Bacon's rebellion
Bacon's Rebellion , also known as the Virginia Rebellion , was a 1676 rebellion led by Nathaniel Bacon in the British colony of Virginia against Governor Sir William Berkeley .
Nathaniel Bacon
Nathaniel Bacon (born January 2, 1647 in England, † October 26, 1676 ) came from a wealthy English family and was cousin of the Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon . He studied at Oxford and traveled around Europe. After his marriage to Elizabeth Duke, he was involved in an inheritance scandal and in the summer of 1674 he emigrated with a considerable fortune to Virginia , where he had influential relatives: Councilor Nathaniel Bacon sr. was his cousin and the wife of the local governor Berkeley a cousin of his wife. As a result of these family ties, Bacon received a seat on the Virginia Council shortly after his arrival. He also bought a plantation on which he - as is common in Virginia - grew tobacco .
Governor Berkeley
Sir William Berkeley (* 1606 ; † July 9, 1677 ) came from an influential English family and was knighted by Charles I in 1639 . After studying at Oxford and brief political activity in London, he came to Virginia in 1642 as governor of the crown, where he remained almost without interruption until 1677. First of all, he calmed the divided colony by promoting the interests of the general public. This unselfish policy is also reflected in the fact that he granted the General Assembly , the assembly of the legislature (consisting of the House of Burgesses , which comprised the elected representatives of the individual cities), the right of the highest court of appeal - also against decisions of the General Court, which he chaired himself. So he initially gained great sympathy among the inhabitants of the colony.
In 1644 Berkeley went to the field with a small army against the Indians after a massacre of Virgins. With few losses, he achieved peace for a generation. In the peace treaty of 1646 the Indian tribes involved were also contractually bound to the English colony. In 1661 he began a ruthless persecution of the Quakers and Puritans . In 1665 Berkeley defended Virginia in war against the Dutch and stopped their invasion on land.
Under Oliver Cromwell , the loyal governor, who protested against the navigation act , was deposed and only recalled to office under Charles II . From then on, however, the citizens got less and less part in the politics of Virginia, whereas Berkeley itself controlled Parliament, Council, General Court and the community halls.
Prehistory: The conflict between settlers and Indians
The trigger and background of Bacon's rebellion was the conflict between the Indians and the English settlers in Virginia. In July 1675, the Doeg Indians, who were not contractually bound to the settlers, confiscated the pigs belonging to the plantation owner Thomas Mathews because he had not paid his debts. When Mathews forcibly retrieved the pigs, Indians were killed. This led to a bloody confrontation between Indians and Virgins, in which the Susquehanna Indians got themselves through no fault of their own . These fled to Maryland to the befriended tribe of Piscataway . Both Susquehanna and Piscataway were not contractually affiliated with the Virgins. A troop authorized by Governor Berkeley crossed the border into Maryland without the permission of the local government and also called their army to help. They besieged the Piscataway fort where the Susquehanna were staying. On September 26, five chiefs willing to negotiate were murdered. However, despite subsequent fighting, most of the Susquehanna escaped. In the period that followed, the surviving Susquehanna undertook brief raids to avenge every murdered chief by ten murdered settlers. Although the Susquehanna were numerically vastly inferior to the Virgins, they were able to attack individual plantations from the forests and return to the forests. Therefore the planters felt threatened from all sides by Indian crowds.
In January 1676, Governor Berkeley again sent a punitive expedition against the Susquehanna under Henry Chicheley, but called them back soon afterwards. The Susquehanna had announced that the chief murders had now been avenged and that no further attacks would take place. Berkeley, having become more cautious about the Maryland massacre, decided to adopt a defensive policy. In a special session on March 7, 1676, the assembly in Jamestown decided to build manned forts at the river ends. The contracted tribes should also provide help against the hostile Indians. However, no enemy should be attacked without permission from the governor. According to Berkeley's own statement, this tactic should have resulted in no victims between April and May.
Bacon's first punitive action
Nevertheless, the intimidated planters in the south considered the March resolutions to be inadequate and decided to actively resist. When, in September 1675, the Appomattox tribe was suspected of stealing grain from the settlers, Berkeley declined the settlers' request for a commanding officer for an Indian campaign. For their part, the settlers categorically refused to distinguish between hostile and friendly Indians with whom the governor traded and decided to take arbitrary punitive action. To do this, they chose Nathaniel Bacon as their leader without the consent of Governor, who was not affected by the theft himself. Bacon was a friend of the governor and a member of the council, which made the company legal. He also financed the volunteer army from his own resources. Because of this incident, he was reprimanded by the governor.
When an overseer was murdered in 1676 as a result of the Indian attacks on Bacon's own plantation, he raised a volunteer army from his own resources without the permission of the governor. Nevertheless, he wrote to the governor asking for approval on May 2nd. Despite a renewed ban, he began the Indian campaign on May 10th, since he saw Berkeley's attempts to uphold the rights of the contracting parties as a defense and favor of robbers and invaders.
Governor Bacon then took his seat on the council and declared him a rebel in a public announcement on May 10th. In addition, Berkeley scheduled new elections for the Assembly (the first since 1661), which should meet in June.
First, the volunteer army turned to the contractually bound Occaneechees on the Carolina border and demanded support against the Sushquehannahs. Thereupon the Occaneechees marched against the Sushquehannahs and brought the prisoners to Bacon and his army, which had remained in the fort of the Occaneechees. Bacon had the captured sushquehannahs executed. But after a dispute he turned against the Occaneechees, as he wanted to wage a war against all Indians. After his return, the governor initially granted him pardon. But when Bacon wrote a justification for his "glorious" deed on May 28, 1676, Berkeley saw his earlier view of him as a rebel confirmed.
Declaration and remonstrance
On May 29th, the governor issued a declaration and remonstrance , which was read out in all country courts. A copy of it was also sent to England on June 1st. In it Berkeley declared Bacon, who had violated the governor's express prohibition of May 10, 1676 and thus opposed the rightful representative of the crown, to rebel again. Charges of rebellion against the legitimate representative of the Crown in the colony inevitably resulted in the death penalty. In addition to the charges against Bacon and his actions, the declaration and remonstrance also included a justification of Berkeley's previous Indian policy, with Berkeley even admitting personal errors. A decision of May 15, 1676, according to which he himself declared all Indians to be enemies, he revised only a few weeks later when it became known that reports of attacks by the contractually bound Indians were unfounded. The news about King Philip's War and the settlers' fear of a Pan-Indian offensive had also led to such misjudgments . As long as Governor Berkeley could not get evidence of abuses by the subjugated, contractually bound Indians, he wanted to protect their rights. Therefore, he stuck to a defensive policy.
The rebellion
At the end of May, Bacon and many of his supporters were elected as representatives in the new elections for the House of Burgesses . The Assembly met in Jamestown on June 5. While attempting to exercise his mandate, Bacon was captured on June 7th. Berkeley had him performed on his knees in the Assembly and there confess about his actions, but again granted him pardon and let him take his seat in the Assembly. At the meeting of the assembly from May 5th to 25th, it was decided, in addition to domestic political reforms, that a new campaign against hostile Indians should be undertaken under Bacon's leadership. Hostile Indians were now defined as those who wanted to leave their territory without the consent of the Virginians.
After waiting in vain for several days for permission to begin the campaign, Bacon fled Jamestown, rallied his supporters and returned to Jamestown on June 22nd. There he forced the Berkeley permission at gunpoint and had the laws of the June Assembly amended. After his renewed departure against the Indians on June 26th, Berkeley withdrew the forced permission and in turn sought arms support against Bacon in Gloucester without success. He returned to Jamestown to negotiate with the governor, but Berkeley fled to the east coast. On the way he wrote a declaration to the Crown that Bacon had no permission to go to war and was a rebel. Bacon then wrote his manifesto concerning the troubles in Virginia and a little later the declaration of the people .
The manifesto concerning the troubles in Virginia
The manifesto was probably written at the end of July 1676, before a conference of the rebels on the Middle Plantation in Williamsburg . With rhetorical dexterity, Bacon denied any charges against himself and his followers and justified his previous actions. In addition, he attacked Berkeley's Indian policy and leadership in Virginia sharply. He concluded the manifesto with an affirmation of the loyalty and sincerity of his followers and a complaint to the king about the governor. To this day, the character of the manifesto as the basis of a rebellion or revolution is assessed differently in the professional world.
The declaration of the people
The declaration of the people , signed by Bacon as General by the consent of the people , is often seen in research as the result of the Middle Plantation Conference . Thus it would have a democratic character. According to other studies, it was drafted by Bacon alone on July 30th and would therefore have no basis. In the declaration of the people , Bacon no longer tried to justify his actions, but instead indicted Berkeley and 19 other incumbents on behalf of the people of misconduct in Indian policy and in the government of the colony. He declared the rightful rulers to be rebels and gave them an ultimatum of four days to surrender to him and his supporters. Among other things, Bacon accused his opponents of having put their own benefit and personal profit above the welfare of the land and the inhabitants of the colony by trading with the hostile Indians for their own gain. As a result, they also supplied the Indians with weapons as objects of exchange for beaver pelts. He accused Berkeley himself of having usurped the monopoly of the beaver trade and placed it over the land and the lives of the residents. Bacon himself had been personally affected by the ban on the private beaver trade ( 1676 ), which had represented his second mainstay alongside tobacco cultivation, and had since suspected that the governor's beneficiaries continued to trade, for which no evidence can be found. In contrast, the Virginia lawyer William Sherwood even assumed that Bacon had launched the attack on the Occaneechees precisely because of their beaver fur supplies of 1,000 pounds. But there is no evidence for this either.
In addition, at its meeting in March 1676, the Assembly had transferred control of the beaver trade from the governor to the justice of the peace in the local courts, and with the second law of the June Assembly , the trade with the Indians was largely prohibited. Measures against enrichment and arbitrariness of the executive were already taken during the June Assembly . Although these laws are often traced back to Bacon and accordingly called Bacon's Laws , a direct involvement of Bacon in some laws is doubted because their content - u. a. a riot suppression law - appears to be in part directed against himself. However, the June Assembly also initiated political reforms in line with the complainants of the declaration of the people , such as limiting the sheriff's term of office to one year, prohibiting the accumulation of offices and abuse of office and the permission to pay taxes in tobacco. The high annual taxes for the settlers in Virginia stemmed from the king's ventures since 1660: Charles II had given the entire Virginia area to Lords Arlington and Culpeper for 31 years. The Virginians therefore had to pay excessive taxes to the Lords to get their land back. Another reason for the amount of taxes was the construction of forts at the river ends to protect against the Indians since the March Assembly . But since the forts had an expressly defensive, not an offensive, task, the settlers saw no visible and reasonable results of their tax burden. Therefore, in Act VIII of the June Assembly , the settlers also had the option of sending their own representatives to the tax courts, who should have equal voting rights when determining the tax revenue. These socio-political reforms are often seen in research as direct or indirect results of Bacon's participation in the June Assembly and as further goals of the declaration of the people .
Bacon also accused the governor of not only protecting and favoring the Indians, but also encouraging them against the people of Virginia and never imposing a penalty for assault, robbery and murder. However, Berkeley was considered the darling of the people until Bacon's rebellion . There has never been any evidence of injustice or corruption at Berkeley.
Objectives of the rebellion
Bacon called his goal at the beginning of the rebellion the war against all Indians and until the June Assembly complained neither injustice nor corruptibility of the governor. He only voiced these allegations at a time when the break with the legitimate rulers was irrevocable. Apart from the decisions of the June Assembly , in which the legal rulers still participated, approaches to social and political reforms can only be found for the period after the governor's flight. Up until this point, Bacon insisted on not planning any social or political rebellion. With the declaration of the people , in which he declared the governor as a representative of the crown to be a rebel, he finally went over to open rebellion.
The end of the rebellion
After the rebel conference at the Middle Plantation in Williamsburg in August, Bacon again took action against the Indians. On September 7th, he won one final victory over the Pamunkeys . Then there was a military conflict with the supporters of Berkeley in Jamestown. Property belonging to supporters of the legitimate rulers was looted and pillaged. After the last enemy had fled, Bacon had the city burned down on September 19th . In this way, Nathaniel Bacon rose to rulership of Virginia within a short time. However, his rule only lasted for a short time: Bacon fell ill with dysentery and died on October 26, 1676 . He was buried in an unknown location in a river so that the body would not fall into the hands of his opponents. Soon afterwards the leaderless rebellion began to collapse. By February 1677 , Berkeley, returning with an army, threw down Bacon's followers with extraordinary severity. This ruthless and cruel procedure resulted in an investigation commissioned by the Crown, the result of which was the replacement of Berkeley as governor that same year.
Sir William Berkeley returned to England and died there a little later, on July 9, 1677 .
literature
- Middekauff, Robert: Bacon's Rebellion , Chicago, Illinois, 1964.
- Miller, Hellen Hill: The Case for Liberty , Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, 1965.
- Morgan, Edmund S .: American Slavery - American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia , New York, 1975.
- James D. Rice: Tales from a Revolution: Bacon's Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-538694-3 .
- Washburn, Wilcomb E .: The Governor and the Rebel. A History of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia , 1958, reprinted in New York: Norton, 1972.
- Webb, Stephen Saunders: 1676: The End of American Independence , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
Web links
- The text of Bacon's Declaration in the Name of the People
- Overview on the side of the National Park Service (English)