American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia

This chapter discusses the basis for servants and freedmen’s discontent throughout the colony in the 1660s and 1670s.

First, people were brought to the colony to be exploited, to make profits for big farmers directly, and for burgesses, other leaders, and the king through exorbitant taxes. Exploitation was often exacerbated by other social conditions, like the lack of women. Bachelor servants and freedmen were ill-behaved and, given that tobacco prices remained low after 1660, many lived in misery. Many unscrupulous ship captains brought over convicts, although because they would not yield to authority, the “government put a stop to the practice” (236). Still, the destitute, indigent, and criminal were supposed to be reformed through work, but without the prospect of family or a wife, any reformation was unlikely.

By 1670, even though the big farmers continued to exploit freedmen’s labor, they started to view the freedmen as dangerous. The bachelor freedmen became “terrible young men” who behaved badly after enduring contracts for five to seven or even 12 years. And since the dangerous, bachelor freedmen liked to gather and vote, the assembly took away their voting right—which did not inspire them to “settle down” (239). The big farmers worried about other laws and discontent. The law required that “every man was supposed to keep a gun,” but the big farmers understood that “men with guns are not as easily exploited as men without them” (240).

Since wars with the Dutch and the French were ongoing, the freedmen and servants appeared even more dangerous. But when a Dutch warship came up the James River in 1667, Berkeley headed up a force to prevent the Dutch from landing. A hailstorm that year destroy their tobacco crop. Thus, war “hurt the planters” because there were fewer ships to collect the tobacco, and they were required to build forts to protect the ships that made it to Virginia. Further problems presented themselves when the king decided to take the land in Virginia to reward his friends. In 1674 he gave all the remaining open public lands to two of his friends, so the freedmen had even less land.

The “breaking point” was reached in 1663, as the pressure on tobacco growers increased (246). A group of nine servants tried to start a rebellion, but Berkeley initially kept Virginians from rising up. He constricted the “free institutions that had begun” earlier when trading with the Dutch kept tobacco prices higher (247). Berkeley also relied on the burgesses to help. Ultimately, all he and the other leaders could count on to prevent rebellion was that Virginians would have “an exalted view of their position” (248). They did not, and discontent spread throughout the colony.

Morgan details the civil war in 1676, also known as Bacon’s Rebellion, named for leader Nathanial Bacon, who was new to the colony but well connected to Berkeley. The rebellion, which involved freedmen and servants, took advantage of colony-wide discontent to kill the Indians and plunder the rich.

It started when the Doeg Indians allegedly took some hogs they never paid for. Berkeley sent a militia that indiscriminately killed Susquehannahs instead. When the Susquehannahs prepared to retaliate, Berkeley ordered that a fort was to be built.

Bacon was among those “not reassured” by the governor’s actions; he also disliked the wealthy. Like Bacon and his allies, who were mostly discontented new arrivals, the “less prosperous planters on the south side” of the river were angry with the assembly, because at the time the burgesses paid themselves 150 pounds per day to assemble (255). But the “immediate problem” was the Indians. Berkeley knew an Indian war was coming, but he still sought to keep the tributary Indians close, even though the frontiersmen hated the Indians.

Bacon came forward to lead a group against the Indians and to prevent a mutiny. Although Berkeley declined his offer, Bacon still raised a group, writing in a public statement that the English “were the only rightful inhabitants and possessors of Virginia” (259). On May 10, 1676, Berkeley removed Bacon from the council, and to reduce tensions, he called for a new election of burgesses and invited voters to come and present their complaints against Bacon. While the voters were meeting, Bacon massacred the Occaneechees. Initially, Berkeley was content to let Bacon fight the Indians rather than the colony, but what he did was treason “and the proper punishment death” (260), so Berkeley declared that Bacon and his supporters were rebels. Morgan suggests this was foolish, since it split Bacon and his followers’ anger between the Indians and Virginia’s leaders, with no clear path to quash rising discontent.

After the elections in May, the assembly tried to reduce tensions. For example, they restored the freedmen’s right to vote. The assembly defined Indians as hostile if they “left their towns without English permission,” forfeiting their land (263). Berkeley also ordered a force of 1,000 men, and Bacon got his commission went off to enslave Indians and collect war booty (264).

The men under Bacon’s commission also had something to lose. By July 30, Bacon denounced Berkeley and “his crowd of placeholders” in a “Declaration of the People” (266). Bacon wanted to redistribute their wealth by plundering the estates of those who made their money dishonestly and to continue to plunder the Indians (266). On August 3, Bacon invited all men to a meeting, and even those who complained about Bacon and the rebels joined: “better to plunder than be plundered” (267).

Meanwhile, the governor and Virginia’s gentlemen, who had been so careful not to allow servants to rise up, now found themselves in an unenviable position. Berkeley allowed those who plundered to keep their spoils and promised servants loyal to the government their freedom. As the government stood by, Bacon and his followers continued to plunder until Bacon died on October 26. Then, just as quickly as it started, the rebellion ended.

Few white Virginians and few Indians died. The slaves and English servants who refused to surrender were captured and returned to their masters. Morgan argues that the rebellion fell apart because no singular cause could bind the freedmen into a full-scale rebellion. And those who were watching closely came to understand that hatred aimed at an “alien race” could be better and more powerful than the “resentment of an upper class” (270).

This chapter details how the colony recovered from the rebellion, primarily by maintaining the social, political, and economic conditions.

The king sent three commissioners to “restore order” in Virginia after the rebellion (272). When they arrived, the rebellion was quashed, and Berkeley was in control. However, the governor “and his crowd were squeezing” the settlers for revenue even though they had yet to return to work (273). Berkeley was told to return to England, but before leaving he hung the rebels; refused the king’s request to pardon all participants, listing 18 men he would not pardon; and called on the assembly to pass an act allowing all loyal to the governor to get their property returned. Berkeley departed in May 1677, and the king’s commissioners were left in charge.

Even though the commissioners came with forces, they could not end the “legalized plunder,” including the burgesses’ high pay (275). The assembly repealed prior acts; they did not reenact the freedmen’s right the vote, but they no longer allowed masters to “coerce” their servants to give up their “freedom dues in exchange for early freedom” (276). The freedmen told the commissioners they wanted to know how the government was spending their tax money, which they assumed was going “to line the pockets of a pack of officials” (276).

The commissioners’ interference never resulted in change. Lord Culpeper, the “titular governor,” remained in England until the House of Burgesses decided to allow new towns to deal with Indians, to prevent rebellion.

Culpeper returned because the House of Lords in England wanted to get rid of the House of Burgesses and take an active role in governing Virginia. Culpeper’s aim was to “substitute the benevolent despotism of the king for the rapacious local despotism” (281). Culpeper got an act passed that would establish a tobacco warehouse in every town that secured the king’s revenue, with an export duty on each hogshead in exchange for his support of the colony, making the governor free “from dependence on the assembly” (283).

Culpeper returned to England but was again recalled in 1682, as rebellion was still afloat. Virginia’s big farmers continued to squeeze freedmen and servants, so many Virginians started to cut down tobacco plants in protest and were subsequently jailed. Even the assembly’s clerk, who had been lining his pockets with seized tobacco, was jailed. However, with the assembly members still getting paid for the long assemblies, and with royal governors still taking their share from taxes, many of Virginia’s leaders were “ready to gamble on another rebellion” to keep making profits (291). And the freedmen, whose “plant-cutting rebellion” was suppressed, hinted that another could easily be set off (291). Nonetheless, a new social order was in the making.