By Brenna Geraghty, Education Manager, Preservation Virginia

During Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, Virginia colonists rallied against the colony’s governor, Sir William Berkeley, citing corruption, overtaxation, and a lack of representation. Like the American Revolution 100 years later, it turned violent. That, however, is where the similarities end. Nathaniel Bacon and his followers were loyal to England; unlike the Founding Fathers, they had no ambition of freeing Virginia from colonial rule. If anything, Bacon wanted a larger slice of the colonial pie. His failure to cash in on the lucrative fur trade, his expulsion from the governor’s council, and his hatred of Indigenous people were Bacon’s prime motivators in inciting his rebellion.

So why has Bacon’s Rebellion long been called the prelude to the American Revolution? This is largely due to the efforts of Thomas Jefferson and John Daly Burk in the early 19th century. In 1803, Jefferson obtained a manuscript by Bacon follower Thomas Mathew, detailing the rebellion with a heavy bias in Bacon’s favor (1). Jefferson’s pride and his role in the American Revolution led him to identify with Mathew’s heroic version of Nathaniel Bacon (2). Bacon, Jefferson felt, was a man standing up to the colonial government on behalf of his fellow colonists, another noble Virginian leading the charge against tyranny (4).

Jefferson found a willing listener in John Daly Burk. Burk was a young Irish writer and revolutionary who had been forced into hiding by the Sedition Act; Jefferson, as an opponent of the Act, offered Daly his protection in Virginia (6). Burk became a devoted follower of Jefferson and agreed to write a historical account of Virginia using source material provided by Jefferson and his allies (3).

Of course, Burk was to paint Bacon’s Rebellion in a favorable light. Using deeply biased source material, Burk produced a four-volume work that was little more than pro-Virginian, anti-British, sectionalist propaganda (5). In its retelling of Bacon’s Rebellion, Burk’s History painted Governor Berkeley as a weak-minded, one-dimensional villain. Burk attributed unrest among Virginia’s Indigenous population to malicious meddling from English colonists in New York, rather than the encroachments, kidnappings, and murders perpetrated by white Virginians on the frontier. And of course, Burk represented Nathaniel Bacon as a handsome, polite scholar with a stainless reputation. He conveniently left out Bacon’s reason for coming to Virginia in the first place: exile for attempting to swindle a neighbor out of his inheritance (4). Bacon’s Rebellion is painted in Burk’s History as a glorious injunction against the tyrannical Governor Berkeley, which ended with the death of a martyred Nathaniel Bacon.

Despite its obvious bias and inaccuracies, Burk’s History was the most widely available history of Virginia for four decades, cementing its place in the fledgling state’s education system. Histories published after Burk’s (including Robert Howison’s History of Virginia and John Esten Cooke’s Virginia, A History of the People) simply restated Burk’s version of events almost verbatim. Well into the twentieth century, this incorrect version of events was taught in schools, universities, and museums. It has only been in the last seventy years or so that scholars have begun to deconstruct the Jeffersonian image of Nathaniel Bacon, relying on primary and scholarly sources, as well as archaeology, instead of books written second, third, or fourth hand by biased authors (4). Now, at America’s 250th anniversary, scholars of Bacon’s Rebellion are using the rebellion’s long-standing association with the American Revolution to dissect how the two events were different, and to shine a light on the importance of unbiased history.

Sources

1. Mathew, Thomas. The Beginning, Progress, and Conclusion of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, In the Years 1675 and 1676. Written 1705, published 1835 by Peter Force, Washington D.C. Accessed via Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/collections/thomas-jefferson-papers/articles-and-essays/virginia-records-1606-to-1737/beginning-progress-and-conclusion-of-bacons-rebellion/
2. Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in the Years 1675 & 1676. Virginia Museum of History and Culture. https://virginiahistory.org/learn/bacons-rebellion-virginia-years-1675-1676
3. Lynch, Jack. The Seditious Patriot: Mr. John Daly Burk. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Journal. https://research.colonialwilliamsburg.org/Foundation/journal/Autumn05/burk.cfm
4. Gardner, Andrew G. Nathaniel Bacon: Saint or Sinner? Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Journal. https://research.colonialwilliamsburg.org/Foundation/journal/Spring15/bacon.cfm
5. Burk, John D., Skelton Jones, and Louis Hue Girardin. The History of Virginia: from its first settlement to the present day. Petersburg, Virginia, 1804. Accessed via Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/historyofvirgini01burk/page/296/mode/2up
6. Quinn, James. John Daly Burk. Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009. https://www.dib.ie/biography/burk-john-daly-a1151