Nathaniel Bacon

Early life and education

Bacon was born on January 3, 1647, in Friston Hall in Suffolk, England, to influential landowner parents Thomas Bacon and his wife Elizabeth (daughter of Sir Robert Brooke of Cockfield Hall, Yoxford and his wife Elizabeth). Nathaniel was his father's only son, and had one full sister, and a half-sister by his father's second wife Martha (Reade), his natural mother having died in 1649 when he was two years old. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he was admitted as a Fellow-Commoner at St Catharine's College in 1661. He traveled around Europe (Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, Netherlands) in 1663–1664 with the celebrated naturalist John Ray and fellow pupils Francis Willughby and Philip Skippon. At the end of April 1664, in Naples, Ray and Skippon took ship for Messina, to continue their expedition together to Sicily, leaving Willughby and Bacon to return north to Rome. He was admitted to study law at Gray's Inn in November 1664.

Nathaniel married Elizabeth Duke, the daughter of Sir Edward Duke of Benhall (1604–1671) and his wife Ellenor Panton, reputedly in direct defiance of her father's veto. After accusations that Nathaniel had cheated another young man of his inheritance, Thomas Bacon gave his son the considerable sum of £1,800 and the young man sailed into exile across the Atlantic. Upon arriving in Virginia, Nathaniel Bacon bought two frontier plantations on the James River.

Relocation to Virginia

Since his cousin and namesake Nathaniel Bacon was a prominent colonial leader and friend of governor William Berkeley, Bacon initially settled in Jamestown, the capital. By 1675 Bacon was himself appointed to the governor's council. Berkeley's wife, the former Frances Culpeper, may also have been Bacon's cousin by marriage.

Bacon's Rebellion

Before the "Virginia Rebellion" (as it came to be called) began in earnest in 1674, some freeholders on the Virginian frontier demanded that Native Americans, including those in friendly tribes living on treaty-protected lands, should be driven out or killed. Historians have noted that the hatred among the settlers towards the Native Americans is a historically underrepresented catalyst of Bacon's Rebellion, as the rebellion was equally about "violently [displacing] Indians" and "[exploiting] that hatred" as it was about changing frontier policy in Virginia. They also protested against corruption in the government of Governor Berkeley, which has been described as "incorrigibly corrupt, inhumanely oppressive, and inexcusably inefficient, especially in war".

Predating Bacon's Rebellion, the Anglo-Powhatan Wars instituted the distinct hierarchical separation and selfishness between the Indians and the Virginians that would eventually mold into the basis for the subduing of the Indians during Bacon's Rebellion. Following a raid by Doeg Indians in Stafford County, Virginia, which resulted in the deaths of two white settlers associated with a trader named Thomas Mathew (whom later reports found regularly "cheated and abused" Indians), a group of Virginia militiamen raided settlements of the Susquehannock tribe, instead of the Doeg tribe, including some across the Potomac River in Maryland. Maryland Governor Calvert protested against the incursion, and the Susquehannocks retaliated. Maryland militia under Major Thomas Trueman then joined Virginia forces (now led by John Washington and Isaac Allerton), and attacked a fortified Susquehannock village. After five chiefs accepted the Maryland leader's invitation to parley, they were slaughtered, an action which provoked later legislative investigations and reprimands. The Susquehannocks retaliated in force against plantations, killing 60 settlers in Maryland and a further 36 in their first assault on Virginia soil. Then other tribes joined in, killing settlers, burning houses and fields and slaughtering livestock as far as the James and York rivers.

Seeking to avoid a larger conflict similar to King Philip's War in New England, Berkeley advocated containment, proposing the construction of several defensive fortifications along the frontier and urging frontier settlers to gather in a defensive posture. Frontier settlers dismissed the plan as expensive and inadequate, and also suspected that it might be a pretext for raising tax rates.

In the meantime, Bacon owned two large plantations along the James River. This main plantation called "Curles" (about 1000 acres, although only a third cleared since it was formed by others circa 1630, and by now worked by a dozen slaves) was on a peninsula formed by a bend of the James River (hence its name). Another plantation was significantly upstream, near the falls of the James River at Shockoe Creek, and had more cattle. Indian raiders killed Bacon's overseer on that upriver plantation, and Bacon soon emerged as a rebel leader. When Berkeley refused to grant Bacon a military commission to attack all Indians, Bacon mustered his own force of 400–500 men and moved up the James River to attack the Doeg and Pamunkey tribes. Although both had generally lived peaceably with the colonists, and had not attacked the frontier settlements, their cultivated lands were valuable.

Legacy

Despite recent historians' views of the conflict, many in the early United States, including Thomas Jefferson, saw Bacon as a patriot and believed that Bacon's Rebellion was a prelude to the later American Revolution against the control of the Crown. This understanding of the conflict was reflected in twentieth-century commemorations, including a memorial window in Colonial Williamsburg, and a prominent tablet in the Virginia House of Delegates chamber of the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, which recalls Bacon as "A great Patriot Leader of the Virginia People who died while defending their rights October 26, 1676."