[As with
everything else in this plague-ridden year, my sons and my annual summer trip
to Charlottesville unfortunately hasn’t been able to happen as planned. But this
blog will always return to my home state, this time for a series on a few
of Virginia’s pivotal historical moments!]
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 VA history
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Virginia histories or contexts you’d share?
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