The Legacy of Bacon's Rebellion

well with the less prosperous planters who despised Berkeley's economic policies which they saw as oppressive. Bacon had something else in common with the common farmer: contempt for Indians. All of these factors made Bacon a practical candidate for leading a rebellion against all of these entities.

One event in particular brought Bacon into the leadership role he would take in the struggle against the American Indians. The Susquehannocks made another attack in the winter of 1675-76, killing thirty-six colonists. Angry frontiersmen then took revenge on the Indians closest at hand (Appomattox and Pamunkeys) who resided on land long-coveted by neighboring whites.¹⁰ In April 1676 Bacon and several others had lost servants who had been killed by Indians. The men decided that the measures taken by Berkeley were nowhere near enough to deal with the ongoing problems. They were nervous about future Indian insurgencies and felt more had to be done to rid the landscape of a seemingly increasing "savage" problem. Bacon insisted that the country must be defended "against all Indians in generall for that they were all enemies." He would later tell Berkeley that this was a position "I have alwayes said and doe maintaine."¹¹ His rationale for this position was that the Indians "have so cunningly mixt among the severall Nations of familyes of Indians that it hath been very difficult for us, to distinguish how, or from which of thos said nations the said wrongs did proceed."¹²

Bacon asked Berkeley for a commission to lead his growing army of volunteers, most of whom would be poor frontiersmen and farmers, against all Indians in the region. This was an ingenious method of ensuring Berkeley that there would be no mutinies against him; for Bacon was part of the landed elite, and if he could gain the trust of the masses then the chance of a rebellion against Berkeley's tax policies would diminish. Morgan explains:

"Since being with my volunteers," he wrote to Berkeley, "the Exclaiming concerning forts and Leavys has beene suppressed and the discourse and earnestness of the people is against the Indians...." Bacon was offering Berkeley a way to suppress a mutiny. The Indians would be the scapegoats. Discontent with upper-class leadership would be vented in racial hatred, in a pattern that statesmen and politicians of a later age would have found familiar.¹³

Berkeley refused to grant Bacon's request, perhaps out of distrust for his burgeoning number followers, or for

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