Three hundred and fifty years ago, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers engaged in an armed rebellion against the Colonial government. This week marks the 350th anniversary of the burning of Jamestown, a pivotal event that was just one of the drastic moves that Bacon and his supporters took during their rebellion. The greater rebellion created a ripple effect of consequences we can still see today.
At Preservation Virginia, two of our historic sites — Historic Jamestowne and Bacon’s Castle — are intricately tied to these events. In 1676, Jamestown was the seat of Colonial government in Virginia. Across the James River in Surry County, Bacon’s supporters seized Arthur Allen’s brick house (now known as Bacon’s Castle) from September to December. Allen had already fled to safety on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, alongside Royal Governor Berkeley. Although this rebellion has been romanticized as a precursor to the American Revolution for decades, our organization is dedicated to sharing the reality of this history, and the devastating impact it had on marginalized populations, including Indigenous Tribes and enslaved Africans.
During the rebellion, Bacon and a slew of Virginia Colonists rallied against the Colony’s governor, Sir William Berkeley, citing corruption, overtaxation, and a lack of representation. Like the American Revolution 100 years later, it turned violent. That, however, is where the similarities end. Nathaniel Bacon and his followers were loyal to England; unlike the Founding Fathers, they had no ambition of freeing Virginia from Colonial rule. If anything, Bacon wanted a larger slice of the Colonial pie. His failure to cash in on the lucrative fur trade, his expulsion from the governor’s council, and his hatred of Indigenous people were Bacon’s prime motivators in inciting his rebellion.
So why has Bacon’s Rebellion long been called the prelude to the American Revolution? This is largely due to the efforts of Thomas Jefferson and John Daly Burk in the early 19th century. In 1803, Jefferson obtained a manuscript by Bacon follower Thomas Mathew, detailing the rebellion with a bias in Bacon’s favor. Jefferson’s pride and his role in the American Revolution led him to identify with Mathew’s heroic version of Nathaniel Bacon. Bacon, Jefferson felt, was a man standing up to the Colonial government on behalf of his fellow Colonists, another noble Virginian leading the charge against tyranny.
Jefferson found a willing listener in John Daly Burk. Burk was a young Irish writer and revolutionary who had been forced into hiding by the Sedition Act; Jefferson, as an opponent of the Act, offered Burk his protection in Virginia. Burk became a devoted follower of Jefferson and agreed to write a historical account of Virginia using source material provided by Jefferson and his allies.
Of course, Burk was to paint Bacon’s Rebellion in a favorable light. Using deeply biased source material, Burk produced a four-volume work that was little more than pro-Virginian, anti-British, sectionalist propaganda. In its retelling of Bacon’s Rebellion, Burk’s History of Virginia painted Governor Berkeley as a weak-minded, one-dimensional villain. Burk attributed unrest among Virginia’s Indigenous population to malicious meddling from Colonists in New York, rather than the encroachments, kidnappings and murders perpetrated by white Virginians on the frontier. And of course, Burk represented Nathaniel Bacon as a handsome, polite scholar with a stainless reputation. He conveniently left out Bacon’s reason for coming to Virginia in the first place: exile for attempting to swindle a neighbor out of his inheritance. Bacon’s Rebellion is painted in Burk’s History as a glorious injunction against the tyrannical Governor Berkeley, which ended with the death of a martyred Nathaniel Bacon.
Despite its obvious bias and inaccuracies, Burk’s History was the most widely available history of Virginia for four decades, cementing its place in the fledgling state’s education system. Histories published after Burk’s (including Robert Howison’s History of Virginia and John Esten Cooke’s Virginia, A History of the People) simply restated Burk’s account almost verbatim. Well into the 20th century, this incorrect version of events was taught in schools, universities and museums. It has only been in the last 70 years or so that scholars have begun to deconstruct the Jeffersonian image of Nathaniel Bacon, relying on primary and scholarly sources and archaeological evidence. Now, at America’s 250th anniversary, we are using the rebellion’s long-standing association with the American Revolution to dissect how the two events were different and to shine a light on the importance of unbiased history.
In this anniversary year of Bacon’s Rebellion, our organization, Preservation Virginia, has led a coalition of historic sites and Tribal Partners to host a series of lectures and programs highlighting this important history, with a wider frame of reference and perspective than ever gathered before. The culmination of this work is hosted online, free to anyone, at www.baconsrebellion350.org. Here, teachers can access free lesson plans, past lectures can be viewed at no charge, and resources are gathered for armchair historians, students and the general public alike.
On Sept. 19, Historic Jamestown will be presenting its annual event, “The Burning of Jamestown,” and on Oct. 17, our series will wrap up with the annual “Seventeenth Century Day” at Bacon’s Castle. To learn more or to purchase tickets, please visit. www.baconsrebellion350.org/events.
Brenna Geraghty is education manager of Preservation Virginia and Elyse Werling is director of interpretation and collections of Preservation Virginia.
