2014/12/01 by J. D. Rice, James D. Rice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jau651
Bacon's Rebellion, a bitter civil war that convulsed the key English colony of Virginia in 1676, has long been considered one of the most significant events in American history. It is a fixture of high school and university courses, textbooks, and scholarly writing. Although the rebellion was condemned as treason by colonial-era writers, after the American Revolution it came to be regarded as an important step in the rise of freedom and democracy and thus as an integral part of the nation's creation story. This line of interpretation drew a stark contrast between the reactionary forces led by Virginia's royal governor Sir William Berkeley, the “archenemy of colonial democracy,” and the frontier planters led by Nathaniel Bacon, the “patriot, who gave his life in the cause of American liberty” in a valiant attempt to get out from “under the heel of the mother country.” This portrait of Bacon as a freedom-loving protorevolutionary came under heavy fire after World War II, however, when Wesley Frank Craven and Wilcomb Washburn demonstrated that it was incompatible with the evidence and with any reasonable definition of democracy. Bacon explicitly denied having any democratic (“leveling”) tendencies; besides, the Baconites' main grievance was that Governor Berkeley “refused to authorize the slaughter and dispossession” of Virginia's Indian neighbors. Would a truly “democratic champion of the oppressed,” Washburn asked, “limit his benevolence to whites only?”1