Bacon's Rebellion

Three Lessons In Politics

The era is one of Political Stagnation. A do-nothing head of state is asleep at the wheel of Governance foreign and domestic. Greedy elites, built not by merit but by nepotism, favoritism, and legal protections maintain their stranglehold on wealth, land, and power through inertia alone.

A disenfranchised undercaste groans beneath the weight of intolerable conditions. They cannot buy land, as all the land was bought and sold before it even went to market, leaving them to fill the role of cheap, replaceable labor. They cannot pick up sticks and colonize the space that surrounds them, as the law fences them into a small area owned by the elite. That same law extracts from them exorbitant and unreasonable taxes, ensuring any hope of Economic (and therefore, social) advancement is strangled every time tax day rolls around.

Simultaneously, the elite intends to replace this undercaste with an imported workforce of foreigners willing to work for even cheaper than the undercaste is, driving their overtaxed wages even lower with every ship that brings them. Meanwhile, savage ethnicities unfit for and defiant of law and order are given free reign to rape, pillage, and harass the undercaste and their communities. Should the undercaste take up arms to defend themselves against these ethnicities, they are prosecuted, fined, imprisoned, hanged, and/or their property is seized and redistributed to the elite, or to the ethnicities.

In short, the undercaste have no Economic prospects, are forced by law to remain in the country they live, are being subjected to a campaign of foreign replacement which they can do nothing to stop, and have been prohibited from defending themselves and their families from threats actively aided and abetted by the Elite. 

The year is 1676. The place is Virginia.

Lesson One:

Every threat comes from the Periphery.

The elites are the Virginia Planters. They’re the much fabled second and third sons of the English Gentry and Lower Nobility, who brought old world wealth to monopolize the new. The newly restored head of state, Charles II, heavily favors them in the colony while he parties away in far-off England. In his stead, William Berkeley Governs the Colony of Virginia from Jamestown with waning competence, shown by his appointments of family to office.

While the Jamestown regime stagnates in the east, the west is aflame. Savage Indians from the Doeg, Susquehannock, and Occaneechi tribes raid frontier settlements with impunity– for they are the sole source of the highly demanded commodity of furs, the trade of which Governor Berkeley has monopolized. Any who seek to end the raids are prosecuted for violating Colony Treaties, which the Indians ignore.

The Governor, himself a Planter, favors his caste by appropriating Crown funds to build forts on Plantations that do not need them. He refuses to patrol the frontier with the Virginia Militia, the Colonies’ only military body, whose ranks are staffed by the kinsmen of those killed by his decision. 

The foreign workforce are African Slaves, mostly from Portugal’s holdings on Africa’s Atlantic Coast. They were introduced fifty-seven years ago to much trepidation amongst the Planters and their undercaste alike. But now they’re surging in popularity amongst the ranks of the Planters, who see in them an even cheaper labor source for Virginia’s most notable and demanded export: Tobacco.

The Tobacco-Farming undercaste are called many names: Poor Whites, Backcountry Folk, White Trash, the Periphery, Frontiersmen, and Peckerwoods. Some own land, most do not. They are the most numerous population in the Virginia Colony, and have the least representation politically as suffrage is limited to landowners. Simultaneously, they carry the heaviest burden of taxation. Many are indentured servants, contracting out their labor for decades in exchange for passage to the New World and one-hundred acres of land upon the completion of their term. This promise was ended in 1640 when the land slated for indentured servants was given to the Powhatan Indians by treaty. They have not forgotten.

All wealth in Virginia is related to Tobacco, whose demand in European markets surges daily. England knows this, and has ensured Virginia can sell its Tobacco to none other than her mother country. Tobacco is amongst the most labor-intensive crops grown on the Planet. Its thirteen-month growing season means next year's crop is planted a month before last year's is harvested. It depletes Virginia’s once fertile soil faster than forward thinking Planters can diversify it. 

 Forced to fill twice the demand for half the price, the Planters lobby the Jamestown regime to keep a ready supply of cheap labor. For those who can’t afford slaves, Poor Whites are the only option. So their wages are kept artificially depressed, forcing many to sell themselves back into indentured servitude, while the frontiers are closed to them in favor of a steady supply of furs.

By 1676, the situation had reached a boiling point.

Lesson Two:

Bring the most Brandy and you’re in charge.

Enter Nathaniel Bacon. Born of the landowning Gentry in East Anglia at the latter end of the English Civil War, his childhood was spent under the rule of his fellow East Anglian Oliver Cromwell and his major generals. A kinsman of the famous philosopher, Bacon was educated at Cambridge and traveled Europe before he was banished to Virginia for less than honorable conduct.

His consignment to Virginia was a blessing in disguise. Bacon’s cousin of the same name was a well-respected advisor to Governor Berkeley, and soon Bacon found himself on the Governor’s advising council. But Berkeley and Bacon were two different men. One was old, waning, cautious, the other young, impetuous, charismatic. Already disputes were forming.

Meanwhile, the undercaste were taking matters into their own hands. After Doeg warriors raided a farm in Stafford County, killing two white settlers, armed mobs began forming in the frontier counties. Many were composed of indentured servants and formerly indentured freedmen, the betrayal of 1640 still fresh in their minds. The frontier whites are oft accompanied by the frontier planters, who know all too well the havoc Indian raids had been having on their land.

One such frontier planter was none other than Nathaniel Bacon, whose two estates rested in Henrico County, right on the frontier with the Powhatan. His overseer had been killed in a raid, as had much of his crop been destroyed. Bacon, too, recognized an opportunity when he saw one. Even back in Europe, Bacon would never pass up a chance to build his fortune, the consequences of which consigned him to the New World. But he was here to make the most of it, and when word reached him of mobs assembling to hunt Indians in defiance of the Governor’s Law, Bacon inserted himself.

One such assembly was occurring in Henrico, where nearly five-hundred men were gathered to discuss further action. In Virginia, like in England, alcohol was served at all public assemblies usually at the expense of a planter. This served two purposes: first, it kept proceedings simple and short (drinking men can only debate so long,) second, it predisposed all present to the opinion of the man providing the drink. The tradition would remain throughout the Early American Republic.

Bacon was well acquainted with such traditions. Already possessing a charismatic personality and a Cambridge-educated intellect, Bacon further supplemented his gambit with a supply of Brandy unrivaled by any other present. Before long, Nathaniel Bacon was elected leader of the assembly, and eventually, the entirety of the discontent frontier whites. Thus began Bacon’s Rebellion.

Lesson Three:

Revolts are victorious in defeat.

It was amazingly successful until it wasn’t. Bacon marched his Battalion into Jamestown and demanded a commission in the Militia to end the Indian threat on the frontier and open it up to settlement. Berkeley granted it, and the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a series of reliefs for the dissenting frontiersmen. Suffrage was restored to landless freedmen, selling arms to Indians was made punishable by death, and the Governor’s power was significantly reduced.

But this was treating the symptoms and not the sickness. Nothing was done about the depressed wages, the undue tax burden, or the artificial fence around the frontier. Even worse, when Governor Berkeley proposed the construction of a series of Frontier Forts, the bereaved frontiersmen had their suspicions confirmed. Berkeley would do nothing to affect his fur monopoly, and frontier whites were to remain the cheap labor of choice. So Bacon and his followers took drastic measures.

On June 30th, Bacon issued The Declaration of the People of Virginia. Here he listed the grievances held by himself and his followers, signed by dozens of his followers, many of them planters. Immediately after, he marched his Battalion to Jamestown.

If there was any fight at all, it was short. Berkeley and his entire Government fled across the river, and Bacon’s followers set Jamestown aflame. They occupied the plantations of many notables within Berkeley’s Government, and within a few months had almost completely occupied the Virginia colony. But it was not to last.

In October, Bacon died of dysentery to the shock of everyone in the Colony. Berkeley was competent enough not to let this chance go to waste. Reinforced by some armed merchant ships and Privateers, Berkeley divided the leaderless rebellion into pockets and set about crushing each bastion of resistance. Every landowner, Planter or Poor White, was hanged and their properties were seized. By all metrics, Bacon’s rebellion had failed.

Except it hadn’t. Charles II recalled Berkeley to England over the matter, apocryphally saying, “That old fool has put to death more people in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father.” The Planters learned their lesson as well.

The frontier was opened up for white settlement in the following decades, and taxes were drastically reduced. The Planters began appointing Poor Whites to positions in Government, and Indian raids were put to an end with military force. Jamestown was rebuilt but never recovered the prominence it once had, and the capital was moved to the far more sensible location at Williamsburg. 

While the Planters retained their power, they no longer held their subjects in the abusive conditions they had been. Economic advancement was once again possible, and the coming automation of African Slaves was now looked upon as a boon rather than an apocalyptic fear. Over the long term, everything Bacon’s Rebellion sought to accomplish was accomplished, and in the process it made Virginia the wealthiest, most prestigious, and most radically competent of all the English Colonies in the New World.

If the Frontier Whites on the Periphery were paid more or taxed less, if the frontier was open to settlement, if they were permitted to defend themselves against the natives, if the Economy itself were diverse enough not to depend on their cheap labor, and even if none of those grievances were addressed or changed by the Jamestown Regime, if Governor Berkeley had kept the planters, frontier or otherwise in lock-step, and did not patronize to too small a group of favorites; if any or all of these occurred then it’s likely the system would have continued.

But the frontier whites were paid too little and taxed too much. The frontier was closed to them. They were not permitted to defend themselves. The Economy was not diverse and depended upon their cheap labor. And Governor Berkeley did appoint favorites and miffed Nathaniel Bacon. And all of these mistakes did their minor and seemingly invisible part in setting the stage for the birth of the greatest nation to yet exist on God’s Green Earth.