a population that in the latter years of the century was a declining proportion
of all of the colony's laborers.[50]
In the planters' patriarchy that emerged into full flower in the decades following Bacon's
Rebellion, whether as a consequence of it or merely as a chronological coincidence,
authority of all kinds was conspicuously concentrated: in the hands of the heads of
households; in the hands of plantation patriarchs; in the hands of the self-perpetuating
groups of men who sat on the parish vestries and county courts; in the hands of the
influential men who held public office as clerks, surveyors, and customs officers, men who
collected large fees and often served for life; and in the hands of the members of the
governor's Council who received their lifetime appointments from the Crown.
The political and social institutions and practices of Virginia in the 1670s were strong
enough to survive Bacon's Rebellion unchanged, even if they could not always control or
repress aspiring or frustrated white men who resented overbearing elites or whose own
failings or ill fortunes prevented them from joining the propertied and prosperous part of the
population. The political institutions and practices also survived, largely in tact, the Stuart
crackdown on colonial governments during the fifteen years following Bacon's Rebellion,
even if in the long run they could not prevail in the planters' attempt to escape Parliament's
navigation acts and stricter controls over colonial commerce.
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2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... Sir William Berkeley had preserved and strengthened the central institution of
representative government, the General Assembly that had been formed in 1619, and
therefore his legacy contained within it the essence of republican government, but it was in
no way a democratic legacy, and it did not extend to local government. Social and political
stratification persisted, and the increased reliance of the great planters on enslaved
laborers amplified that stratification. There may be a chicken-and-egg problem in
attempting to sort out whether the political and economic cultures of Berkeley's Virginia
made the creation of the slave economy possible or whether the slave economy shored it
up and allowed it to flourish. Either way, that was the origin of the Old South.[51]
NOTES
The author wishes to acknowledge many years of instructive conversation about
seventeenth-century Virginia politics with Jon Kulda and Warren M. Billings and to thank
members of the Fall Line Early American group, Wil M. Verhoeven, Doug Winiarski, Marion
Nelson, and Sarah Meacham, for thoughtful comments and suggestions.
1. For Moryson, see Jon Kukla, Speakers and Clerks of the Virginia House of Burgesses,
1643-1776 (Richmond, 1981), pp. 54-57 and Warren M. Billings, A Little Parliament: The
Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, 2004), esp. pp. 99-100;
for Berry, see John T. Kneebone et al., eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography (cited
hereafter as DVB) (Richmond, 1998- ), 1:461-62; and for Jeffreys, see Billings, Little
Parliament, esp. pp. 78-79.
• 2. Warren M. Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia
(Baton Rouge, 2004), pp. 210-11,232-55.
• 3. Warren M. Billings, with the assistance of Maria Kimberly, eds., The Papers of Sir
William Berkeley, 1605-1677(Richmond, 2007), pp. 568-73, 575-76 (quotation on p.
575).
• 4. Wiseman's copies of most of the essential documents that the commissioners
collected are in the National Archives of Great Britain, Public Record Office, Colonial
Office (cited hereafter as PRO CO) 5/1371, but the full final report is in the Pepsyian
Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge University. It was published with an index that
the publisher unfortunately muddled in Michael Leroy Oberg, ed., Samuel Wiseman's
Book of Record: The Official Account of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia (Lanham, Md.,
2005).
• 5. The original documents are in PRO CO 1/39, ff. 194-256 and PRO CO 1/40, ff.
140-47. Transcriptions of grievances from seven of the nineteen counties that
responded (some with multiple sets of grievances) that were prepared in England in the
1870s and deposited in the Library of Virginia have been published: from Gloucester
-County, Lower Norfolk County, and Surry County {Virginia Magazine of History and
Biography [cited hereafter as VMHB] 2 [1894]: 166-73), from Northampton County
{VMHB 2 [1895]: 289-92), from Isle of Wight County (VMHB 2 [1895]: 381-92), from
Rappahannock County (VMHB 3 [1895]: 35-42), and from Charles City County (VMHB 3
[1895]: 132-59). Some of those were reprinted along with the grievances from
Page 2 3of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... Westmoreland County, James City County, and Lancaster County in H. R. Mcllwaine,
ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1659/60 -- 1693 (Richmond, 1914),
pp. 106-8, 110-11. All of those copies of copies are derivative and therefore at best
second- or third-best texts.
• 6. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, edited by Louis B.
Wright (Chapel Hill, 1947), pp. 74-85 and John Daly Burk, History of Virginia from Its
First Settlement to the Present Day (4 vols.; Petersburg, 1804-16), 2:155-94. The
evolution of the historiography of Bacon's Rebellion is thoroughly treated in Wilcomb E.
Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia
(Chapel Hill, 1957), chaps. 1 and 10; Arthur Shaffer, "John Daly Burk's History of
Virginia and the Development of American National History," VMHB 77 (1969): 336-46;
Jane Carson, Bacon's Rebellion, 1676-1976 (Jamestown, 1976); and John Harold
Sprinkle, "Loyalists and Baconians: The Participants in Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia,
1676 -- 1677" (Ph.D. diss., William and Mary, 1992), pp. 9-24.
• 7. Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of
Bacon's Rebellion and Its Leader (Princeton, 1940).
• 8. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel.
• 9. Bernard Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia," in James Morton Smith,
ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, 1959), pp.
90-115.
• 10. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of
Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), pp. 215-49.
• 11. Warren M. Billings, "'Virginia's Deploured Condition,' 1660-1676: The Coming of
Bacon's Rebellion" (Ph.D. diss., Northern Illinois University, 1968); Warren M. Billings,
"The Causes of Bacon's Rebellion: Some Suggestions," VMHB 78 (1970): 409-35; and
Warren M. Billings, "The Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634 to 1676,"
William and Mary Quarterly (cited hereafter as WMQ), 3d sen, 31 (1974): 225-42.
• 12. Billings, Little Parliament, pp. xix-xx. For political culture in colonial Virginia, see
Darrett B. and Anita Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650 -- 1750
(New York, 1984); Jon Kukla, "Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social
Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 275-98;
Martin H. Quirt, "Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural
Transmission and Innovation," WMQ, 3d ser., 45 (1988): 629-55; Jon Kukla, Political
Institutions in Virginia, 1619-1660 (New York, 1989); James R. Perry, The Formation of
a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1615 -- 1655 (Chapel Hill, 1990); James Horn,
Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
(Chapel Hill, 1994); and Edward L. Bond, Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion
in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, Ga., 2000).
• 13. Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (New York,
1984). A serious and searching critique of Webb's idiosyncratic and not-always accurate
and sometimes internally inconsistent study is Wilcomb E. Washburn, "Stephen
Saunders Webb's Interpretation of Bacon's Rebellion," VMHB 95 (1987): 339-52.
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2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... • 14. Billings, "'Virginia's Deploured Condition,'" p. 16.
• 15. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the
Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 … (13 vols.;
Richmond, 1809-23), 2:101 -- 2 and William H. Seiler, "Land Processioning in Colonial
Virginia," WMQ, 3d sen, 6 (1949): 416-36.
• 16. Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, 2:280.
• 17. Compare Kevin Butterfield, "Puritans and Religious Strife in the Early
Chesapeake," VMHB 109 (2001): 5-36 and Brent Tarter, "Reflections on the Church of
England in Colonial Virginia," VMHB 112 (2004): esp. pp. 353-54; and John C. Coombs,
"Building 'the Machine': The Development of Slavery and Slave Society in Early Colonial
Virginia" (Ph.D. diss., William and Mary, 2003).
• 18. Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, 2:326-33; Billings, ed., Papers of Sir William
Berkeley, pp. 504-10.
• 19. Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, 2:341-51; Billings, ed., Papers of Sir William
Berkeley, pp. 534-38 (quotation on p. 537).
• 20. Declaration of the People against Sir William Berkeley, n.d. (c. 30 July 1676), two
copies in Egerton MSS 2395, British Library.
• 21. Oberg, ed., Samuel Wiseman's Book of Record, p. 106.
• 22. Ibid., pp. 60, 90-93, 130.
• 23. Billings, ed., Papers of Sir William Berkeley, pp. 520-21. The Long Assembly was
a subject of remark only in the grievances of Stafford County (PRO CO 1/39, f. 203) and
Surry County (PRO CO 1/39, f. 207).
• 24. Oberg, ed., Samuel Wiseman's Book of Record, pp. 250-56 and PRO CO 1/39,
ff. 246-49, 250-51,255.
• 25. PRO CO 1/39, f. 216.
• 26. Ibid., ff. 194, 223-27.
• 27. Ibid., f. 233.
• 28. Ibid., ff. 207-9, 214.
• 29. Peter Thompson, "The Thief, the Householder, and the Commons: Languages of
Class in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," WMQ, 3d sen, 63 (2006): 253-80. Variants on
commonalty appeared in grievances from Henrico County (PRO CO 1/39, f. 233), Isle of
Wight County (PRO CO 1/39, f. 223), Rappahannock County (PRO CO 1/39, f. 197),
York County (PRO CO 1/39, f. 240), and the first set from Nansemond County (PRO CO
1/39, f. 246), in several of Bacon's declarations (PRO CO 1/37, ff. 128-29, 130-31, 133,
178-79), and in the brief newssheet, Strange News from Virginia; Being a Full and True
Account of the Life and Death of Nathanael Bacon Esquire… (London, 1677).
• 30. Surry Co. Deeds, Wills, Etc., No. 2, ff. 40-44.
• 31. Ibid., f. 40.
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2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... • 32. H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court… (Richmond,
1924), p. 367; Surry Co. Deeds, Wills, Etc., No. 2, fol. 69; Billings, ed., Papers of Sir
William Berkeley, p. 459; Billings, Sir William Berkeley, pp. 227-28; and Alexander B.
Haskell, "The Affections of the People': Ideology and the Politics of State Building in
Colonial Virginia, 1607-1754" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2006), esp. pp.
177-215.
• 33. Billings, ed., Papers of Sir William Berkeley, p. 507.
• 34. PRO CO 1/39, ff. 246-49.
• 35. Billings, ed., Papers of Sir William Berkeley, pp. 520-21, 537 (quotations on p.
520).
• 36. PRO CO 1/36, ff. 113-14.
• 37. Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, 2:352-60.
• 38. Berkeley's letter to Henry Coventry, 2 Feb. 1676/7 (Billings, ed., Papers of Sir
William Berkeley, pp. 568-73) did not mention any events in July. Nor did Strange News
from Virginia. Nor did William Sherwood's "Virginias deploured Condition Or an
Impartiall Narrative of the Murders committed by the Indians there, and of the Sufering
of his Maties: Loyall Subjects under the Rebellious outrages of Mr Nathaniell Bacon
Junr. to the tenth day of August Ao. dom 1676," George Chalmers Collection, New York
Public Library (and printed in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th
ser., 9 [1871]: 162-76). Nor did the undated narrative (but doubtless composed early in
1677) of John Cotton (for whom, see DVB, 3:482-83), Virginia Historical Society (cited
hereafter as VHS), Richmond, printed in a modernized form as "The Burwell Papers" in
Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2d sen, 1 (1814): 27-80, and from
that text reprinted in volume one of Peter Force's Tracts and Other Papers, Relating
Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America (4
vols.; Washington, D.C., 1836-46) and from Force's text in Charles M. Andrews, ed.,
Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675 -- 1690 (New York, 1915), pp. 47-98, and in a
more accurate version in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 9
(1867): 299-342. Nor did the abbreviated version of John Cotton's narrative that his
wife, Ann Cotton (for whom, see DVB, 3:481-82), later prepared and that was printed
from an unlocated manuscript in the Richmond Enquirer of 12 September 1804, and
from that text reprinted in Force's Tracts. Nor did the narrative portion of the
commissioners' report, completed in the spring of 1677 and printed in Andrews's
Narratives, pp. 105 -- 41, long before the modern edition of Samuel Wiseman's Book of
Record. Nor did Thomas Mathews "The Beginning, Progress, and Conclusion of Bacons
Rebellion in Virginia in the Years 1675 & 1676," 1705, Thomas Jefferson Papers, series
8, volume 1, Library of Congress, which was printed serially in the Richmond Enquirer of
1, 5, and 8 Sept. 1804 from a transcription that Thomas Jefferson made and from that
source in Force's Tracts and in Andrews' Narratives of the Insurrections, pp. 15-41. All
of those printed versions of those essential documents on which historians have relied
are derivative copies of copies and therefore at best second- or third-best texts.
• 39. Philip Ludwell to Joseph Williamson, 28 June 1676, PRO CO 1/37, f. 38
(published in VMHB 1 [1893]: 178-86) and David D. Hall, "The Chesapeake in the
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2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... Seventeenth Century," in Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., A History of the Book in
America, Vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), pp.
57-65.
• 40. Declaration of the People against Sir William Berkeley, n.d. (c. 30 July 1676), two
copies in Egerton MSS 2395, British Library.
• 41. PRO CO 1/40, ff. 140-47 (published in VMHB 3 [1895]: 132-147) and Oberg, ed.,
Samuel Wiseman's Book of Record, p. 110.
• 42. Billings, ed., Papers of Sir William Berkeley, p. 550; Hening, ed., Statutes at
Large, 2:380-81; and McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1659160 --
1693, p. 66.
• 43. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel, pp. 13-14, 60, 67 and Brent Tarter,
"Long Before the NHPRC: Documentary Editing in Nineteenth-Century Virginia,"
Documentary Editing 30 (2008): 37-38.
• 44. PRO CO 1/39, ff. 243, 247 and Oberg, ed., Samuel Wiseman's Book of Record,
p. 250.
• 45. William Sherwood to Joseph Williamson, 1, 28 June 1676, PRO CO 1/37, ff. 1,
39-40 (published in VMHB 1 [1893]: 168-74) and Nicholas Spencer to Unidentified, 6
Aug. 1676, Coventry Papers, 77, f. 170, Longleat, Warminster, United Kingdom.
• 46. PRO CO 1/40, ff. 148-61 (published in VMHB3 [1896]: 239-52, 341-49; 4 [1896]:
1-15).
• 47. Philip Ludwell to Joseph Williamson, 28 June 1676, PRO CO 1/37, f. 38
(published in VMHB 1 [1893]: 178-86).
• 48. Billings, ed., Papers of Sir William Berkeley, pp. '537, 572-73 (first and second
quotations on pp. 572-73). The oath "God damme my Blood" was also reported in
Sherwood, "Virginia's deploured Condition," p. 9 and in Mathew, "Beginning, Progress,
and Conclusion of Bacon's Rebellion," p. 41.
• 49. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel, pp. 60-63.
• 50. Excellent analyses of the status and roles of white women in the families of late
seventeenth-century tobacco planters include Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty
Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
(Chapel Hill, 1996) and Terri L. Snyder, Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the
Law in Early Virginia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003). Scholarship on the development of the slave
economy includes Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern
Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680 -- 1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986), Anthony S. Parent, Foul
Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660 -- 1740 (Chapel Hill, 2003),
and Coombs, "Building 'the Machine.'" For the linkages between families, economic
status, and politics, see Emory G. Evans, A "Topping People": The Rise and Decline of
Virginia's Old Political Elite, 1680-1790 (Charlottesville, 2009).
• 51. Credit where credit is due: in a review of Morgan's American Slavery, American
Freedom, Jon Kukla described it as a study in the origins of the Old South (John Kulda,
Page 2 7of 2 9 Bacon's Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture ...: EBSCO h...
2017 /04 /18 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/ehost/detail/detail?si d... review of American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, by
Edmund S. Morgan, North Carolina Historical Review 54 [1977]: 321-22).
Brent Tarter is a founding editor of the Library of Virginia's Dictionary of Virginia Biography
and a cofounder of the annual Virginia Forum.
Sir William Berkeley (1605-1677) was governor of Virginia from 1642 to 1652 and from
1660 to 1677. He was the most influential and important English-speaking political leader in
seventeenth-century Virginia, but his reputation suffered as a consequence of the manner
in which he suppressed Bacon's Rebellion.
There is no portrait of Nathaniel Bacon (1647-1676). All that exist are conjectural images
published during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as this one from M. T.
Magill's History of Virginia (1890).
John Cotton of York County, a Virginian who witnessed Bacon's Rebellion, wrote an
account in 1677, entitled Bacon's Proceedings, shortly after the rebellion's conclusion. His
wife, Ann Cotton, later prepared a shorter narrative based on his.
Thomas Mathew, a burgess for Stafford County in the June 1676 assembly, was another
eyewitness to the rebellion. He wrote a history of the event in 1705 and entitled it The
Beginning, Progress, and Conclusion of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in the Years 1675 &
1676.
John Daly Burks History of Virginia from Its First Settlement to the Present Day (1804)
influenced several generations of writers. His account of Bacon's Rebellion, for the first
time, linked the events of 1676 with the American Revolution of 1776.
From the publication of John Daly Burks account of Bacon's Rebellion in his History of
Virginia (1804) until after Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker's Torchbearer of the Revolution:
The Story of Bacon's Rebellion and Its Leader (1940), most historians erroneously treated
Bacon's Rebellion as a revolt against British misrule. Later scholarship and the contents
of the neglected county grievances have overturned that interpretation.
~~~~~~~~
By BRENT TARTER
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