Bacon's Rebellion: The Declaration (1676)

Abstract: Economic and social power became concentrated in late seventeenth-century Virginia, leaving laborers and servants with restricted economic independence. Governor William Berkeley feared rebellion: "six parts of Seven at least are Poore, Indebted, Discontented and Armed." Planter Nathaniel Bacon focused inland colonists' anger at local Indians, who they felt were holding back settlement, and at a distant government unwilling to aid them. In the summer and fall of 1676, Bacon and his supporters rose up and plundered the elite's estates and slaughtered nearby Indians. Bacon's Declaration challenged the economic and political privileges of the governor's circle of favorites, while announcing the principle of the consent of the people. Bacon's death and the arrival of a British fleet quelled this rebellion, but Virginia's planters long remembered the spectacle of white and black acting together to challenge authority.

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