Perhaps the first clear instance of an American political movement based on ethnic xenophobia, however, occurred in 1675. The events surrounding Bacon's Rebellion are worth examining not merely for their narrative value, but because of the light they shed on the motivations by which an otherwise tolerant segment of a population can turn violently against an ethnic group -- motivations that, both then and now, rarely have anything to do with the ethnicity of the victims or even with the victims at all.
Nat Bacon's Bones
Nat Bacon's Bones
They never found,
Nat Bacon's grave
Is wilderground:
Nat Bacon's tongue
Doth sound! Doth sound!
The rich and proud
Deny his name,
The rich and proud
Defile his fame:
The proud and free
Cry shame! Cry shame!
The planter's wife
She boasts so grand
Sir William's blood
Makes white her hand:
Nat Bacon's blood
Makes free this land.
--Archibald MacLeish
Despite MacLeish's twentieth-century paean to him as a populist hero -- a sentiment that intrudes deep into Southern popular culture -- the real Nathaniel Bacon was anything but a heroic figure. A distant relative of the British philosopher and statesman Sir Francis Bacon, Nat was "a troublemaker and schemer whose father sent him to Virginia in the hope that he would mature." (Note that this image, accepted by many websites, including Wikipedia, as being a likeness of Nat Bacon, is actually an engraving of Sir Nathaniel Bacon, who appears to be Nat's great-grandfather.) After arriving in America in 1676, the dissolute Bacon fell on the mercy of his cousin's husband, the "Sir William" of the poem above -- who would later become Bacon's great enemy.
Sir William Berkeley (pronounced "Barkley"), a favorite of King Charles I, was one of the most powerful of all the colonial Royal Governors. He had first been named Royal Governor of Virginia in 1642, and he held that post off and on for the next thirty-three years, an astonishing timespan in that era of diminished life expectancy. Berkeley was a favorite of the Stuart monarchs, and by all accounts he was an able and politically astute leader of the colony.
As anyone familiar with Colonial Williamsburg knows, the Virginia House of Burgesses was the chief legislative body of colonial Virginia. This body was directly elected by landowning white males of the colony at intervals determined by the Royal Governor. The Governor's chief control over the House of Burgesses was in fact this power to dissolve the body whenever he felt it would benefit him politically, and most Governors did so with regularity, enabling the people of the colony to have frequent elective input in their governance.
In 1660, immediately after Berkeley was reinstated as Royal Governor after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy to the throne, he dissolved the House of Burgesses and called for new elections -- an expected action for a new governor who hoped to put his friends in power. But when the returns came in, the people of Virginia had gifted Berkeley with a House of Burgesses made up almost entirely of his cronies, the richest landholders of the colony. Berkeley then did something that nobody expected -- instead of holding new elections after a suitable period, he failed to call them for the next fifteen years. When individual Burgesses died, Berkeley would simply leave their seats vacant. Imagine George W. Bush seeing his party decisively win the Congressional elections of 2002 and then suspending all elections until 2017, and you'll get the picture.
Berkeley and his friends in the "Long Assembly" then proceeded to set up Virginia as a virtual fiefdom. With no fear of retribution from England so long as the Stuarts were in power, and no concern for electoral misfortune so long as Berkeley refused to dissolve the House of Burgesses, they consolidated virtually all the public (and many of the private) lands into their own hands. Berkeley backers were elected to all magistrate positions and received the full benefits of legislative pork. Meanwhile, Berkeley's opponents, largely poor and effectively disfranchised by the Governor's refusal to call elections, were left to fume helplessly as their rights were increasingly trampled upon.
Into this volatile atmosphere stepped Nat Bacon, a swashbuckling roue with a way with words and powerful family connections. Berkeley, who was in some ways a fair and even kind man, took his wife's cousin under his wing, offering him grants of land and even a position in government. (Later the Bacon lands were re-granted to William Randolph, the patriarch of a family that would produce two Signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the famously laconic Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke.) But the two men would soon tangle over an unlikely issue: the colony's relations with the local Native Americans.
In other ways a corrupt and canny politician, Berkeley was generations ahead of his time when it came to Indian affairs. Some of this stemmed from political calculation; Berkeley had been Governor way back in 1644 when the Powhatan chieftan Opechancanough had launched the last and bloodiest of his three raids against the Jamestown colonists, killing one-third of the white population. Possibly as a result of that experience, Berkeley never forgot that in the Powhatan Confederacy he was dealing with a powerful military empire that could throw all its considerable forces against Jamestown at the slightest provocation, and possibly destroy it entirely before Berkeley could send to England for reinforcements. In any case, he had always been inclined to be lenient and forgiving with the Powhatans and other Native American tribes; in 1644, Opechancanough had been killed by a white raiding party against Berkeley's express orders. Thirty-two years later, Berkeley's position was the same: Indians were to be disarmed but not assaulted, treaties were to be signed with them and followed to the letter, and whites who violated these terms were to be severely punished.
As prescient as these ideas were, many of Berkeley's political opponents in Jamestown viewed them as just one more provocation by the dictatorial Governor. That Berkeley could place the rights of these "savages" over those of his own subjects seemed the ultimate proof of his lack of feeling for the men whose rights he was supposed to be enforcing. Helpless and angry, the poor of Jamestown turned their wrath on an ethnic outsider group: the Native Americans themselves.
The initial provocation occurred when a reckless settler stole some goods from a group of Indians. In revenge, a Native American raiding party overran the settler's plantation and killed him. A group of whites then launched a counterraid against a nearby group of Indians, who turned out, unfortunately for them, to be the wrong Indians. A dismayed Governor Berkeley called for a peace conference with all the neighboring tribes to sort out the mess.
It was here that Bacon entered the picture. The troublemaking aristocrat took a scorched-earth position against Native Americans in general: "[We must defend ourselves] against all Indians in generall, for that they were all Enemies." As leader of a small troop force at the peace conference, he ordered a group of friendly Indians to bring him captives from an unfriendly tribe; in defiance of Berkeley's orders, he then slaughtered all the captives and ordered his men to fire on the friendly tribe. Berkeley, incensed, reprimanded Bacon, who proceeded to raise a volunteer army and continue to attack and massacre local Native American groups, many of whom were wholly friendly to the Virginia colony and had caused no trouble in the past.
Excellent summaries of the ensuing events can be found here and here. Broadly speaking, Berkeley demanded that Bacon surrender himself for trial in England for his treason against the government. Bacon responded by riding into Jamestown at the head of his militia, frightening Berkeley and his supporters out of the city. After several pitched battles between the two forces, Bacon won a temporary victory and vengefully burned Jamestown to the ground.
The issue was finally decided when Bacon died of dysentery at the end of 1676. A royal fleet called for by Berkeley arrived and hanged the rest of the rebel leaders. Nevertheless, a fearful Berkeley finally dissolved the Long Assembly, and the new Burgesses overturned some of Berkeley's more dictatorial decrees. A royal commission that arrived with the fleet concluded its investigation of the events by ordering Berkeley back to England, where he died the following year, his thirty-four years of service to the Crown ending in dismissal and disgrace.
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Fast-forward to the present, where a debate is taking place in the public sphere that is surprisingly similar to the Bacon-Berkeley conflict over three hundred years ago. At issue is whether to relax immigration laws along the Mexican border in order to legitimize many of the illegal immigrants who have crossed over in recent years. As in Bacon's day, a surprisingly large portion of the American people is violently exercised against this group of ethnic outsiders, upset and angry at the Mexicans who are invading their homeland.
Border districts, of course, can be expected to be up in arms over immigration reform. But some of the strongest electoral expressions of ethnic jingoism in recent years have occurred in districts nowhere near the Mexican border -- in states like Georgia and Utah. Why are these people so bothered by immigration issues that are happening a world away, and so viciously opposed to ethnic Latinos in general?
If we examine the corresponding issue in Bacon's Rebellion, we come to a surprising conclusion: the ethnic hatred of Native Americans expressed by Bacon and his men was amazingly inauthentic, and it really had nothing to do with what the Baconites were really upset about. The Indians were neither the cause of the Baconites' anger nor the main object of it; rather, they were the unfortunate scapegoat for what was really bothering the men, which was the dictatorial actions of Governor Berkeley and the Long Assembly. And this grievance had in turn an underlying motivation of its own: the acute sense of helplessness and disenfranchisement felt by those who were to all intents and purposes left perpetually out of power by the Berkeley machine.
As was true in Bacon's time, illegal immigration is not, I believe, the root issue for angry voters in places like Utah and Georgia. Instead, racial hatred is a convenient scapegoat for what is really bothering the people in the most xenophobic parts of America: grinding poverty, political disenfranchisement, and most of all a feeling of helplessness. It's important to note that these voters generally live in Red districts and are represented by Republican Congresspeople, yet they still feel improperly represented and buoy primary challengers against their incumbent representatives.
As Progressives, we need to find a way to give these people hope -- to show them a way of venting their anger at society constructively instead of aiming it at those less fortunate even than they. Instead of condemning them as disgusting xenophobes, if we can deal with the underlying issue -- why voters in rural and poor districts and in the South feel helpless and disenfranchised no matter which party is in power -- perhaps we can lay Nat Bacon's bones to rest once and for all.
It's a simple question, and one that I'm sure many of us on the Left have asked more than once: what motivates so many Americans to oppose so violently those ethnically different from us? The phenomenon of jingoism is common; most political observers are familiar with its most recent incarnation, in the anti-immigrant ravings of individuals such as Presidential candidates Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter and Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist. But the idea has a long and nefarious history in America; other infamous instances include the xenophobic ramblings of popular radio priest Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930's, the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party in the 1850's, and of course Southern discrimination against and enslavement of individuals of African descent.