[On July 30th,
1676 Nathaniel Bacon issued his “Declaration
in the Name of the People,” kicking off Bacon’s Rebellion. So this week
I’ll AmericanStudy that rebellion and other 17th century histories,
leading up to a special weekend post on some of Virginia’s historic sites!]
On the myths and
realities of a 17th century uprising, and why the latter matter so
much.
I’m not going to
pretend that I can remember my early experiences with Social Studies as a Virginia
public school student with any particular clarity or precision (other than
the Camp
Virginia trips on which my 4th grade Social Studies teacher Mr.
Kirby took us), but I do have a general sense of how some of our state’s
histories were presented in those settings. And I’m pretty sure that when it
came to Bacon’s
Rebellion of 1676, the dominant educational frame was one of class revolt,
of one of the first moments in post-contact Virginian (and perhaps American)
history when settlers of non-elite status rose up against the colony’s elites
and power structure. Nathaniel
Bacon himself was a landed planter, and a member of the Governor’s Council
to boot, and thus entirely part of that elite power structure, and I don’t
think those educational narratives presented him otherwise. But nonetheless, as
I remember it the principal emphasis remained on the surprising coalition of
lower-class white settlers and African American slaves
that Bacon assembled in support of his short-lived rebellion (it ended when
Bacon died of dysentery on October 26th) against his distant
relative Governor
William Berkeley and what Bacon and the rebels perceived as Berkeley and
his cohort’s various affronts to the colonists.
And then there
are the specifics of those affronts. I hope I don’t lose my
VirginiaAmericanStudier credentials when I admit that I had not read Bacon’s “Declaration”
in full until researching this post, and thus had not realized just how
thoroughly it focuses on racist and white supremacist depictions of the colony’s
Native American inhabitants. While the first two of the Declaration’s eight
criticisms focus on broad abuses of power, the remaining six are entirely
linked to “the barbarous heathen” and Berkeley’s unwillingness either to make
total war on them himself or to allow the colonists to do so. The Declaration’s
concluding section makes clear that such war is precisely the overall goal of
the rebellion and its cross-cultural community: “This we, the commons of
Virginia, do declare, desiring a firm union amongst ourselves that we may
jointly and with one accord defend ourselves against the common enemy.” This PBS page quotes Bacon
as saying that the battle was “against all Indians in general, for that they
were all Enemies”; I can’t find verification of that quote elsewhere at the
moment, but the sentiment is entirely in keeping with the Declaration’s
arguments and goals. Bacon’s Rebellion may have featured Virginians of a certain
status rising up against those of another, that is, but they did so in service
of white supremacist and genocidal goals rather than class warfare ones.
I would
highlight two definite and one more potential (but still important) effect of
better remembering those details of Bacon’s Rebellion. For one thing, the
Declaration is as straightforward a 17th century historical document
as one could find; we can’t know why every individual participant in the uprising
joined, but we can and should be clear on why its titular leader started it and
what his (and thus its) goals were. For another, there’s a broader through-line
between Bacon’s combinatory coalition in service of such white supremacist
goals and various other American histories: the Confederacy’s
reliance on so many non-slaveholding whites to fight and die in service of
the slaveholding elite and their white supremacist system; the late 19th
century Populist and Suffrage
movements’ tendencies to unite white perspectives through racial
segregation and prejudice; exclusionary appeals
to African Americans to oppose immigrant communities; and many more. And
for a third, I would argue that the white supremacist realities of Bacon’s
Rebellion offer an important counterpoint to the many well-intentioned 21st
century progressives who claim that class, not race, is the most important
element in our current political and social debates. It’s not an either-or, of
course, but too often in American history, as in July 1676, “class” has been
used as a tool to further oppress and exclude Americans of color.
Next 17th
century history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other early American histories you’d highlight?
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