Bacon's Rebellion (1676) Secondary Source Documents PDF

EXPERIENCE COLLEGE BEFORE COLLEGE Document A: Bacon’s Rebellion in Indian Country, 2014 Written by James D. Rice, professor of history at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, excerpt from Journal of American History, Oxford Univ...

EXPERIENCE COLLEGE BEFORE COLLEGE Document A: Bacon’s Rebellion in Indian Country, 2014 Written by James D. Rice, professor of history at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, excerpt from Journal of American History, Oxford University Press Neither Bacon’s death in October 1676, nor the two Indian treaties of 1677, nor Berkeley’s death in July 1677 could resolve the issues that had sparked Bacon’s Rebellion. The dilemmas that lay at the heart of the conflict remained: for the “neighbor Indians,” how to survive; … Indian slavery, migrations, and consolidations, which were intensifying with the rapid expansion of the European economy into Indian country; and for the Iroquois and their new Susquehannock clients, how to hold their own against other northern nations, continue their raids against the Piscataways and other southern nations without also becoming enmeshed in a war with the English, and maintain peace with the English without losing their autonomy. Among colonial elites the challenge was to relieve the pressures caused by planters’ frustrations with the state of the colony—heavy war-related taxes, many Virginians’ perceived political powerlessness, labor shortages, and other political and economic problems—without resorting to another expensive and divisive Indian war that might lead to still more strife within Virginia society. The resolutions to these conflicts, as they unfolded over the next quarter century, came almost entirely at the expense of Indians. Bacon’s Rebellion marked the beginning of a sharp decline in the ability of most Indian nations on the Eastern Seaboard to significantly shape events, … At the end of the seventeenth century the balance shifted when Native American power and autonomy rapidly (though far from entirely) eroded. … Although some Indian nations continued to significantly shape events and even to thrive in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, it was increasingly common for English fantasies about Indian power, rather than actual Indians, to drive events. With a few important exceptions, by the early eighteenth century Indian power and autonomy in the region was reduced to a fraction of what it had been in 1675. Native Americans’ options, even for relatively successful nations, became correspondingly fewer and less palatable. Virginia’s involvement in the Indian slave trade accelerated as a consequence of Bacon’s Rebellion. In the 1650s and 1660s the Virginia Assembly had placed restrictions on the enslavement of Indians, though these were often evaded. During Bacon’s Rebellion, however, numerous Occaneechees, Pamunkeys, and other Indians were seized and sold into servitude. Provincial officials seized upon these wartime circumstances to legitimize the expansion of Indian slavery, first in a 1676 statute and then in a provision of the Treaty of Middle Plantation. After the rebellion, the void left by the Occaneechees’ abandonment of their choice location astride the main trading path into the southern Piedmont meant that Virginians could trade more freely with other groups. HIS 315K Lesson 1.4  EXPERIENCE COLLEGE BEFORE COLLEGE …By the turn of the eighteenth century Indian slave raids for English markets had spread from the Carolinas to Florida and the Mississippi River; all told, thirty thousand to fifty thousand southern Indians were enslaved by the British between 1670 and 1715. Entire peoples disappeared or were absorbed into more successful nations and confederacies, such as the Creeks, Catawbas, Cherokees, and Yamasees. Gaping holes in the map opened up as places once inhabited by numerous small nations became buffer zones between a more limited number of large nations. … Historians seeking to understand Bacon’s Rebellion by focusing on Virginia’s planters, servants, and enslaved Africans have taught us much about the workings of colonial society and have confirmed the event’s status as a landmark in American history. Yet inward- looking studies of Virginia society in the era of Bacon’s Rebellion are inherently incomplete—not only in terms of who is included in the story but also in terms of their explanatory power. Even the label “Bacon’s Rebellion” has inhibited understanding of the conflict by framing it too narrowly, much as the label “Mexican-American War” has obscured the centrality of Native Americans to that conflict. It is therefore time to fully integrate Indians into tellings of Bacon’s Rebellion, and not merely as the people who sparked an internecine struggle among English colonists. HIS 315K Lesson 1.4  EXPERIENCE COLLEGE BEFORE COLLEGE Document B: Inventing Black and White, 2022 Reading from Facing History and Ourselves, a non-profit curriculum organization, excerpt from Race in U.S. History, Chapter 2 In Virginia in the 1600s, Anthony Johnson secured his freedom from indentured servitude, acquired land, and became a respected member of his community. Elizabeth Key successfully appealed to the colony’s legal system to set her free after she had been wrongfully enslaved. By the 1700s, the laws and customs of Virginia had begun to distinguish black people from white people, making it impossible for most Virginians of African descent to do what Johnson and Key had done. Why did Virginia lawmakers make these changes? Many historians point to an event known as Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 as a turning point. Although Bacon died of fever a month later and the rebellion fell apart, Virginia’s wealthy planters were shaken by the fact that a rebel militia that united white and black servants and slaves had destroyed the colonial capital. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes: The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves. After Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s lawmakers began to make legal distinctions between “white” and “black” inhabitants. By permanently enslaving Virginians of African descent and giving poor white indentured servants and farmers some new rights and status, they hoped to separate the two groups and make it less likely that they would unite again in rebellion. Historian Ira Berlin explains: Soon after Bacon's Rebellion they increasingly distinguish between people of African descent and people of European descent. They enact laws which say that people of African descent are hereditary slaves. And they increasingly give some power to 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. HIS 315K Lesson 1.4  EXPERIENCE COLLEGE BEFORE COLLEGE The division in American society between black and white that began in the late 1600s had devastating consequences for African Americans as slavery became an institution that flourished for centuries. Lawyer and civil rights activist Bryan Stevenson explains: [S]lavery deprived the enslaved person of any legal rights or autonomy and granted the slave owner complete power over the black men, women, and children legally recognized as property... American slavery was often brutal, barbaric, and violent. In addition to the hardship of forced labor, enslaved people were maimed or killed by slave owners as punishment for working too slowly, visiting a spouse living on another plantation, or even learning to read. Enslaved people were also sexually exploited. Leaders and scientists from the United States and around the world would increasingly rely on the supposed differences between the black and white races to justify the brutal and inhuman treatment of slaves. HIS 315K Lesson 1.4  EXPERIENCE COLLEGE BEFORE COLLEGE Document C: Theatre and Power in Bacon’s Rebellion: Virginia, 1676-77 Written by Susan Westbury, a historian and scholar who has published multiple articles about early American history; Excerpt from full article published in The Seventeenth Century peer- reviewed journal, Volume 19, p. 69 – 86, March 1, 2004 From the beginning of Bacon’s Rebellion, Frances Berkeley took political action in defence of her husband’s honour.16 She gave an account of her activities in an undated document, without salutation, found among the papers of Sir Henry Coventry, the English secretary of state. She started with a flourish, ‘Being not borne of a family that hath taught me to lie’. She went on to explain that Bacon’s would-be supporters believed that he had the financial resources to ‘maintain the wives and children of all those that would goe out with him’. Having what she believed was credible evidence that the heavily indebted Bacon was having difficulty getting his bills of exchange honoured, she spread the damaging news everywhere.17 In so doing, she was behaving like the rebel women – Sarah Grendon is one example – who spread news and propaganda around the colony on Bacon’s behalf.18 Continuing her statement, Lady Frances denied that she had stooped to calling Bacon a ‘parliament captain’, a member of the hated armies of Cromwell. Her statement was probably written before the June Assembly met in 1676. Lady Frances’s words attest to her convictions as well as her willingness to act politically. At the time, too, [Governor Sir William] Berkeley and the men around him were desperate to absolve themselves from future accusations that they had provoked Bacon’s followers into rebellion… To her husband her political actions must have been especially offensive. Berkeley detested the speech and writing of other Virginia women who, in the years following his resumption of the governorship of the colony in 1660, had freely and publicly aired their religious and personal discontents. Even before Bacon’s Rebellion, [historian] Kathleen M. Brown argues, the patriarchal order of the colony was threatened by women’s assertive and challenging behaviour.20 Frances Berkeley’s behaviour during Bacon’s Rebellion does not fit the model of female passivity which Western European culture in the early modern period prescribed for women.21 Nor does she appear to have been a victim of the ‘restrictive patriarchalism of seventeenth-century England where women lived in subjection to their parents, and then their husbands.22 But nor does the behaviour of other seventeenth-century women of the English upper classes fit the model… It is likely that in chaotic Virginia women’s situations were less restricted than in England… There is evidence that, because of the diminished life chances of Virginians generally, together with the shortage of women, the latter gained social power… During Bacon’s Rebellion Frances Berkeley found herself in the middle of an acute political crisis which led to the overthrow of her husband’s government, a crisis analogous to the Civil War in England in the 1640s. The English Civil War offered royalist women opportunities for political expression, just as Bacon’s Rebellion offered them to Frances Berkeley… Since [Philip] Ludwell’s [a member of the Virginia Council] report indicated that Berkeley had lost control of the colony, [King Charles II] recalled the governor to England.32 HIS 315K Lesson 1.4  EXPERIENCE COLLEGE BEFORE COLLEGE He also ordered troops to Virginia to suppress the rebel forces, and appointed three commissioners to hear the people’s grievances.33 Frances Berkeley must have been gratified by Charles’s decision to send troops; it is possible that she played a small part in that decision. Probably she found unnecessary the commissioners’ charge to conduct hearings into the reasons why so many Virginians rebelled. Nevertheless, the governor’s recall to London must have been a serious blow. Apparently lacking the power to persuade the king to change his decision, she was forced into the demeaning posture of petitioning him for the small privilege of allowing her husband to remain in the colony long enough to settle his affairs. There is no indication that the king replied. Frances Berkeley then left England for Virginia aboard one of the commissioners’ ships.34 HIS 315K Lesson 1.4