Bacon's Rebellion (1676): Uprising Against Virginia's Governor

Bacon’s Rebellion was an armed revolt in the English colony of Virginia in 1676, led by the young planter Nathaniel Bacon against the long-serving governor, Sir William Berkeley. Beginning as a dispute over war with Native Americans on the frontier, it grew into a challenge to the colony’s government that ended with the burning of Jamestown. It is often described as the largest uprising in the English colonies before the American Revolution and is still debated for what it reveals about class, race and power in early Virginia.

Background: a colony under strain

By the 1670s Virginia had around 40,000 colonists, most of them living on scattered tobacco farms along the rivers. Seven decades after the Jamestown settlement, the colony’s economy was in trouble. Tobacco prices were low, partly because of the English Navigation Acts, which forced planters to ship their crop only to England. Taxes, collected per head, fell heavily on poorer households.

Political power was concentrated in a small group of wealthy planters around Sir William Berkeley, governor from 1641 to 1652 and again from 1660 after the restoration of Charles II. The House of Burgesses elected in 1661 sat for some fifteen years without new elections, earning the name the “Long Assembly”. Many former indentured servants, who had worked off their terms of four to seven years, found the best land already taken and were pushed towards the frontier, where they came into conflict with Native peoples.

The frontier war of 1675

In July 1675 a dispute over unpaid goods between Doeg Indians and a planter named Thomas Mathew in Stafford County, on the Potomac River, led to killings on both sides. Virginia militiamen pursuing the Doegs also killed members of the Susquehannock nation, who had not been involved. In September 1675 Virginia and Maryland forces besieged a Susquehannock fort on the Maryland side of the Potomac. Five Susquehannock leaders who came out to negotiate were murdered.

The Susquehannocks escaped and launched raids on outlying plantations in the winter of 1675–1676, killing dozens of colonists. Berkeley’s answer, approved by the assembly in March 1676, was a defensive line of forts along the frontier and a ban on attacks against friendly tributary Indians. Frontier settlers saw the forts as expensive and useless, and some suspected that Berkeley wished to protect his own and his allies’ profitable fur trade with Native nations.

What happened

Bacon takes command

Nathaniel Bacon, born in 1647 in Suffolk, England, had arrived in Virginia in 1674. He was well connected: Berkeley’s wife, Frances Culpeper, was related to him by marriage, and the governor appointed him to the council. After raiders killed his overseer in the spring of 1676, Bacon agreed to lead a force of volunteers against the Indians without the governor’s commission.

In May 1676 his men marched south to the Roanoke River, where the Occaneechee people, who had been trading partners of the colony, helped them attack a Susquehannock camp. Bacon’s force then turned on the Occaneechees themselves and killed many of them. Berkeley declared Bacon a rebel, but also dissolved the Long Assembly and called the first elections in years.

Jamestown and the June Assembly

Bacon was elected a burgess for Henrico County. When he arrived at Jamestown in June he was captured, made a public submission and was pardoned. He soon slipped away and returned on 23 June with several hundred armed men, who surrounded the statehouse and forced Berkeley to give him a commission to fight the Indians. The assembly that summer passed a series of reforms later known as “Bacon’s Laws”, widening the vote to all free men and limiting office-holding and fees.

Once Bacon had left, Berkeley again proclaimed him a rebel and tried to raise troops in Gloucester County, but few men responded. The governor withdrew across Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore. Bacon issued a “Declaration of the People” on 30 July 1676, accusing Berkeley and his favourites of unjust taxes, corruption and protecting the Indians. In August his forces attacked the Pamunkey, a tributary nation led by a woman ruler, Cockacoeske, who had tried to stay at peace.

The burning of Jamestown

In early September Berkeley returned by sea and retook Jamestown. Bacon’s men besieged the town, at one point placing the captured wives of Berkeley’s supporters in front of their earthworks to deter attack. Berkeley’s men, many of them unwilling to fight, abandoned the town and the governor sailed away again. On 19 September 1676 the rebels set Jamestown on fire, destroying the church, the statehouse and many houses so that the governor could not use them.

Collapse and punishment

Bacon fell ill and died on 26 October 1676, most likely of dysentery, at the age of 29. His body was never found, perhaps hidden by his followers. Without him the movement split apart. Berkeley’s forces, aided by armed merchant ships, picked off rebel garrisons over the following weeks. Late in the year Captain Thomas Grantham, an English ship’s captain, persuaded the last holdouts at West Point to surrender; among them were, by his account, around 80 enslaved Africans and 20 English servants.

Berkeley took harsh revenge. More than twenty rebels were hanged, commonly given as 23, and the estates of others were seized. In early 1677 a royal commission arrived from England with around 1,000 soldiers. The commissioners, led by Colonel Herbert Jeffreys, criticised Berkeley’s severity and reported on the colonists’ grievances. Berkeley was recalled, sailed for England in May 1677 and died there that July. In May 1677 the Treaty of Middle Plantation renewed peace with the tributary nations, with Cockacoeske as a leading signatory.

Key people

• Nathaniel Bacon (1647–1676), the rebel leader, a newcomer who sat on the governor’s council.
• Sir William Berkeley (1605–1677), governor of Virginia and leader of the colony’s established planter elite.
• Cockacoeske (died 1686), ruler of the Pamunkey, whose people were attacked by the rebels and who later helped negotiate the 1677 treaty.
• Herbert Jeffreys, head of the royal commission and later lieutenant governor of Virginia.

Historians’ debate

Interpretations of the rebellion have changed over time. Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, writing in 1940, portrayed Bacon as a “torchbearer of the Revolution”, a defender of the common people against tyranny. Wilcomb Washburn’s 1957 study answered that Bacon was a reckless adventurer bent on killing Indians, and that Berkeley had been a reasonable governor.

The most influential modern argument came from Edmund Morgan in 1975. He pointed out that the rebels included landless free men, indentured servants and enslaved Africans. In Morgan’s view, Virginia’s elite learned that a large class of armed, poor and discontented white men was dangerous. Over the following decades, as enslaved Africans replaced English servants as the main labour force, the colony passed laws separating white and Black people and giving poor whites a stake in a racial hierarchy. These culminated in the Virginia slave codes of 1705.

Other historians caution that the shift to slavery also had economic causes: fewer English migrants were willing to come as servants after the 1660s, while the Royal African Company made enslaved people more available. Recent work, such as James Rice’s, places the rebellion within a wider crisis that affected Native nations from the Chesapeake to New England, at the same time as King Philip’s War.

Timeline

• 1675, July: Killings between Doeg Indians and settlers in Stafford County start the frontier conflict.
• 1675, September: Virginia and Maryland forces besiege the Susquehannock fort; five leaders are killed during talks.
• 1676, May: Bacon attacks the Occaneechees; Berkeley declares him a rebel.
• 1676, 23 June: Bacon’s men surround the statehouse and force Berkeley to grant a commission.
• 1676, 30 July: Bacon issues his “Declaration of the People”.
• 1676, 19 September: The rebels burn Jamestown.
• 1676, 26 October: Bacon dies of illness.
• 1677, January–February: Berkeley regains control; royal commissioners and troops arrive.
• 1677, May: Treaty of Middle Plantation; Berkeley sails for England.

Why it matters

Bacon’s Rebellion exposed deep tensions in colonial Virginia between rich and poor, established and new settlers, and colonists and Native peoples. It led the Crown to take a firmer hand in the colony, devastated several Native communities, and remains central to debates about how racial slavery became entrenched in English America and the later transatlantic slave trade that fed it.