BACON’S REBELLION
Nathaniel Bacon
UNDERLYING CAUSES
• Favoritism in government
• Inequities in wealth and governmental power
• Higher taxes
• Falling tobacco prices
• Constriction of opportunity
• Aggressiveness of frontiersmen driven by
economic opportunism and racism
• Conflicts with Indians
• Long-standing tensions between small freeholders
and the elite
• Western planters resented power of entrenched
eastern elite of Berkeley’s inner circle
IMMEDIATE CAUSE
• Berkeley’s Indian policy
FRONTIER REGULATOR
TRADITION
EFFECTS
• Planter elites found it easier to control and exploit
African slaves. A hardening of racial lines
contributed to a growth in a commitment to
democracy, liberty, and equality among white
men.
• Massacre and displacement of Indians
• Jamestown burned
• Berkeley brutally crushed Bacon supporters and
rebels following Bacon’s death as a result of
dysentery
• Heightened fears of the “rabble” and fewer
importations of indentured servants
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brindenbaugh, Carl. Jamestown, 1544-1699. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American
Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New
York: W.W. Norton Company, 1975.
Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of
Early North America. New York: Harper Collins,
1992.
Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Governor and the Rebel:
A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1957.