Somewhat Rough Draft number 1 v1.0

In the summer of 1676, a revolution began in the colony of Virginia that changed England’s policies for governing its colonies forever. This revolution was a battle of two individuals using various excuses, such as unfair taxation and Indian policy, to get the people of Virginia behind their ideas of what should be done to make their colony a utopia. The war was later called Bacon’s Rebellion, named after Nathaniel Bacon Jr., the renegade leader of the people rebelling against William Berkeley, the corrupt governor of Virginia. These two men were very influential in the Virginia colony, and they both were deeply entrenched in their views about how the Indian threat should be handled. Sadly, they could in no way agree on how it should be handled. Bacon thought that all trade and land agreements with the local tribes should be forgone and the colonists should slaughter the Indians, to stop the attacks from the hostile Indians, while Berkeley wanted to maintain the peace with the Indians and follow the laws that had been set in place, so as to keep benefiting from the pelt trade that was making him one of the richest people in America at the time. Sadly, Berkeley’s policy came at the cost of not allowing the frontiersmen the ability to adequately defend themselves from the tribes that were in fact hostile, while Bacon’s plan of destroying all the hostile Indians did not leave any room for the friendly Indian tribes. Thus, this as well as several other issues such as unfair taxation and low profits from the tobacco being grown in the Chesapeake area, turned into a prolonged rebellion, with both sides labeling the other as a traitor to the crown of England. Though it seems a common occurrence for people who read about Bacon’s Rebellion to take Bacon’s side in their historical analysis, I find too many faults in both Bacon and Berkeley to feel comfortable saying that either person had the correct ideas of how the situation should have been handled. I believe that both Nathaniel Bacon and William Berkeley were responsible for inciting and prolonging Bacon’s Rebellion.
Bacon had a history of disobeying the laws before he ever even arrived in Virginia. “A contemporary remembered him as being tall and slender, ‘blackhair'd and of an ominous, pensive melancholy Aspect … not much given to talk, … of a most imperious and dangerous Pride of heart, despising the wiser of his neighbours for their Ignorance, and very ambitious and arrogant” (http://www.answers.com/topic/nathaniel-bacon), which paints Bacon as a man who did not want any sort of authority over him, and would do whatever he needed to get what he wanted. As if to further my point, Bacon had to leave Cambridge University after being caught attempting to defraud an acquaintance there. He was given a chance at a new beginning when his father and brother-in-law sent him to Virginia in hopes of him maturing, giving him a large sum of money to start up his own plantation. Upon his arrival, William Berkeley helped Bacon buy two estates with which to start up his farm. Later, Berkeley even gave Bacon the honorary seat on the council, saying “Gentlemen of your quality come very rarely into this country, and therefore when they do come are used by me with all respect," (http://www.answers.com/topic/nathaniel-bacon). Berkeley even gave Bacon permission to trade with the Indians, a privilege he allowed only a few people in Virginia.
One might think that with all the help he was given once he got to America Bacon might have settled down and lived a comfortable life as a plantation owner, but that would not be the case. About two years after arriving and building up his plantation, Bacon’s overseer was killed in a raid by a local Indian tribe. I do not know whether Bacon had truly despised the Indian tribes before this (as many of the frontiersmen did, most with little to no reason), but after this incident he surely did. It was soon after this incident that he sent notice to William Berkeley, requesting a military commission allowing him to form a militia that could legally attack the local Indian tribes. Without waiting for a response, he formed an “extra-legal band of over 500 men, without commission” (Puglisi’s Essay, page 77), and began his campaign against the tribes.
When William Berkeley got this notice he denied Bacon’s request, as it was against the law that had been in place for decades. I assume that it was not long after his denying of Bacon’s request (more of a demand really) that he received reports of an army of frontier farmers was destroying Indian settlements indiscriminately. Berkeley now had two choices. He could attempt to appease the people under his governorship by talking and compromising with Bacon and allowing him to in fact receive a limited military commission, or he could declare Bacon a traitor and demand that he disband his army and go home. Not surprisingly he chose the latter option. Once he had done this, he demanded that Bacon be arrested, which he was. (From Wikipedia, so a grain of salt should be taken with it), “On July 30, 1676, Bacon and his makeshift army issued a Declaration of the People of Virginia,[4] demanding that natives in the area be killed or removed, and an end of the rule of "parasites."[2] The declaration also criticized Berkeley's administration, accusing him of levying unfair taxes, of appointing friends to high positions, and of failing to protect outlying farmers from Indian attack.” This explanation of Bacon’s “Declaration of the People” is almost exactly how I understood it, and I agree with most of Bacon’s attacks on William Berkeley’s character. After he realized that the common people of Virginia did not like their hero called a traitor and rebel, he was intimidated into hosting a reelection, in hopes of appeasing the people. This completely backfired on him however, when Bacon was elected into the seat of governor, and many of the Grandees were replaced.
While Bacon was in his seat of power, he enacted laws that I consider one of the few things that he did that I might call good. These were known as Bacon’s Laws, and they had several positive effects and fixes to the old governing system of the Virginian government of the time. The history book (The American Promise) has this to say on the laws, “Among other changes, the laws gave local settlers a voice in setting tax levies, forbade officeholders from demanding bribes or other extra fees for carrying out their duties, placed limits on holding multiple offices, and restored the vote to all freemen.” As I mentioned earlier, these laws were an excellent thing for Bacon to do, and one of his few redeeming acts of his rebellion. Unfortunately for the colonists of Virginia and the hope that Bacon’s Rebellion would come to a close quickly, Bacon was not content to simply govern the people of Virginia. Instead of allowing the frontier farmers to properly defend and retaliate against Indian offensives, he abandoned his seat of government in favor of leading his army to attack the Indians in a more direct manner.
The Grandees who had been removed from power decided to seize this opportunity, and demanded that Berkeley re-declare Bacon a traitor. Not surprisingly, Bacon took this poorly. He also re-declared Berkeley a traitor, and once again the two factions were fighting, Bacon against Berkeley and the Indians, Berkeley against some 500 angry frontier settlers who burned down many of the large plantations. Sadly, this time Bacon would die of dysentery before he could do anything to redeem his actions that tore the breach of the rich Grandees and the poor frontier farmers wide. With no leader, the rebel farmers were quickly caught and hung by William Berkeley, after he received around 1300 reinforcements from England.
In the aftermath of this terrible, bloody, failed revolution, the English king launched an investigation into what happened in Virginia. Once the investigator’s reports got back to the king, he decided to do several things. These included having a governor of his choice rule Virginia, and implementing a new tax on Virginia to pay for all the damage that was done. If anything, life for the frontier farmers was made harder, instead of Bacon’s apparent motive of giving them more power and William Berkeley lost his control over the government that he had held for so long. In the end, the two people that were responsible for all the bloodshed during the revolution were either dead or removed from their seat of power, not leading a army seeking vengeance against the Indians or maintaining their monopoly on Indian trading as the case may have been.