Chapter 1: Beware of False Prophets

Notes

p15. “Beware False Prophets”: In 1585, Thomas Bilson echoed Matthew 7:15 in warning that claims to spiritual authority could conceal a bid for political power: “Princes, as well as other private persons, may trie spirits, and beware false Prophets.” In The True Difference Betweene Christian Subiection and Unchristian Rebellion (Oxford, 1585), Bilson argued against the pope’s authority over English subjects and the Jesuit defense of that authority — particularly the claim that the pope could depose Elizabeth I and release her subjects from their allegiance.

p15. “gospel of terror”: My description. I took the sense of it from seventeenth-century New England preachers such as Thomas Shepard, who wrote in The Sincere Convert (1640) of the “matter of terror to all those that be of opinion that few shall be saved,” and Michael Wigglesworth, whose The Day of Doom (Cambridge, Mass., 1662), one of the most widely read works colonial New England produced, put judgment and damnation at the center of religious instruction.

p16. “Bacon had arrived in Virginia….”: Nathaniel Bacon was twenty-seven when he arrived in Virginia in the summer of 1674. Born in 1647 at Friston Hall in Suffolk, he was the son of a lawyer and Member of Parliament who had sat in Cromwell’s Protectorate Parliament and then in the Convention Parliament that restored Charles II. Nathaniel attended St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and Gray’s Inn in London before marrying Elizabeth Duke, over her father’s furious objection, in 1670. Sir Edward Duke disinherited his daughter, and Bacon’s reputation took another hit when he became involved in a fraudulent land scheme. That scandal probably put Bacon and his wife on a ship to Virginia in 1674, with £1,800 — a massive sum — from his father to help them start over. Within weeks, Bacon had purchased an 820-acre plantation at Curles Neck in Henrico County. He was educated, intelligent, tall, good-looking, and, by most accounts, insufferably arrogant, even before the rebellion. The fullest reliable account of his life is Brent Tarter’s entry for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, hosted at Encyclopedia Virginia: “Nathaniel Bacon (1647–1676)”. No modern scholar has written a full life of Bacon. Washburn’s The Governor and the Rebel and Rice’s Tales from a Revolution, both listed in the sources, come closest, but understandably concentrate on his final months and the rebellion.

p16. “Dutch fleets…”: England’s wars with the Dutch, which the English were losing handily, are an underappreciated influence on Virginia affairs in the 1660s and 1670s. In 1667, for example, a Dutch squadron sailed into the James River flying English colors, destroyed the guardship Elizabeth, and captured nineteen tobacco ships. The Dutch struck again in 1673, outmaneuvered the two English frigates protecting Hampton Roads, drove the tobacco fleet upriver, and burned or captured several ships. The raids exposed the inability of either the colony or the Crown to protect Virginia’s Atlantic trade. The resulting military preparations — especially the expensive and useless fort at Point Comfort — added to the taxes and resentment that fed Bacon’s Rebellion.

p17. “Conotocarius”: The editors of the modern Diaries of George Washington trace the name (Jackson and Twohig, 1:183). See the note in the Library of Congress edition.

p17. “seventy-something Sir William Berkeley”: William Berkeley (pronounced “Barkley”) was thirty-five or thirty-six, and drifting toward a diplomatic posting, when he secured the governorship of Virginia instead. Born in 1605, he went to Oxford and took a B.A. in 1624 and an M.A. in 1629. By 1632 he had a place in Charles I’s privy chamber. He wrote at least five plays and was a soldier in Charles’ wars against the Scots, which earned him a knighthood. By the spring of 1641, with England hurtling toward civil war, his prospects at home looked thin enough that a relative steered him toward Constantinople. Berkeley took the Virginia job instead and landed at Jamestown the following February. The fullest reliable online account is Warren Billings’ Berkeley entry for Encyclopedia Virginia: Sir William Berkeley (1605–1677). Unlike Bacon, Berkeley found his biographer in Billings. His Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia is a full scholarly life, not just a history of the rebellion that ended his career.

p17. “tyranny, extortion, and the most cruel oppressions”: Petition of Anthony Panton, 30 October 1641, House of Lords Papers (1625–1641), Virginia Colonial Records Project (hereafter VCRP), SR 5900, p. 3. That short citation conceals how difficult it is to retrieve records related to colonial America. The VCRP’s online access runs through the Library of Virginia, but it is not a searchable archive. It is an index to digital images of 14,704 reports, grouped by collection and often many pages long. The Panton petition is indexed only under Panton, not under anyone he was complaining about nor under a subject heading. Finding it required identifying the House of Lords Papers for the right period, opening the pages of the report one by one, recognizing the unexplained microfilm number stamped in the upper corner, taking that number to a separate index, and then working through the physical reel at one of only a few Virginia libraries to see the document itself.

The Panton petition was one of the lucky cases. The VCRP stopped ordering microfilm during the 1970s, and only about two-thirds of the records identified in its survey reports were ever filmed. For several records used here, I had to track down the originals myself; the reproductions I obtained might be the only copies that exist.

The Records of Antebellum Southern Plantationspresents similar problems. Despite a name that makes it sound irrelevant to the colonial period, it holds family papers reaching deep into the seventeenth century, drawn from libraries and archives across the South and organized into fourteen lettered series whose labels reveal almost nothing about their contents. The microfilm is often badly photographed, and poor photography combined with damaged documents leaves whole stretches unreadable. A researcher must then chase down the originals, some of which were last recorded — decades ago — in plantation houses in family hands. Neither collection has been updated to the digital age. Where a citation in these notes stops short of a shelf mark or a survey report number, that gap is the state of the archive.

Primary Sources

Billings, Warren M., ed. The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1700 (2007).

Secondary Sources

Bacon’s Rebellion, Colonial Virginia, Race & Power

Warren M. Billings, John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate. Colonial Virginia: A History (1986).

Warren M. Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (2004).

Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996).

Kathleen M. Brown, “Americans on the James: Re-reading American Slavery, American Freedom,” Common-place1, no. 4 (2001). Available at https://commonplace.online/article/americans-on-the-james/

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975).

James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (2012).

James D. Rice, “Bacon’s Rebellion in Indian Country,” Journal of American History 101, no. 3 (2014): 726–750.

Brent Tarter, “Bacon’s Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture of Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 119, no. 1 (2011).

Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1957).

Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon’s Rebellion and Its Leader (1940).