Bacon’s Rebellion: Slavery and Freedom

by Jack R. Johnson 01.2023

In 1676, a century before the American Revolution, a well-connected British landowner owner named Nathaniel Bacon led thousands of of Virginians against Governor William Berkeley for his refusal to war with Native Americans. The failed rebellion, named ‘Bacon’s Rebellion,’ helped shape two contradictory threads in America’s history: Westward expansion and its promise of economic freedom, and the institution of slavery. 

By 1670, poor farmers had been hit hard by falling tobacco prices, and many living on the borders of the colony’s frontier wanted to expand westward. There, they faced threats from Native Americans intent on protecting their ancestral lands. When the colonists called on their governor for military support, he refused. Governor Berkeley had a more nuanced view of the matter. He feared a widespread Indian war, and wanted to continue trade with Native Americans, which was lucrative for himself and select cronies. To resolve the issue, Berkeley called a "Long Assembly" in March 1676, which established rules for trade with the Native Americans and made it illegal to sell them weapons. Coincidentally, or not, most of the favored traders were friends of Berkeley. Regular traders, some of whom had been trading independently with the local Indians for generations, were no longer allowed to trade. 

Bacon accused Berkeley publicly of playing favorites. Distant kinsman to Sir Francis Bacon, and related by marriage to Governor Berkeley, himself, Bacon was a man with considerable resources. When Susquehannock Indians attacked one of his plantations and killed one of his overseers, Bacon raised the militia of Henrico and Charles City Counties. He demanded that Governor Berkeley give him a commission to war against the Indians. The governor described Bacon as a “young, unexperienced, rash, and inconsiderate person” and refused. Bacon played on popular fears, charging that the governor was corrupt and secretly aiding the Indians. Ignoring Berkeley’s authority, Bacon, with three hundred men, pursued the Susquehannock as far as the Roanoke River. There, he persuaded the Occaneechi nation (long-time trading partners and English allies) to attack the Susquehannock. When the Occaneechi returned with Susquehannock captives, Bacon turned on them, and killed them all—Occaneechi and Susquehannock-- men, women, and children. It was a brutal and unnecessary act.

Furious, Governor Berkeley had Bacon declared a rebel. He called for a new General Assembly election. Unfortunately for Berkeley, Bacon’s actions had struck a chord with many poorer Virginians, and his movement grew. Ironically, he was elected, despite being declared a rebel.  Arriving at Jamestown in June, Bacon was captured and forced to capitulate before taking his seat in the assembly. As the assembly convened, Bacon got on his knees and apologized to the governor. His supporters erupted with cries for the governor to let him lead a new campaign against the Indians. Frustrated, the governor refused and eventually kicked Bacon out of the assembly with no commission.

Undeterred, Bacon gathered his troops. A few weeks later, he marched toward Jamestown with 500 supporters and demanded to lead the colony into war against the Native Americans. As Bacon’s men stood off against Berkeley’s men, the governor opened his shirt and showed Bacon his bare chest. “Here, shoot me!” yelled Berkeley, daring Bacon to shoot. Surrounded by the Governor’s loyalists, Bacon demurred. Instead, he retreated and marched throughout Virginia, recruiting other disgruntled rebels. Berkeley accused Bacon of rebellion and treason again, and Bacon responded with heated proclamations of his own, accusing the governor of having sold “his [friends], country and the liberties of his loyal subjects to the barbarous heathen.”

In September, matters came to a head. Governor Berkeley had been traveling throughout Virginia to recruit supporters of his own, and returned to Jamestown to issue a final proclamation condemning Bacon. In response, Bacon and his men rushed into Jamestown, burning and pillaging as they went. On the night of September 19, they torched the entire town, burning it to the ground. 

Bacon died of dysentery shortly thereafter. Without their leader, the rebels floundered. Berkeley, assisted by an English naval squadron, soon defeated the remainder of the rebels, and Berkeley returned to Jamestown.

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Bacon’s army crossed all classes and races (from indentured servants to newly arrived Africans). The ad hoc alliance between the servants and Africans (a mix of indentured, enslaved, and Free Negroes) deeply disturbed the colonial upper class. In order for the Virginia elite to maintain the loyalty of the common planters and to avert future rebellions, historian Allan Taylor writes, they "needed to lead, rather than oppose, wars meant to dispossess and destroy frontier Indians." According to Taylor, this bonded the elite to the common planter in wars against Indians, their common enemy, and enabled the elites to appease free whites with land. "To give servants greater hope for the future, in 1705 the assembly revived the headright system by promising each freedman fifty acres of land, a promise that obliged the government to continue taking land from the Indians."

Since both black and white indentured servants had joined the frontier rebellion, seeing them united in a cause alarmed the ruling class. Historians believe the rebellion hastened the hardening of racial lines associated with slavery, as a way for planters and the colony to control some of the poor. The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 provided the legal basis for the treatment of all enslaved people as property—which meant that they could be tortured and even killed with relative impunity. It also transformed black indentured servants into slaves regardless of how many years they had already worked, even if they were only days away from being freed of their indentured status.

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In a recent PBS interview Ira Berlin noted that after Bacon's Rebellion, "They enact laws which say that people of African descent are hereditary slaves. And they increasingly give some power to white independent white farmers and land holders. … Now what is interesting about this is that we normally say that slavery and freedom are opposite things -that they are diametrically opposed. But what we see here in Virginia in the late 17th century, around Bacon's Rebellion, is that freedom and slavery are created at the same moment.”

After Bacon’s rebellion, expansion of the colonies continued unabated, allowing indentured servants to acquire acreage, and a certain degree of economic freedom, while pushing Native Americans further and further West. The number of enslaved persons increased from three hundred in 1650 to thirteen thousand in 1700. By 1862, the beginning of America’s Civil War, that number was nearly 4 million, or over 12 percent of the US population.