Bacon’s Rebellion, Part 1

For a long time Bacon’s Rebellion was primarily interpreted as a precursor to the Revolutionary War, with patriotic colonists rising up against the tyranny of the British colonial government. But there are a lot more moving parts than that. This first part sets the scene and establishes the context of the rebellion. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Before we start today's episode, we wanted to
let you know that Stuff you Missed in History Class
has been nominated for a Webby Award this year. We've
been nominated for Best Writing in the Podcast category. You
can vote by going to Webby Awards dot com. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of

(00:20):
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
On the surface, Bacon's Rebellion sounds a little similar to
the Regulator War that we talked about on the show
a couple of months ago. Both of them took place

(00:42):
in England's North American colonies before the Revolutionary War. Although
Bacon's rebellion was about a century earlier than the other one,
they both involved some divisions between the less affluent, more
inland people in the colony and the elite ruling class
out on the coast, and as was the case with
the Regulators, for a long time, Bacon's rebellion was primarily

(01:03):
interpreted as a precursor to the Revolutionary War, with patriotic
colonists rising up against the tyranny of the British colonial government.
If you studied this in school up through about the
mid to late twentieth century or maybe even later, that
might be the version of it that you heard. But
on the other hand, historians writing over the last seventy

(01:25):
five years or so have been focusing on all kinds
of factors, including labor and race, and colonists relationships to
the native tribes and the nations who were already then
that part of North America, and the native tribes and
nations own relationships to each other. Although some scholars have
tried to find like one central explanation for this whole incident,

(01:47):
it really seems like the deeper you look into it,
the more complicated it gets, and there was really just
a lot going on. So we're going to be getting
into Bacon's rebellion in two episodes. This was an uprising
that involved free farmers and enslaved and indentured people of
multiple races and nationalities. So today we're going to talk
about how colonial Virginia evolved to look like that in

(02:10):
the first place, and then the next episode we will
get to the actual fighting. Um Tracy decided later in
the game than you might have expected that this was
going to be a two parter, but I suspected early
when she texted me last week and said, I think
this is the most complicated thing I've tried to untangle. Yeah,

(02:30):
it was like the more I tried to untangle, the
more tangle I found. That's often how it plays out.
So to put it plainly, the Colony of Virginia was
established to make money. There was also some focus on
converting the Native American population to Christianity, but really turning
a profit was a much bigger priority. To that end,

(02:50):
the Virginia Company of London was granted a series of
royal charters to establish and govern the colony, so the
Virginia Company, not the Crown, assumed the fine financial risk. Yeah.
The sole story is just a lot of people trying
to get something with the minimal expense to themselves as possible.
The Virginia Company's first charter was granted in sixteen o six,

(03:12):
and at first the colony that it established in sixteen
o seven really struggled. The colony had a shortage of
everything from supplies to just basic skills. The starving time
of sixteen o nine to sixteen ten was particularly bad,
and we talked about that on the show back in.
One of the problems was that at first the colony
didn't have a profitable export crop. That started to change

(03:35):
in the sixteen teens after John Rolfe introduced strains of
tobacco from the Caribbean. Virginia already had its own native tobacco,
but British consumers preferred the milder, sweeter Caribbean varieties. Soon
after John Ralph started experimenting with these seeds, tobacco became
the foundation of the entire colonial economy and virtually it's

(03:56):
only export. But this led to a couple of new problems. One,
since the colony had all of its eggs in one basket,
things like bad weather and fluctuations and tobacco prices and
wars could be really catastrophic to the whole economy and
to the colony needed a much larger workforce than it
had to keep this new industry running. To assemble this workforce,

(04:18):
investors and planters in seventeenth century Virginia largely turned to
a system of indenture. People signed contracts to work for
a specific period of time, essentially losing their freedom for
the term of their indenture. In an exchange they were
given passage from Europe to North America. In North America,
they were supposed to be provided food, shelter, clothing, and

(04:41):
usually the tools that they needed to work. Yes, sometimes
people contracting with indentured workers were like, you got to
provide your own tools. It's buried a little bit. But
at the end of this contract, the workers typically received
what was called freedom does and this was usually some
corn and some clothing. Sometimes the people had contracted them
would give them some tools or some other goods as well,

(05:03):
but this was really more of a custom than a
legal requirement until way after the events that we're talking
about today, so some people didn't do it. This system
was based on a model that had existed in parts
of Europe for centuries, but in general it was implemented
far more harshly in North America. In England, an apprenticeship
might last for years, since apprentices were meant to be

(05:26):
learning a specific trade like blacksmithing or bookbinding. But outside
the apprenticeship system and indenture in England could last for
as little as a year. In Virginia, though indenture's lasted
as long as seven years, and it depended on how
old the person was when they started working. Laws adjusted
the exact length from time to time over the seventeenth century,

(05:49):
but in general, the younger the worker was when they
signed the indenture, the longer their indenture was for. Also,
in North America, contract terms were much stricter. Indentured people
had fewer rights and protections, and there were more laws
specifically governing their activities and behavior. Punishment for breaking these
laws tended to be harsh, and because contract holders had

(06:11):
a financial incentive to keep their laborers working for free
for as long as possible, punishments also included adding more
time to a person's indenture. People signed these indentures for
a lot of different reasons and as examples, a person
might genuinely want to immigrate to North America and just
have no other way to afford it, or they might

(06:31):
be in debt in Europe and signing this indenture would
have absolved them of their debt. Or they might have
been convicted of a crime and the indenture was part
of their punishment. So while there were some people who
signed an indenture freely, for a lot of people it
was somewhere between being forced and being coerced. Conditions for
these workers could be truly appalling. Even though an indenture

(06:54):
was supposed to have an end date, a lot of
people died of disease, malnourishment, or mistreatment before get anywhere
close to the end of their contract. And of course
there were people who just refused to let their indentured
workers go or who provided them with no sort of
freedom dues at all. In spite of that, a lot
of people came to North America and Virginia specifically as

(07:16):
indentured workers. This was especially true after sixteen eighteen, when
the Virginia Company established what was known as the head
Rights System. This was part of a series of incentives
to try to attract new colonists. The head Right system
granted fifty acres of land to each person who had
either paid their own way to immigrate to North America

(07:37):
or paid someone else's way. So investors and other wealthy
people started paying for big groups of people to immigrate
as indentured workers, and these investors collected fifty acres of
land for each person they brought. This gave the Virginia
Company access to a large labor force without having to
really pay a lot of money for it, because it
was essentially reimbursing the investors who were doing the paying

(08:00):
with land instead of money. Between sixteen thirty and sixteen eighty,
three quarters of all new arrivals in Virginia and neighboring
Maryland were indentured, with as much as half of Virginia's
population being indentured at one time. Most of Virginia's indentured
workers were from Britain and Ireland, but they were indentured
workers from other parts of Europe as well. Especially before

(08:23):
the sixteen eighties, there were also Native American and African
indentured workers. It would be going way too far to
suggest that all of these workers were treated equally, regardless
of their race or their nationality. Most European workers probably
thought they were superior to the Native and African workers,
and there was also something of a hierarchy within the

(08:44):
workers from different parts of Europe. But overall, until the
mid to late seventeenth century, Virginia's indentured workers tended to
have similar working conditions, granted a lot of times they
were similarly terrible, and they also had similar oppert communities.
At the end of their indenture. The contract terms tended
to be less specific and less defined for Native and

(09:07):
African workers. So it really wasn't unheard of for a
person's indenture never to formally end, even though it was
supposed to be temporary. But there were definitely Africans and
people of African descent who got to the end of
their indenture and regained their freedom and became landowners themselves
with indentured workers of their own. That was starting to
change during the period that we're discussing, and the events

(09:30):
of Bacon's rebellion prompted even more changes, and we're going
to talk about that more after we have a sponsor break.
In the seventeenth century, indentured workers were not the only
unfree labor in Virginia. There were also enslaved Native Americans

(09:52):
and enslaved Africans. For the first couple of years after
the founding of Jamestown, most of the unfree native labor
in the colony was indentured. That started changing after the
First Anglo Powhatan War started in sixteen o nine. This
was the first of a series of wars between the
English Colony and an alliance of about thirty Algonquin speaking

(10:12):
native peoples. It's known as the Powhatan Confederacy because its leader,
Wahoon Sinacoa, was first introduced to the colonists as Powatin.
Also heard that pronounced a couple of different ways, including
exactly how the emphasis goes in pot or. I heard
someone say at polatan and I was like, I never
heard anyone say it that way when I was a child.

(10:36):
There was not really a legal framework to do this
at first, but the English colonists started treating native prisoners
of war from this conflict as slaves. A lot of
North America's native tribes were already practicing some form of
slavery before Europeans got there. Often this involved enslaving prisoners
of war. So the colonists established alliances and trading relationship

(11:00):
ships with the tribes in the area, and as they
did this, they started trading weapons and supplies with their
native allies in exchange for their native allies prisoners of war.
The enslavement of native people became a bigger part of
the Virginia Colony and more legally formalized in the middle
of the seventeenth century. In October of sixteen forty six,

(11:21):
a treaty and did the Third Anglo Powhetan War and
This treaty made the remaining tribes of the Powhetan Confederacy
tributaries and subject to English rule. One of the provisions
of the treaty was that Native children under the age
of twelve could voluntarily come to live in English households.
So the colonists claimed that what they would be doing

(11:43):
was providing these children was shelter and an education and
converting them to Christianity, but in reality they were more
like hostages. This provision had been built into the treaty
to try to force the Native people to comply with it. Basically,
we're taking your children into our homes, so you better
do what we say because we have your kids. In

(12:06):
addition to being treated as hostages, many of these Native
children were also forced to work as servants. The colony's
General Assembly passed a series of laws prohibiting the capture
and sale of Native children as slaves starting in sixteen
fifty five, but these laws were largely ignored by the colonists,
and in some cases colonial administrators encouraged breaking the law. Then,

(12:29):
in sixteen sixty the General Assembly passed a law that
permitted the enslavement of Native prisoners of war, and there
were also mass enslavements and retribution for attacks on colonial settlements.
So if a tribe attacked a settlement and retaliation, the
colonists would enslave huge numbers of people from that tribe. And,
as was the case in Africa with the trans Atlantic

(12:52):
slave trade, England's willingness to trade guns for people led
to increase warfare among the native tribes, as some of
them saw more prisoners of war to sell, and others
just tried to keep from becoming enslaved themselves. In sixteen seventy,
the General Assembly passed a new law that mandated that
native prisoners of war be indentured rather than enslaved, but

(13:14):
as had happened with the laws that prohibited enslaving native children,
a lot of people just ignored this. The treatment of
Africans in Virginia followed a somewhat similar trajectory from indenture
to enslavement. The first Africans in Virginia are generally noted
as having arrived on a ship called the White Lion
in August of sixteen nineteen, although there may have been

(13:35):
a small number of other Africans before that point. The
White Lion was an English privateer and its crew had
taken a group of Africans prisoner after capturing a Portuguese
vessel bound for Mexico. So the crew of the White
Lion traded these people for food and supplies. But it's
not really clear from the historical record whether the colonists

(13:55):
treated them as indentured or enslaved. It may have varied
among all of them. They were described as twenty and odd,
so a couple of dozen people chattel. Slavery was really
well established in Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies by this point,
but British colonies were a little slower to adopt the practice.

(14:15):
So in sixteen nineteen, when the ship arrived in dentures
were really encoded in Virginia law, but slavery was not
mentioned at all. Regardless of the question of the people
sold from the White Lion, there were definitely indentured Africans
in Virginia in the early to mid seventeenth century, although
over time more Africans started to be held in lifelong

(14:35):
bondage and the legal status of slavery in Virginia also
started shifting around sixteen forty. That year, three indentured workers
who were contracted to a man named Hugh Gwin fled
from where they were living into Maryland. They were captured
and returned to Virginia, where all three of them were whipped.

(14:56):
The two European men of these three were sentenced to
in a sational four years of servitude, but the third man,
who was an African man known as John Punch, was
sentenced to servitude for the rest of his life, and
that was the first incidence of the lifelong servitude of
an African in Virginia's legal system. Lifetime enslavement of Africans

(15:17):
formally became part of Virginia law in sixteen sixty one,
and then in sixteen sixty two. The law also specified
that quote Negro women's children to serve according to the
condition of the mother, so slavery was basically passed down
from mothers to their children. So Bacon's rebellion started in
sixteen seventy six, at which point chattel slavery was relatively

(15:41):
new in Virginia, especially in terms of it's having some
kind of legal framework, and it was unlawful to enslave
Native prisoners of war for life, but that law was
often being ignored, so looking at it a little bit
more broadly, in sixteen seventy six, the Colony of Virginia
had a population of free people, some of whom had
previously been indentured, and these free people were of multiple

(16:04):
races and nationalities. Virginia also had a very large number
of indentured workers who were also of multiple races and nationalities,
and the colony had a much smaller number of enslaved people,
which included enslaved Africans and enslaved Native Americans. So regardless,
the vast majority of Virginia's labor was not free, and

(16:26):
the majority of Virginia's unfree labor at this time was indentured.
But all of this was changing. Another thing that was
shifting was how the Europeans in this society thought of
themselves in relation to everyone else. The idea that European
Christians were collectively one group, that group being white people,
was fairly new. It was more common for people of

(16:48):
European descent to think of their neighbors in terms of
their specific nationality or in terms of their religion. So
the people living in Virginia at this time, really we're
thinking of things in terms of Christians and on Christians,
Native Americans and Africans were considered non Christians unless they
could prove that they had been baptized. And this was
also connected to how people understood slavery, because before the

(17:11):
mid sixteen hundreds, it was only considered acceptable to hold
non Christians in bondage. This was part of the core
definition of slavery, and this meant that in some parts
of the colony people were freed after being baptized. In
sixteen sixty seven, the Virginia General Assembly passed an act
specifying that baptizing an enslaved person did not free them

(17:33):
from bondage. We should also note that non Christians didn't
really include Jews at this point because there were very
few Jewish people in North America aside from a very
few individual people. The first known group of Jewish colonists
arrived in New York as refugees from Brazil in sixteen
fifty four. Yeah, later on there were definitely more specific

(17:54):
references to Jewish people, but at this time there were
so few that it was just not a big part
of the law or people's social understanding to some. All
of this up Bacon's rebellion united a lot of parts
of the society, including free farmers and indentured workers and
enslaved Africans all against a perceived Native American threat. And

(18:17):
then they turned their attention against the colonial government. And
we will get to why people were so frustrated with
the government after a sponsored break. Before the break, we
talked about the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans in
Virginia from the earliest years of the colony up through

(18:39):
the sixteen seventies, and now we need to rewind just
a little bit to talk about how the colonial government developed,
because that was a big source of frustration leading into
Bacon's rebellion. At the top of the show, we talked
about how the Virginia Company established the colony at Jamestown
in sixteen o seven. In sixteen eighteen, the company drafted
a set of instructions for newly appointed governor, Sir George Yeardley.

(19:03):
These instructions were called the Great Charter, and they included
the head right system that we talked about earlier. The
Great Charter also included instructions about the colony's governance. The
company decided to establish an elected body of representatives so
that the colonists could have some say in the government.
While the colony stayed in the company's control. These representatives

(19:23):
were known as burgesses, and they were elected to represent
each settlement. Together, the Burgesses, the Governor's Council, and the
Governor formed a unicameral body that was the General Assembly
that has come up a couple of times in this episode.
But in spite of ongoing reforms through these decades and
all these instructions that were detailed in the Great Charter,

(19:44):
the colony still just was not thriving. The Virginia Company
never managed to get out of debt, even though it
was not paying the vast majority of its labor. By
the sixteen twenties, critics were also raising serious questions about
the company and how it was running things. So in
sixteen twenty four, after a year long investigation, the Crown

(20:04):
revoked the company's charter and took direct control of the colony,
appointing a royal governor and other officials. This was a
massive change for the colonists, especially because for the first
several years the General Assembly had no formal recognition. The
colonists were frustrated and angry over the situation, since they
had gone from being at least somewhat self governing with

(20:26):
an elected assembly to being under the control of a
governor who was appointed by the monarch. The crown did
eventually recognize the assembly, and then in sixteen forty three,
Governor Sir William Berkeley split the Burgesses off into their
own house of the government, and so this turned the
colony's unicameral legislature into a bicameral one. His goal in

(20:48):
doing this was part of a plan to try to
create a stable central government for the colony. But a
side effect of splitting the Burgesses into their own house
was that the Burgesses, who had always been mostly it
up of the colony's gentry, they became increasingly focused on
their own needs and the needs of other rich colonists,
so the colonies less affluent people really felt like they

(21:09):
didn't have a voice in the government anymore. Throughout all
this time, tobacco continued to be the foundation of Virginia's economy.
Tobacco prices had started to drop around the sixteen twenties
as exports from North America and the Caribbean flooded the
British market. The Dutch also bought a lot of tobacco
from Virginia, and that revenue was cut off completely during

(21:30):
the First Anglo Dutch War, which started in sixteen fifty two.
Then in sixteen sixty, Parliament passed the Navigation Acts, which
required Virginia's exports to be sent through English ports on
English ships. That once again up ended Virginia's tobacco trade
with the Dutch Republic, since the colony could no longer
sell directly to the Dutch yea. Once the war was

(21:52):
over they had resumed that trade, and then the Navigation
actiments that they could not do it anymore. And then,
of course, because it was a war, we are also
all the other wartime effects, including the colony being directly attacked.
Also in sixteen sixty, Sir William Berkeley was appointed the
Governor of Virginia for a second time. His separation of
the Burgesses into their own house and the government had

(22:13):
happened during his first term. That first term lasted from
sixteen forty one to sixteen fifty two, and it largely
took place during the English Civil War. Berkeley himself was
a Royalist, so when that side lost the war, he
naturally lost his position as governor. Not long afterward, Charles
the Second was restored to the throne in sixteen sixty

(22:34):
and Berkeley's first term as governor had gone well enough
that the king restored him to the position, but the
second term did not go nearly as well. In his
first term, Berkeley had encouraged Virginia farmers and planters to
diversify their crops so the colonial economy wouldn't be so
susceptible to everything from whether to wars. Charles the second

(22:55):
approved a formal plan to do this during Berkeley's second term,
but Berkeley's attempt to carry it out just didn't go well.
Taxes were increased to fund the diversification effort, which meant
that planters felt like they were being taxed in order
to make a change that they didn't even want to
make in the first place. The diversification effort fizzled, and
tobacco remained as the primary export crop, so when the

(23:17):
Second Anglo Dutch War started in sixteen sixty five, planters
incomes once again plummeted. Planters were also becoming frustrated because
of some of the consequences of the head right system
that we talked about earlier. The land that was granted
to people under that system was not the most fertile
farmable land out in the tide Water area of the colony.

(23:38):
It was farther inland, where it was a lot rockier,
the soil was not as rich. Some of it was
on the other side of the fall line, which made
it harder to transport goods out to the coast. And
the more people moved into this territory, the more frustrated
they were about this disparity between the people out on
the tide Water and people in the inner coastal plane.

(23:59):
Governor Keley was also really fond of granting some of
the best land so people that he liked as rewards,
and that meant that that extra good land was not
available to sell to anyone else. Those earlier issues with
colonists feeling like they weren't represented in the government resurfaced
in sixteen seventy when the Assembly adopted legislation that restricted

(24:19):
the right to vote only to people who owned taxable land.
This disenfranchised a lot of previously eligible voters. On top
of that, there hadn't been a new election for the
Assembly in eight years, so only the wealthiest and most
elite people in the colony felt represented in the government,
since they were the ones connected to the burgesses who

(24:40):
had been serving all that time. As if that was
not enough. On top of all of this, in sixteen
seventy two, Charles the Second granted all of Virginia's revenues
to the Lords Arlington and Culpepper, and this led the
Governor of Virginia to raise taxes again both try to
offset that loss of revenue and pay for an appeal

(25:01):
to try to get the grant reversed. All of these
things that we've talked about today led to the British
colonies first violent uprising among its colonists, and we were
going to talk about that on our next show. I
have a little bit of listener mails to close us out,
and this is about our not that long ago episode
on Raphael Limpkin and the Genocide Convention. It is from Nate.

(25:22):
Nate says, Hello, Tracy and Holly. I just wanted to
add a note to your episode on Raphael Limpkin and
the Genocide Convention. You mentioned that Limpkins studied law at LVOV, Poland,
which is now in Ukraine and called Liviv. While Limpkin
was working to define genocide as a crime, the related
but distinct legal concept of crimes against humanity was being

(25:44):
developed by Hirsch louder Pact, who had studied law at
the same university. The parallels between the two continued at
the Nuremberg trial, where louder Part was an advisor to
the British prosecutors while Limpkin was an advisor to the Americans.
Both men lost relatives in the Hall a cost and
at Nuremberg they came face to face with a defendant
most directly responsible for these deaths, Hans Frank, the Nazi

(26:07):
governor of Poland. I learned this and more in a
fascinating book called East West Street by Philips Sands, which
I highly recommend. Keep up the good work, Nate. Thank you, Nate.
I wanted to read this email for two reasons. One
to include that tidbit about Loder Pact and the idea
of crimes against humanity, because that did come up in
my research and was not something that we really got

(26:29):
into in the episode as much. Um One of Lincoln's
sources of frustration was that it seemed like sometimes there
was more focused on this idea of crimes against humanity,
and he really felt like there needed to be a
legal focus on the idea of genocide and on preventing
and prosecuting genocide. And then I also wanted to clarify

(26:50):
because I don't think I said that he had studied
law in love Poland. I'm not sure what gave that impression.
What I did say that was definitely confus using, or
what I did right that was definitely confusing. I don't
remember which of us said it in the actual episode.
Is that um I made it sound like the University

(27:11):
of Heidelberg and Levov which is now Lviv, was one place.
Those are in fact two different universities, and limpken Uh
studied at both of those universities at different times. So
if anybody got the impression that there used to be
a university that was called the University of Heidelberg and Liviv,
that it's two different places and Liviv yes is in

(27:34):
Ukraine now. Uh So, thank you Nate for letting me
share that. If you would like to write to us
about this or any other podcasts, we are a history
podcast at how stuff works dot com. There we're all
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(27:55):
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(28:18):
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