Revolution in the Chesapeake, 1675–1679

This chapter places Bacon’s Rebellion in the context of political developments in the surrounding colonies. In Virginia, Governor Berkeley had recently disenfranchised many of the poorer farmers. This allowed his elite supporters in the assembly to pass a high poll tax. Dissatisfaction became violent in the summer of 1676, in both Virginia and in an area of Maryland known as the Clifts. The rebellions were eventually suppressed, but when a new governor tried to tax the Albemarle settlers, he was met with Culpeper’s Rebellion, which successfully saved representative government in North Carolina.

Early American Rebels

During the half century after 1650 that saw the gradual imposition of a slave society in England’s North American colonies, poor white settlers in the Chesapeake sought a republic of equals. Demanding a say in their own destinies, rebels moved around the region looking for a place to build a democratic political system. This book crosses colonial boundaries to show how Ingle's Rebellion, Fendall's Rebellion, Bacon's Rebellion, Culpeper's Rebellion, Parson Waugh's Tumult, and the colonial Glorious Revolution were episodes in a single struggle because they were organized by one connected group of people. Adding land records and genealogical research to traditional sources, Noeleen McIlvenna challenges standard narratives that disdain poor whites or leave them out of the history of the colonial South. She makes the case that the women of these families played significant roles in every attempt to establish a more representative political system before 1700. McIlvenna integrates landless immigrants and small farmers into the history of the Chesapeake region and argues that these rebellious anti-authoritarians should be included in the pantheon of the nation’s Founders.

“Darling Indians” and “Natural Lords”

Dixon contends that between the 1640s and Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), Virginia went far in following the Spanish policy of incorporating Natives into the polity. Reminiscent of the Spanish empire’s “republic of Indians,” the tributary Natives lived in semiautonomous communities. Virginia law granted tributary kings and queens a privileged standing to enhance their rule over potentially dangerous Indians. The colony (in theory) viewed Indians, particularly poorer ones, as having a special claim upon English justice. Indeed, comparing Virginia’s to Spanish America’s (more elaborate and theoretically developed) notions of corporate Indian rights suggests a model for grouping together early Virginia initiatives whose collective significance might otherwise be overlooked. The Spanish experience also highlights how Virginia’s tributary system, like the “republic of Indians,” claimed to uphold a particular vision of justice—one that purported to safeguard Natives against the worst abuses of colonists in return for loyalty to the king.

Frontier Politics, Providentialism, and “Hobbism” in Bacon’s Rebellion

Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677) was an uprising in the Virginia colony that its participants experienced as both a civil breakdown and a period of intense cosmic disorder. Although Thomas Hobbes had introduced his theory of state sovereignty a quarter century earlier, the secularizing connotations of his highly naturalized conceptualization of power had yet to make major inroads on a post-Reformation culture that was only gradually shifting from Renaissance providentialism to Enlightenment rationalism. Instead, the period witnessed a complicated interplay of providential beliefs and Hobbist doctrines. In the aftermath of the English civil war (1642–1651), this mingling of ideologies had prompted the Puritans’ own experimentation with Hobbes’s ideas, often in tandem with a Platonic spiritualism that was quite at odds with Hobbes’s own philosophical skepticism. The Restoration of 1660 had given an additional boost to Hobbism as his ideas won a number of prominent adherents in Charles II’s government. The intermingling of providentialism and Hobbism gave Bacon’s Rebellion its particular aura of heightened drama and frightening uncertainty. In the months before the uprising, the outbreak of a war on the colony’s frontier with the Doeg and Susquehannock peoples elicited fears in the frontier counties of a momentous showdown between faithful planters and God’s enemies. In contrast, Governor Sir William Berkeley’s establishmentarian Protestantism encouraged him to see the frontiersmen’s vigilantism as impious, and the government’s more measured response to the conflict as inherently godlier because tied to time-tested hierarchies and institutions. Greatly complicating this already confusing scene, the colony also confronted a further destabilizing force in the form of the new Hobbist politics emerging from the other side of the ocean. In addition to a number of alarming policies emanating from Charles II’s court in the 1670s that sought to enhance the English state’s supremacy over the colonies, Hobbes’s doctrines also informed the young Nathaniel Bacon Jr.’s stated rationale for leading frontiersmen against local Indian communities without Berkeley’s authorization. Drawing on the Hobbes-influenced civil war-era writings of his relation the Presbyterian lawyer Nathaniel Bacon, the younger Bacon made the protection of the colony’s Christian brotherhood a moral priority that outweighed even the preservation of existing civil relations and public institutions. While Berkeley’s antagonism toward this Hobbesian argument led him to lash out forcibly against Bacon as a singularly great threat to Virginia’s commonwealth, it was ordinary Virginians who most consequentially resisted Bacon’s strange doctrines. Yet a division persisted. Whereas the interior counties firmly rejected Bacon’s Hobbism in favor of the colony’s more traditional bonds to God and king, the frontier counties remained more open to a Hobbesian politics that promised their protection.

Donald Trump and the Legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election was the biggest upset in American history. Trump propelled himself to victory by running a racist campaign that targeted the White working-class voters by assuring them that he would be their agent and would redeem the country on behalf their shared Whiteness by deporting Mexican immigrants, banning Muslims, and stopping and frisking African Americans. The racial wedge that Trump used was the result of the enduring legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion in the United States.

Sources: The 100 Most Important American Financial Crises: An Encyclopedia of the Lowest Points in American Economic History

The story of the United States is tied inexorably to the highs and lows of its economy. This single-volume encyclopedia brings together what the author feels are the one hundred most important financial crises that occurred from Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 to the Detroit bankruptcy in 2013. There is also an appendix which includes textual reproductions of some of the events covered in the book, along with a robust bibliography and index. Topics are 2-3 pages long. Individual entries consist of a condensed narrative of events, followed by a "see also" section pointing readers to other entries the author finds similar or connected and, finally, a list of two or three recommended readings. Some entries provide illustrations or photographs but no charts or graphs are used. The format remains consistent throughout.

Sir William Berkeley, the Hobbists, and the End of Renaissance-Era Colonization

This chapter traces the end of Renaissance-era colonization in the tensions between Thomas Hobbes's new theory of state sovereignty and the more-traditional Christian humanism of Sir William Berkeley. As Virginia’s governor for more than a quarter century, Berkeley applied an establishmentarian approach to governance that he had first developed, in the 1630s, in the theological-philosophical coterie known as the Great Tew circle. Adopting a Pyrrhonian skeptical view of God's truths as accessible only in the mundane civil achievements of humans, Great Tew members like Berkeley's friend Edward Hyde, later first earl of Clarendon, exalted established laws and institutions as the only true guide to following God's will. Eschewing both the godly assurance of the Puritans and the extreme skepticism of Hobbes, Berkeley sought to steer Virginia through an era marked by the English Civil War, the Restoration of monarchy under Charles II, and new Hobbesian initiatives to realize a unitary state that centered on England and whose colonies were meant to be provinces rather than commonwealths. When, in 1676–1677, Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., launched his own Presbyterian Hobbist challenge to Berkeley's authority in Bacon's Rebellion, planters themselves ultimately rejected Hobbism in favor of the colony's familiar commonwealth bonds to king and God.