Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Trans­formation of Colonial America

Historian Rice, of SUNY-Plattsburgh, energetically relates a series of dramatic events in colonial Virginia that presaged the eventual tragic fate of Native Americans. In 1675, young Nathaniel Bacon, fleeing from accusations of fraud in London, arrived in Jamestown, Va. While Bacon’s status and wealth won him a position among the colony’s elite class of planters, he proved an arrogant, dangerous man. He challenged the liberal Indian policies of Gov. William Berkeley, attacked and imprisoned a group of friendly Appomattox Indians, and then he and his pack of followers attacked Jamestown. Rice energetically brings to life a large cast of characters—Indian leaders, British officials, colonial governors, wealthy planters—and puts Bacon’s rebellion in the wider context of a colonial population largely poor and restless, Protestant-Catholic animosity, and the politics of Indian nations’ relations with the colonists and with one another. By 1715, Rice says, the issues exemplified by Bacon’s rebellion had so transformed colonial America: almost all Indian communities in the South were fully trapped in a web of what one historian called “debt, slaving, militarization, and warfare.” Illus., maps. (Sept.)