# Declaration of the People of Virginia The manifesto [[Nathaniel Bacon]] issued at Middle Plantation on or about **30 July 1676**, indicting Governor [[William Berkeley]] in eight articles and demanding that Berkeley and twenty named associates surrender within four days. It is the founding document of [[Bacon's Rebellion]] and the first American text to claim governing authority explicitly from popular consent rather than the Crown. ## The charges The Declaration accuses Berkeley of: 1. Raising **unjust taxes** on the commonalty under "specious pretences of publique works," for the advancement of private favorites, with no visible result; 2. Failing across a long governorship to advance the colony by fortifications, towns, or trade; 3. Rendering the magistracy contemptible by advancing "scandalous and Ignorant favorites" to judicial office; 4. **Monopolizing the beaver trade**, and in that unjust gain betraying the king's country and subjects; 5. Protecting and emboldening Indigenous nations against the king's loyal subjects; 6. Recalling the English army when it was "just upon the track of those Indians," on his word that they would keep the peace; 7. Forging a commission "by the alteracon of a figure," without and against the consent of the people, to raise civil war. It then names twenty men — including Philip Ludwell, Nicholas Spencer, Richard Lee, Robert Beverley, and Sir Henry Chicheley — as Berkeley's "wicked and pernicious councellours Confederates, aiders, and assisters," orders them delivered up "within fower days," and declares that anyone sheltering them is a traitor whose estate is forfeit. ## The signature > [!quote] Nathaniel Bacon, 30 July 1676 > Nathaniel Bacon > Generall by Consent of the people. In a colonial system where every office descended from the king, signing as general *by consent of the people* was the radical act — more so than the grievances, which were conventional complaints about taxes and corrupt favorites. Bacon nonetheless framed the whole rising as loyal to Charles II, commanding seizures "in his majesties name" and casting Berkeley, not himself, as the traitor. ## The irony the vault should keep The Declaration closes with an explicit plea against division: > [!quote] Declaration of the People of Virginia, closing passage > ...desiering a firme union amongst our selves that we may joyntly and with one accord defend our selves against the common Enimy, and lett not the faults of the guilty be the reproach of the inocent, or the faults or crimes of the oppressours devide and separate us who have suffered by theire oppressions. Bacon's coalition did hold together across the line that mattered — poor white servants and enslaved and free Black Virginians fought side by side, and the last holdouts to surrender were roughly eighty enslaved Africans and twenty English servants. Virginia's answer, over the following three decades, was to make that union illegal: see the [[Virginia Slave Codes of 1705]]. A document that begged men not to let oppressors divide them was followed by the most systematic division-by-statute in early American history. The "common Enimy" the Declaration names, it should be said plainly, was Indigenous Virginians. The union Bacon wanted was a union for an Indian war. ## Status as a "core document" The Declaration is filed here with the vault's other pre-national texts — [[Mayflower Compact]], [[English Bill of Rights]], [[Magna Carta]] — as an antecedent of American consent-of-the-governed language, **not** as an endorsed one. Historians since the 1950s have rejected the older reading of Bacon as a forerunner of 1776; see [[Bacon's Rebellion]] for that historiography. ## See Also - [[Bacon's Rebellion]] · [[Nathaniel Bacon]] · [[William Berkeley]] - [[Virginia Slave Codes of 1705]] - [[Mayflower Compact]] · [[Declaration of Independence]] — the consent-language lineage - [[Consent of the Governed]] · [[Popular Sovereignty]] ## Sources - Full text: *American History From Revolution To Reconstruction*, "Bacon's Declaration in the Name of the People, 30 July 1676" (transcription); Wikisource, "Declaration of the People of Virginia" - Encyclopedia Virginia, "Bacon's Rebellion (1676–1677)" and "Nathaniel Bacon (1647–1676)" - Historic Jamestowne, "Declaration of the People"