Conceived in Liberty (19 page)

Ready to send out an even larger armed force against the Indian party, Berkeley received word from the Indians that, having killed ten whites for each of their chiefs murdered at the peace parley, they were ready to make peace and ask for compensation for damages. Grateful for a chance to stop the spiraling bloodshed, Berkeley disbanded his new army. But when Berkeley categorically rejected the peace offer as violating honor and self-interest, the Indian raids continued. Instead of peace, Berkeley and his Assembly decided on an uneasy compromise: a declaration of war not only against all Indians guilty of injuring white persons or property, but also against those who had refused to aid and assist the whites in uncovering and destroying the guilty Indians. However, Berkeley also decided to fight a defensive rather than an offensive war by constructing at great expense ten forts facing the enemy at the heads of the principal rivers, and by not attacking the Indians unless they were attacked themselves. The large force needed to garrison these forts was financed by burdensome new taxes, which aggravated Virginia’s grievances against the Berkeley regime.

It is another common rule that militarization of a society ostensibly to bring
force majeure
against an enemy often succeeds also (or even only) in bringing that force against the very society being militarized. Thus, soldiers, conscripted into the garrisons, were to be subject to highly rigorous articles of war: any blasphemy, for example, when “either drunk or sober” was punished by forcing the soldier to run the terrible gantlet. Public prayers were to be read in the field or garrison twice a day, and any soldier refusing or neglecting to attend the prayers or the preaching or to show proper diligence in reading homilies and sermons was to be punished at the whim of the commander. A great many Virginians, driven forward by war hysteria, by ingrained hatred of the Indians, and by the desire to grab Indian lands, began to accuse Berkeley of being soft on the Indians. The softness was supposed to be motivated by economic interest, as Berkeley’s monopoly of the fur trade was supposed to give him a vested interest in the
existence of Indians with whom to trade. The common expression of the day was that “no bullet would pierce beaver skins.” The charge, if charge it be, was probably partially correct, at least insofar as trade between peoples generally functions as a solvent of hatreds and of agitations for war. At any rate, in deference to these charges, the Assembly took the Indian trade from Berkeley and his licensees and transferred the authority for licenses to the county justices of the peace.

The middle-of-the-road policy of defensive war, however, was probably the most unpolitic course that Berkeley could have taken. If he had concluded peace, he would have ended the Indian raids and thus removed the constant sparkplug for war hysteria among the whites. As it was, the expensive policy of constructing mighty defensive forts prolonged the war, and hence the irritant, and did nothing to end it. The only result, so far as the Virginians were concerned, was a highly expensive network of forts and higher taxes imposed to pay for them. Furthermore, Berkeley reportedly reacted in his usual tyrannical fashion against several petitions for an armed troop against the Indians, by outlawing all such petitions under threat of heavy penalty.

With peace still not concluded, the frontier Virginians found themselves suffering Indian raids and yet being refused a governmental armed force by Berkeley. They finally determined in April to raise their own army and fight the Indians themselves. While three leaders of this effort were frontier planters on the James and Appomattox rivers, they were hardly small farmers; on the contrary, they were among the leading large planters in Virginia. The chief leader was the eloquent, twenty-eight-year-old Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., descendant of Francis Bacon, a cousin of Lady Berkeley and a member of the select Council of Virginia. The other leaders were William Byrd, founder of the Byrd planter dynasty, and Captain James Crews, another large planter and neighbor of Bacon. The effort quickly emerged, however, not as a new armed force, but as a mutiny against the Virginia government. When the three founders and their friends went to visit a nearby force of militiamen at Jordan’s Point in Charles City County, the soldiers decided to mutiny and follow “Bacon! Bacon! Bacon!” and swore “damnation to their souls to be true to him.” The mighty Bacon’s Rebellion had begun.

*
The massacre was also seized as one of the Crown’s excuses for dispossessing the Virginia Company.

*
Some writers attribute to this incident Bacon’s hostility to the Indians. But already the previous fall, Bacon had seized some friendly Appomattox Indians, charging them falsely with stealing corn even though the corn in question was neither his nor his neighbors’.

Why? Why revolution? This question is asked in fascination by contemporary observers and historians of every revolution in history. What were the reasons, the “true” motives, behind any given revolution? The tendency of historians of every revolution, Bacon’s Rebellion included, has been to present a simplistic and black-and-white version of the drives behind the revolutionary forces. Thus, the “orthodox” version holds Nathaniel Bacon to have been a conscious “torchbearer” of the later American Revolution, battling for liberty and against English oppression; the version of “revisionist” history marks down Bacon as an unprincipled and Indian-hating demagogue rebelling against the wise statesman Berkeley. Neither version can be accepted as such.
*

The very search by observers and historians for purity and unmixed motives in a revolution betrays an unrealistic naiveté. Revolutions are mighty upheavals made by a mass of people, people who are willing to rupture the settled habits of a lifetime, including especially the habit of obedience to an existing government. They are made by people willing to turn from the narrow pursuits of their daily lives to battle vigorously and even violently together in a more general cause. Because a revolution is a sudden upheaval by masses of men, one cannot treat the motives of every participant as identical, nor can one treat a revolution as somehow planned and ordered in advance. On the contrary, one of the major characteristics of a revolution
is its dynamism, its rapid and accelerating movement in one of several competing directions. Indeed, the enormous sense of exhilaration (or of fear, depending on one’s personal values and one’s place in the social structure) generated by a revolution is precisely due to its unfreezing of the political and social order, its smashing of the old order, of the fixed and relatively stagnant political structure, its transvaluation of values, its replacement of a reigning fixity with a sense of openness and dynamism. Hope, especially among those submerged by the existing system, replaces hopelessness and despair.

The counterpart of this sudden advent of unlimited social horizons is uncertainty. For if the massive gates of the political structure are at last temporarily opened, what path will the people now take? Indeed, the ever-changing and -developing revolution will take paths and entail consequences perhaps only dimly, if at all, seen by its original leaders. A revolution, therefore, cannot be gauged simply by the motivations of its initiators. The paths taken by the revolution will be determined not merely by these motives, but by the resultant of the motives and values of the contending sides—as they begin
and
as they change in the course of the struggle—clashing with and interacting upon the given social and political structure. In short, by the interaction of the various subjective values and the objective institutional conditions of the day.

For masses of men to turn from their daily lives to hurl themselves against existing habits and the extant might of a ruling government requires an accumulation of significant grievances and tensions. No revolution begins in a day and on arbitrary whim. The grievances of important numbers of people against the state pile up, accumulate, form an extremely dry forest waiting for a spark to ignite the conflagration. That spark is the “crisis situation,” which may be intrinsically minor or only distantly related to the basic grievances; but it provides the catalyst, the emotional impetus for the revolution to begin.

This analysis of revolution sheds light on two common but misleading historical notions about the genesis of revolutions in colonial America. Conservative historians have stressed that revolution in America was unique; in contrast to radical European revolutions, American rebellion came only in reaction to new acts of oppression by the government. American revolutions were, therefore, uniquely “conservative,” reacting against the disruption of the status quo by new acts of tyranny by the state. But this thesis misconceives the very nature of revolution. Revolutions, as we have indicated, do not spring up suddenly and
in vacuo;
almost all revolutions—European or American—are ignited by new acts of oppression by the government. Revolutions in America—and certainly this was true of Bacon’s Rebellion—were not more “conservative” than any other, and since revolution is the polar archetype of an anticonservative act, this means not conservative at all.

Neither, incidentally, can we credit the myth engendered by neo-Marxian historians that revolutions like Bacon’s Rebellion were “class struggles” of the poor against the rich, of the small farmers against the wealthy oligarchs. The revolution
was
directed against a ruling oligarchy, to be sure; but an oligarchy not of
the
wealthy but of
certain
wealthy, who had gained control of the privileges to be obtained from government. As we have pointed out, the Bacons and Byrds were large planters and the revolution was a rebellion of virtually all the people—wealthy and poor, of all occupations—who were not part of the privileged clique. This was a rebellion not against a Marxian “ruling class” but against what might be called a “ruling caste.”
*

No common purity of doctrine or motive can be found among the Bacon rebels, or, for that matter, in the succeeding rebellions of the late seventeenth century in the other American colonies. But the bulk of their grievances were certainly libertarian: a protest of the rights and liberties of the people against the tyranny of the English government and of its Virginia agency. We have seen the accumulation of grievances: against English mercantilist restrictions on Virginian trade and property rights, increasing taxation, monopolizing of trade by political privilege, repeated attempts to impose feudal landholdings, tightening rule by the governor and his allied oligarchs, infringements of home rule and local liberties, and, to a far lesser extent, persecution of religious minorities. On the other hand, there is no denying that some of the grievances and motives of the rebels were the reverse of libertarian: hatred of the Indians and a desire for land grabbing, or, as in the allied and later rebellions in neighboring Maryland, hatred of Roman Catholicism.
**
But even though the spark of Bacon’s Rebellion came from an anti-libertarian motif—pursuit of more rigorous war against the Indians, and Bacon’s motives were originally limited to this—it is also true that as the rebellion developed and the dynamics of a revolutionary situation progressed, the other basic grievances came to the fore and found expression, even in the case of Bacon himself.

It should also be recognized that any revolt against a tyrannical state, other things being equal, is
ipso facto
a libertarian move. This is all the more true because even a revolution that fails, as did Bacon’s, gives the people a training ground and a tradition of revolution that may later develop into a revolution more extensively and clearly founded on libertarian motives. If cherished in later tradition, a revolution will decrease the awe in which the constituted authority is held by the populace, and in that way will increase the chance of a later revolt against tyranny.

Overall, therefore, Bacon’s Rebellion may be judged as a step forward to liberty, and even a microcosm of the American Revolution, but
despite,
rather than because of, the motives of Bacon himself and of the original
leaders. Nathaniel Bacon was scarcely a heroic and conscious torchbearer of liberty; and yet the dynamics of the revolutionary movement that he brought into being forged such a torch out of his rebellion.

After the start of the mutiny at Jordan’s Point, Berkeley, having tried to stop the movement, denounced Bacon and his followers as rebels and mutineers and proceeded west against them. He missed Bacon, however, who had gone north to New Kent County to gather men who were also “ripe for rebellion.” Meanwhile, masses of Virginians began to join Bacon—on the most hysterical and bigoted grounds. Berkeley’s unfortunate act of war of March 1676 had declared war not only against enemy Indians, but just as roundly against neutrals. The peaceful and neutral Pamunkey Indians, fearful and unhappy at this prospect and terrorized by the Baconians, fled to the wilderness of Dragon Swamp on the Gloucester peninsula. To many Virginians, it was incomprehensible that Berkeley should proclaim men as traitors whose only crime seemed to be hard-line pursuit of victory against all Indians; at the same time, Berkeley was clearly soft on the Pamunkeys. The protests poured in: how can anyone tell “friendly” Indians from enemy Indians? “Are not the Indians all of a color?” Thus, racism and war hysteria formed a potent combination to sweep away reason, as a time-honored phrase of the racists, “You can’t tell one from another,” became logically transmuted into: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Or, as the Baconian rebels put it: “Away with these distinctions... we will have war with all Indians which come not in with their arms, and give hostages for their fidelity and to aid against all others; we will spare none. If we must be hanged for rebels for killing those that will destroy us, let them hang us....”

Alarmed, Berkeley rushed back to the capital and to appease the people called an election—at long last—for the House of Burgesses. The election was called in mid-May for a session to begin in early June. This was the first election since the beginning of Berkeley’s second reign. This in itself was a victory against tyranny. Meanwhile, Bacon and his band of Indian fighters proceeded against the Susquehannocks, but soon veered their attention, as usual, to the friendly but far less powerful Occaneechees, whom Bacon had even persuaded to attack the Susquehannocks. The Occaneechees had given Bacon’s exhausted and depleted band food and shelter, and had attacked the Susquehannocks themselves in Bacon’s behalf. The Occaneechees presented their prisoners to Bacon and the prisoners were duly tortured and killed.