The Legacy of Bacon's Rebellion

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Virginia had grown to about 40,000 inhabitants, free and unfree, by 1670. The colony's royal governor was William Berkeley, who held the position off and on for some twenty years. He had been involved in creating various treaties with neighboring Indian tribes during his tenure, guaranteeing lands north of the York River into Virginia's interior to the Powhatan tribes. Indeed, Berkeley's policies were designed to avoid further Indian uprisings that plagued the landscape in the early part of the 1600s. After the 1646 Indian uprising there was relative peace for almost thirty years. And with peace came economic prosperity through the fur trade with neighboring tribes. But of course, many in the colony complained that the trade solely benefited Berkeley and his compatriots.³ Moreover, the class divide in the colony was glaring, with two different societies in existence. There was the plantation elite of the Tidewater "who dominated the assembly and ran the government," and there were the small farmers "who penetrated the foothills, or piedmont, of the Appalachian ridges, and beyond them." These two societies were a foretaste of the bifurcation most evident in the 1860s that separated Virginia and West Virginia - "the slave-owning, tobacco-growing, cultured, elitist, leisured" folks on the coast and the "much more rugged farming society in the interior."⁴

The interior was where the problems were most difficult. Recently manumitted European servants were pushing the borders of white settlements and encroaching on Indian lands, furthering the already sharp tension between the red and white societies. Land fever seemed to infect everyone outside of the more populated English settlements. So while the ruling class created a buffer between themselves and American Indian societies through treaties, thus securing towns like Jamestown from Native molestation, relations between poor whites and Indians were nowhere near as trusting.

Clashes between the two groups became more numerous by 1675. In July a group of Doeg Indians, trading in Stafford County, Virginia, entered the property of Thomas Mathew claiming he had neglected to pay them for goods traded by them. As retribution they attempted to take a number of his hogs. Mathew thwarted this attempt and killed a number of them. The Doegs soon took revenge by killing several of Mathews' cohorts, followed by thirty neighboring planters retaliating by killing ten Doegs and fourteen Susquehannocks - who had been friendly with the Virginia government for years. The Indian tribes demanded reparations, and when the

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