# Nathaniel Bacon The English gentleman-planter who led [[Bacon's Rebellion]] against Virginia's colonial government in 1676 and burned Jamestown on **19 September 1676**. Born 2 January 1647 at Friston Hall, Suffolk; died 26 October 1676 in Gloucester County, Virginia. He was in Virginia for barely two years before the rebellion. ## Who he actually was Cambridge-educated (M.B., 1667), admitted to Gray's Inn in 1664, married to Elizabeth Duke, whose father disinherited her over the match. Bacon left England in the summer of **1674** after a fraudulent land sale produced a lawsuit that outlived him, carrying £1,800 from his father to start over. In August 1674 he bought 820 acres at Curles Neck in Henrico County. He was **related by blood or marriage to Governor [[William Berkeley]] and to Berkeley's wife, Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley**, and to his own older cousin Nathaniel Bacon (1620–1692), a sitting member of the governor's Council. On **3 March 1675** — despite having lived in the colony for months, not years — Berkeley appointed him to that Council. He was also Berkeley's competitor in the Indian trade, alongside William Byrd. > [!info] Two Nathaniel Bacons > The rebel is "Nathaniel Bacon the Younger" (1647–1676). His cousin Nathaniel Bacon (1620–1692) sat on the governor's Council, backed Berkeley throughout, and reportedly offered the rebel a share of his estate if he would lay down his arms. Sources from the period distinguish them; modern summaries sometimes do not. ## What he did Bacon's grievance was not taxation in the abstract and not English rule. It was that Berkeley would not authorize a general war against Indigenous nations — including nations allied with the colony under the 1646 treaty. When Bacon's own overseer was killed in a raid, he took command of frontier militiamen and demanded a commission. Berkeley refused. He proceeded anyway. He persuaded the Occaneechi to attack the Susquehannocks, then turned on the Occaneechi and destroyed their town. He attacked the Pamunkey, longtime English allies. Berkeley expelled him from the Council and declared him a rebel in May 1676; Henrico County elected him a burgess anyway. On roughly **30 July 1676** he issued the [[Declaration of the People of Virginia]], signing it "Generall, by the consent of the people" — a claim of authority from below rather than from the Crown, in a system where every office descended from the king. On 18 September Berkeley abandoned the besieged capital. The next morning Bacon's men burned it, on his order to "laye itt level with the Ground." He died five weeks later of dysentery — the "Bloody Flux" — at Thomas Pate's house in Gloucester County. His burial place was deliberately concealed so the body could not be gibbeted. Without him the rebellion collapsed. ## Why he matters for the KB **He is the original American case of a grievance entrepreneur.** Bacon did not create frontier anger about taxes, land, or Indigenous raids; he organized it, aimed it at two targets at once — Indigenous nations and a corrupt governor — and attached himself to it. Encyclopedia Virginia's summary of his method is exact: his success came from his ability to direct fear and anger toward those two targets. **The "torchbearer of liberty" reading of him is a manufactured tradition.** From the early nineteenth century through Thomas Wertenbaker's *Torchbearer of the Revolution* (1940), Bacon was cast as a patriotic forerunner of 1776. Historians abandoned that reading for lack of evidence; Bacon framed his own rising as loyal to Charles II and aimed at a treasonous governor. Expect the heroic version to resurface in patriotic-curriculum material, because it converts an Indian war and an estate-confiscation campaign into a freedom story. **He is not the reason the rebellion matters.** The consequential actor is the Virginia General Assembly that met after his death and wrote the racial order into statute — see [[Bacon's Rebellion]] and the [[Virginia Slave Codes of 1705]]. ## See Also - [[Bacon's Rebellion]] · [[William Berkeley]] · [[Declaration of the People of Virginia]] - [[Virginia Slave Codes of 1705]] - [[White Supremacy]] · [[Race as Social Construct]] ## Sources - Encyclopedia Virginia / *Dictionary of Virginia Biography*, "Nathaniel Bacon (1647–1676)" (Brent Tarter) - Encyclopedia Virginia, "Bacon's Rebellion (1676–1677)" (James D. Rice) - *Encyclopædia Britannica*, "Bacon's Rebellion"; Historic Jamestowne