Chapter 1 Beware False Prophets — Bacon’s Rebellion That Wasn’tResistance Principle #1: The banners of resistance and even rebellion are often stolen by those with no aim other than their own share of power.Two FiresJamestown, September 1676Imagine the humid Chesapeake air descending like a thick cloak, filled with the acrid bite of burning timber. And the sky, once dark and clear with pinpoints of faraway stars, is now orange, punctuated by sparks. Now add the roar of flames, the crackle of collapsing houses, the shouts of men high on rum and grievance. Nathaniel Bacon — thirty-something, Cambridge-educated, a privileged but dangerously disaffected planter — grimly watches it all, surveying his handiwork, as the capital of the first English representative government in North America caves in on itself. Just a week earlier, he had chased the royal governor, the aging Sir William Berkeley, a man drunk on his own claims to power, across the bay. Now Bacon was making sure that Berkeley could never return to what he once ruled — because it would no longer be there.
Nine months earlier, the Great Swamp, December 1675More flames. More screams. More destruction. A much different kind of smell. More than homes were burning — so were children. And their mothers. And their fathers. Old and young. The Puritan “gospel of terror” in full, bloody swing, the instruments of God, the king, and the authority of the New England colonies. And what was the crime that had yielded such a horrible sentence? Resistance. The Narragansett, caught up in Metacomet’s Wampanoag rebellion against the English, chose sides. They were harboring resistance fighters in their winter stronghold in Rhode Island. As far as the English were concerned, that made the Narragansett — every last one of them — as evil as the warriors they were trying to shield, turning toddlers into legitimate targets. So the English set the palisades ablaze and cut down everyone trying to escape. This was not some disaffected, privileged planter torching the symbols of his own government in a battle over his share of it. It was the brutal weight of abusive colonial authority, bent on exterminating a people who had become a threat when they fought to exist and, therefore, to resist.
Two fires. Nine months and more than five hundred miles apart. But also not even in the same universe. Historians have turned Bacon’s Rebellion into a principled uprising of freedom-seeking settlers while erasing the effort by Indigenous people to defend themselves and their way of life as just another episode in a long train of conflict that threatened the progress of civilization and betterment in the New World. Nathaniel Bacon, though, was a false prophet, employing the trappings of resistance to further his own claims to authority. His legacy has been aided and abetted by generations of storytellers. Metacomet, however, was the real thing, leading his people in a last attempt to push back power when there was nothing left to lose.
Grievance: A Cover for ConquestBacon had arrived in Virginia just a few years before with a massive land grant, a seat on the governing council, and a cousin — Frances Culpeper — married to the royal governor. He was handed a share of Virginia’s rule when he stepped onto the shores of the Chesapeake. But he also arrived in the middle of an English war with the Dutch that had tanked the tobacco trade. Dutch fleets were burning whole tobacco fleets right in the James River, almost at will. Planters, large and small, were uneasy and looking for an outlet for their increasing disaffection and, of course, someone to blame for it.
They found both in the Indigenous people, who dared to survive while the new Virginians wanted to settle and trade. The hostilities began in June 1675 when Thomas Mathew, a small planter in the Northern Neck, decided not to pay for goods he’d taken from the neighboring Doeg tribe. The Doeg retaliated, raiding Mathew’s farm. The colonials had to strike back — but they messed up and attacked the wrong tribe, hitting the Susquehannock. On a second mistaken foray, in September, John Washington, a former mate on a tobacco trade ship, led a force against a Susquehannock fort in Maryland, and when the chiefs came out to surrender? Washington and the colonials killed them. For that act, the tribes gave Washington a new name: Conotocarious. Town Destroyer. (His great-grandson George Washington would earn the same name.)
The fight then began in earnest, from the Potomac River to the Falls of the James, threatening the safety and stability of the entire colony, forcing Virginia’s governor to act.
The seventy-something Sir William Berkeley was entering his thirty-fifth year as royal governor of Virginia. It had not been an easy tenure. He was sent by Charles I to bring an end to an era of “tyranny, extortion, and the most cruel oppressions” in the colony. But the king ran into his own problems in 1642 when Parliament rose against him. After he was executed in 1649, “Un-king-ship” was declared in London and a commonwealth established. Oliver Cromwell’s authority reached Virginia soon after, and Berkeley, always able to read the direction of the wind, surrendered Virginia to Parliament in 1652, entering into an early retirement on his wife’s property. So tactfully had Berkeley managed his retreat that he was restored as governor by Charles II in 1660, just in time for another war with the Dutch to begin. But Berkeley weathered that storm, too.
He had never, though, faced the likes of Nathaniel Bacon, someone so full of ambition and animus. When Berkeley pledged restraint and called for a negotiated settlement with the tribes, one that would leverage native allies against tribes hostile to the colonials and build a ring of defensive forts, Bacon called Berkeley a coward and promptly kidnapped several members of the Appomattox. Berkeley reprimanded Bacon and then worked with the Virginia assembly to raise taxes to pay for the military and create a new system of trade with the native peoples — a regulated trade that left out Bacon and, it seemed, everyone but Berkeley’s friends.
That was enough for Bacon. The native peoples needed to be exterminated, not coddled. Trade terms should be dictated, not negotiated. And he, not the weak-willed gentlemen in charge, should be the one taking the fight to them. So Bacon spun what mainly had begun as a personal quarrel into a vendetta that engulfed the colony. When Bacon demanded a commission from Berkeley to wage total war against the tribes, Berkeley and the council refused, so Bacon created his own militia and arranged to be elected its general. Bacon then slaughtered a friendly tribe. In May 1676, he lured the Occaneechee to guide him and his men against a camp of Susquehannock. Together, they raised their glasses to celebrate the joint victory. Then, in the night, Bacon and his men fell on the Occaneechee — men, women, and children — leaving none alive. The next day, Bacon collected their beaver pelts and carried them home as a symbol of his superiority.
In the wake of this slaughter, and an assembly session that expanded voting rights in the colony, Bacon issued his own declaration of independence, complete with a bill of indictment against Berkeley that listed the governor’s offenses. The assembly, of course, had dramatically reformed Virginia politics without Bacon’s influence or even his presence (although he had been elected to the session), in ways that gave “the people” much more say in their government. His Declaration in the Name of the People, issued in July 1676, was starkly racist and mostly fictional but also, like the later declaration that Jefferson would draft, a masterstroke in how to shape a historical narrative in real time. Berkeley had “betrayed and sold his Majesty’s Country and the lives of his loyal subjects, to the barbarous heathen.” The governor protected the tribes exactly when “we might with ease have destroyed them.” And he had violated his duties to the people by raising “great unjust taxes upon the Commonalty for the advancement of private favourites and other sinister ends.” Bacon became the tribune of the many against the corrupt, tyrannical authority of the few. As the historian Robert Beverley observed, only a few decades later, this was pure Bacon: He was “of a Temper Roburst and Haughty, and had a Pompous and prevalent Eloquence, extremely taking with the Common People.” Still, Bacon had his priorities: destroy the tribes and make genocide look like principled resistance.
Bacon’s militia raged, virtually unchecked, across the Tidewater over the next few months, targeting Indigenous people — regardless of their allegiance — wherever they could find and then destroy them. It was one of the most pronounced campaigns of genocide in America’s colonial history, permanently erasing a meaningful native presence in eastern Virginia. Decimation is too weak a term for what happened that summer. Doeg, Susquehannock, Nottoway — names largely erased from the map of Virginia — were villainized indiscriminately by Bacon. What’s more, there was an additional target: All English colonials who weren’t with him were against him, implicit supporters of Berkeley’s corrupt regime, so their persons and property were fair game, too. The smoke that covered the Tidewater sky from looted plantations and gutted encampments defined that summer of ’76.
And on September 19, Bacon’s militia torched Jamestown.
That would be the high-water mark for Bacon. Five weeks later, he was dead. Without heroism, without ceremony, without even dignity, his body riddled with “lousy disease” and the “bloody flux,” his rebellion — always a matter of personal grievance — died with him. His followers — a coalition of disaffected planters who saw Bacon as an opportunity to gain their share of the spoils, indentured and convict servants, and enslaved men hoping for freedom — quickly faded away, just as Berkeley — with a force that mirrored Bacon’s, with servants and enslaved men serving under his banner — finally mounted a response, arresting as many of Bacon’s supporters as he could find. They were then court-martialed, and many of them (including my ninth great-grandfather, William Rookings) were sentenced “to be carried to the gallows, there to be hanged by the neck.”
Bacon’s Rebellion is an old and tired story of one man’s thirst for a greater share of the power that he already held, fueled by hatred, fear, and racism that he could deploy to enlist the support of others who wanted their piece of that power, too.
Copyright © 2026 by Tad Stoermer. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
