The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnicity in America

THE ENGLISH COLONIES OF THE seventeenth century were notable for their diversity of population, religious institutions, and government structures, a diversity arising in large part from the variety of purposes and methods that spurred their creation. Unlike the Spanish and French governments, the English Crown steadfastly refused to finance colonization, relying instead on private citizens to take the risks involved in establishing outposts in the Americas. The Crown was willing to grant charters to companies and bestow huge tracts of land on favorites in the Court, but it was not willing to deplete the royal treasury or provide military support for colonization. Few private citizens rose to the challenge in the sixteenth century, for the dismal failure of Sir Walter Raleigh’s efforts at Roanoke Island, and Raleigh’s resulting bankruptcy dampened even the most patriotic zeal.

Dreams of an American empire did not entirely vanish, however. Indeed, they were enthusiastically revived in the early seventeenth century as English entrepreneurs learned to employ the principles of the joint-stock company to diminish individual risks. The Virginia Company’s success in planting the Jamestown settlement in 1607, coupled with the Stuart kings’ largesse in land grants, resulted in the creation of proprietary colonies, such as Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania, and colonies chartered to joint-stock companies, such as Massachusetts. But what the Crown saved in expenses it lost in the ability to establish uniformity. Each proprietor or joint-stock company could declare its own purposes and goals and establish its own institutions and regulations as long as they did not run contrary to the laws, trade regulations, and diplomatic policies of England. By the end of the century, the crescent of colonies that hugged the Atlantic Ocean on the North American mainland reflected the variety of motives and methods of their founders: some colonies had been established by religious sects seeking refuge, others came into existence for profit, and still others emerged as offshoots from older communities, created by land-hungry settlers or exiled religious deviants.

The State’s refusal to be responsible for the founding of the colonies also meant that key institutions were weak, or absent, in the formal and informal development of these communities. For example, the absence of Anglican church control or organized missionary activity contrasted sharply with the role the Catholic church played in both the French and Spanish colonial world. There was a noticeable lack of uniformity of religious practices, governmental structures, or Indian and land policies, and clearly there was no grand design for settlement. When, late in the century, the king attempted to rationalize and centralize the mainland empire, his efforts met with considerable resistance. The Dominion of New England, which united the colonies of New England, New York, and New Jersey under one governor, was the first American casualty of the Glorious Revolution. Before the debacle of the Dominion—and for several decades after—the English colonies continued to evolve in highly individualistic ways.

Regional distinctions did emerge, however, not only in economies and labor systems, but in patterns of ethnic and racial diversity. All regions were biracial in the early seventeenth century, for Indian populations remained within the borders of each colony. By the end of the century, small concentrations of African servants and slaves suggested a new pattern of triracial colonies, especially in the Chesapeake and Lower South. Throughout the century, the New England colonies remained ethnically more homogeneous than other regions. Massachusetts, for example, openly discouraged and even outlawed non-Puritan settlers, although by the end of the century, its transformation into a royal colony opened up settlement to Anglicans as well. The shortage of available land in New England, already a problem by the end of the century, would discourage the waves of immigrants from Ireland and Germany that would fill the backcountries of the middle and southern colonies in the next century. To the south, the Chesapeake was largely an English society, but one marked by the presence of Catholics as well as Protestants and by small communities of radical dissenting sects. The Lower South, still in its early phases of settlement in 1700, would not see its influx of Scots-Irish, Irish, and German settlers until the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The Middle Colonies of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania were, by comparison, notably heterogeneous, in part because of the non-English origins of the first three and in part because of liberal immigration or land policies that did not discriminate based on religion or national origins. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the ethnic diversity of the middle colonies was the most striking regional anomaly.

Conquest, conflict, migration, and acculturation were historical realities among the peoples East of the Mississippi long before the arrival of European and English colonists. Indeed, the social and political map of Native American societies was no more static or stable than the map of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the Northeast, two massive alliances had, for centuries, shaped the realities of political and cultural life among local communities, pitting the Hurons, Algonquins, Abenakis, Micmacs, Ottawas, and several smaller tribes against the powerful Iroquois Confederacy that was based in New York. In what the English would call Virginia, a confederation of Algonquianspeaking tribes known as the Powhatans dominated local cultures, commanding tribute and military loyalties from a widening circle of villages. By the time John Smith arrived in Jamestown, the Powhatan had forced into its political sphere of control some thirty different Indian peoples. To the south, descendants of Siouan-speaking migrants, who had journeyed over the mountains centuries before Columbus journeyed to the Americas, created communities linked by a common culture but politically independent of one another. Like the Hurons to the north or the subjects of the Powhatans in the Chesapeake, these Siouan descendants had long experience with the aggression of would be conquerors, for Mississippians, intent on seizing territory and compelling political submission, had followed the Siouan groups eastward. Viewed from a global perspective, Europe and North America seemed to be experiencing similar patterns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: shifting boundaries, migration prompted by aggression or by flight from aggression, refugee societies regrouping, and acculturation to the communities that gave them safe haven or to those who conquered them. For the Finns, for the Walloons, for the Irish, the tales of cultural conflict told by the Huron, the Mannahoacs, and the Stuckanocks would be familiar ones.

Many decades before English adventurers and their servants came to Jamestown or Separatist pilgrims arrived at Plymouth, Native Americans had felt the devastation that contact with Europeans would bring to their world. Not the sword, but disease proved the most effective weapon of destruction: an epidemiological disaster of immeasurable proportions swept away Native populations, as smallpox, measles, and other illnesses to which Indians enjoyed no immunities traveled rapidly throughout the Americas following contact with the Europeans. Historians now estimate that millions of Indians died in the centuries before English settlement began.

This catastrophic “exchange” between Europeans and Indians might best be personalized in the life of Squanto, the Wampanoag Indian who befriended the radical Separatist sect known as the Pilgrims and negotiated the treaty with his tribe that insured the survival of their refugee English community at Plymouth in the 1620s. Several years before the Pilgrims set sail for America aboard the Mayflower, Squanto had been taken prisoner by English fishermen sailing the coast of Massachusetts. He remained in English society, learning the language and absorbing the culture, for some three years before returning to his homeland. Here he discovered that his exile had protected him from an epidemic that destroyed his entire village at Patuxet. This outbreak had reached far beyond Patuxet, of course; of the twenty thousand Wampanoag Indians of Massachusetts, fewer than 10 percent remained when Squanto returned to America. Ironically, the Pilgrims’ settlement of Plymouth was built upon the remains of Squanto’s Patuxet.

Despite the devastation wrought by disease, the Indian societies of the Eastern coast did not immediately fall under the control of the European colonizers. Indeed, as historians now understand, negotiation and compromise marked the earliest years of contact between French, Dutch, and English authorities and the local Indians. A “middle ground,” a cultural space contributed to by both Indian and white colonists, emerged, allowing the two worlds some possibility of understanding and cooperation. Although each society was interpreted through the prism of the observing culture, some genuine communication was nevertheless made possible; on the middle ground, a compromise of language, belief systems, political structures, and patterns of physical and emotional intimacy evolved. If the French were more flexible than the English or Dutch, even these more ethnocentric nationals made efforts to engage in commercial exchange, political alliance, and social interaction throughout the century.

The English brought to the “middle ground” a firm sense of their cultural superiority. Their assumptions about Indians varied greatly, with some seventeenth-century observers recording glowing accounts of the nobility and simplicity of tribal life and others detailing the heathen savagery of the indigenous population. The romantic notion of the “Noble Savage” thus existed side by side with the contemptuous judgment that Indians were uncivilized, without religion or culture. The assumed character of the Indian often depended on the English colonists’ vision of themselves. Thus, among the Puritan colonists, who saw the hand of God directing their settlement, Indians appeared as Satanic obstacles to their mission rather than as proper objects for missionary zeal. The Quaker founders of Pennsylvania, committed to a belief that all people shared God’s grace, demonstrated their religious convictions by efforts to treat Native Americans in an egalitarian fashion. In both cases, the prism through which the Indian was seen was self-referential.

No matter what their assumptions or stereotypes, most of the early settlers recognized that their survival depended upon a basic exchange of supplies and knowledge with local Indians. In Jamestown to the south and Plymouth to the north, the willingness of Native Americans to share corn and other foodstuffs as well as information on how to grow these crops made the difference between starvation and sustenance in the early years. In New Netherland, and later in New York, a thriving trade in beaver pelts and other furs secured most of the profits that Europeans wrested from their Hudson River colony. And, in alliances formed with Indian tribes, the English and Dutch found the safety from hostile attack by European rivals and their Indian allies critical to their communities’ survival. To varying degrees, Indians who negotiated the “middle ground” acquired the fruits of European technology: weapons, iron and copper utensils, and woolens. Exchanges of a less concrete or tangible nature altered both white and Indian life as new theologies, modes of production, notions of property, and ideas of social organization passed between colonists and natives.

The creation of the middle ground did not, however, insure peace between Native Americans and European colonists. In the English colonies in particular, the settlers’ relentless expansionist impulse eventually brought them into conflict with local Indians. As English populations grew, the willingness to negotiate and compromise diminished. Even when disputes arose between English communities, nearby Indians were likely to suffer the consequences. For example, in New England in the late 1630s, an intense rivalry between Massachusetts land developers and the expanding Connecticut settlements proved harmful to the nearby Pequots. Rather than initiating a damaging intra-Puritan conflict, the Massachusetts and Connecticut leadership agreed to turn their aggression outward. They decided to settle their differences by a contest, a winner take all for the colony that managed to conquer the Pequots first. By 1637, Pequot leader Sassacus and his men faced attack from two armies. The Pequot situation worsened when Massachusetts governor John Winthrop ordered Captain John Underhill to attack civilian rather than military targets. The resulting massacre at Mystic Village was recorded in all its gruesome details by Underhill, who noted with satisfaction that “Many [Pequots] were burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children.” Villagers who attempted to surrender were brutally murdered. Soon afterward Indian resistance crumbled, and Massachusetts claimed victory over Connecticut in a contest that virtually eliminated the Pequots from New England. The few Indian survivors were rounded up and sold into slavery. The accounts, both private and public, of this brutal war of elimination waged against the Pequots reveal the Puritan certitude that God approved the destruction of heathen obstacles in the path of the faithful.

Thirty-eight years later, the long reign of peace enjoyed between Wampanoag Indians and the Plymouth colonists also came to an end, eroded by the land-hunger of the Pilgrim community. In 1675, Wampanoag leader, Metacomet, mounted a guerilla war against the English, raiding white settlements. Forging an alliance with other regional tribes, Metacomet (or King Philip, as the English called him) expanded the war. The English struck back, aided by Iroquois mercenaries sent by the governor of New York. King Philip’s War ended in Metacomet’s death and the total elimination of several of the tribes who had come to his aid. Those few who escaped death or enslavement scattered, seeking refuge with Indians to the north and the west. The English victory came at great cost to the colonists as well: over two thousand men, women, and children lost their lives in this short but brutal war.

To the south, a similar pattern could be detected. Alliances formed by struggling English colonists and native Powhatan Indians began to show strains before a decade of settlement had ended. In 1609, war broke out, marked by atrocities such as decapitation and torture on both sides. As the colony prospered and the desire for additional tobacco lands grew, aggressive policies replaced compromise and cooperation between the two races. In 1622, Powhatan leader Opechancanough mounted a surprise attack on Jamestown, killing one-fourth of the settlers in one day. Virginians retaliated, and the war continued sporadically for a decade. The Powhatan population was devastated; of forty thousand people, only five hundred remained by the 1630s.

Despite the steady collapse of cooperation between most English colonies and local Indians, the two races remained a presence in one another’s lives. Accounts of predawn Indian raids on New England villages run like a leitmotif through the diaries of Puritan fathers and mothers and the sermons of their ministers. Captivity narratives, written by those who were ransomed from Frenchallied Indians or from French Canadian officials, recount grueling forced marches through snow and storm, injuries, unaccustomed work, and—in some cases—proselytizing efforts by Catholic priests or nuns. Yet these narratives also reveal the diversity of views on Indian life and culture: while some denounce their captors as heathen and savage, others show a growing respect for, and understanding of, a culture strikingly different from their own. Among those differences is the willingness of the Indian communities to accept white captives into their midst, to adopt them into their families fully and without any debilitating traces of racism. English colonists did not reciprocate: the limited efforts by Puritan ministers to convert Indians to Christianity, for example, never resulted in the integration of these “praying Indians” into the colonial community.

The contests for land and resources that erupted between Native Americans and the English were not the only conflicts in these early decades of settlement. Intra-European rivalries emerged as well, for the English did not initially monopolize the territory along the Atlantic coast from present-day Maine to Georgia. The Dutch, basing their claims upon Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage, created trading posts at Albany and Manhattan as early as 1614. Although Hudson had praised the area as a land of “Grasse & flowers,” New Netherland attracted few settlers. Throughout the seventeenth century, Holland’s Caribbean possessions held out the promise of quicker, and more extensive, riches. In 1621, a newly formed trading company, the Dutch West India Company, took over the task of colonizing. To encourage settlement, the Company devised a patroon system, creating subcolonies within New Netherland made up of vast estates whose proprietors enjoyed manorial rights in law and were allowed to collect rents from their tenant farmers. Only one patroonship, Rensselaerwyck, proved successful. Using a sample taken from 1630–1644, historian Oliver Rink drew a portrait of the colonists who settled on Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s million-acre holding. Most were single young men in their teens and twenties, drawn from the economically depressed area around Utrecht—immigrants similar in age and circumstances to the English indentured servants who flocked to the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century. Only 18 percent of the Rensselaerwyck tenants were married and had three or more children. Although most of van Rensselaer’s tenants were farmers, a sizeable number were artisans—masons, carpenters, millwrights, and wheelwrights, along with cobblers, tailors, a baker, and a blacksmith.

Despite its efforts, the colony boasted only three hundred settlers in 1629, most of them Protestant Walloon refugees from the southernmost areas of the Spanish Netherlands. Slowly, because of the West India Company’s liberal admission standards, a heterogeneous collection of adventurous, profit-hungry colonists trickled in. By 1673, there were somewhere between six thousand and nine thousand colonists in New Netherland, although few of them were Dutch. Nearly 40 percent were German, mostly from Aachen, Cleves, East Friesland, Westphalia, Bremen, Hamburg, and Oldenburg. This German emigration had been prompted by the devastation of war in southwest Germany, an experience of displacement they shared, although without acknowledgement or sympathy, with many of the Indian communities in the Hudson Valley. New Englanders accounted for much of the population on Long Island, while the multicultural atmosphere in New Amsterdam was intensified by the arrival of Danes and Norwegians, free and enslaved Africans, French Huguenots, a sprinkling of Muslims, and a small community of Jews.

The Jewish influx illustrates well the impact of the trading company’s openness to diversity—and the resulting tensions within the colony. In 1654, twenty-three Jews had arrived from South America, most of them Iberians seeking asylum after Dutch rule ended in Brazil. Peter Stuyvesant, then governor of New Netherland, was outraged, and sought to banish these refugees from his colony. Writing to the directors of the Dutch West India Company, Stuyvesant insisted that they should not tolerate members of a “deceitful race—such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ” who would “infect and trouble this colony.” The directors ignored his advice and Stuyvesant had to be content with passing measures that restricted Jewish participation in the life of the larger community, limited their trading rights, and imposed special taxes upon them. Nevertheless, the Jewish population increased, and by the turn of the century, Jews constituted about 2.5 percent of Manhattan’s population. While a small Jewish community also appeared in 1658 in Newport, Rhode Island, and four Jewish colonists settled in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1697, the Manhattan community remained the largest in mainland America.

Meanwhile, the Dutch faced what they considered to be Swedish interlopers along the Delaware River. Although the Netherlands claimed this area, in March 1638, two Swedish ships sailed up the river to present-day Wilmington. The Swedes and Finns aboard these ships—citizens of a single kingdom in the seventeenth century—named the site Paradise Point. Ironically, one of the moving forces behind this colonizing venture was a Dutchman familiar to residents of Manhattan: Peter Minuit. In 1626, Minuit had purchased Manhattan island from local Indians; now, in 1638, he repeated the process, this time buying lands for the New Sweden Company, the brainchild of the Finnish admiral Klas Fleming and Minuit himself.

Only a few hundred people ever settled in the colony, most of them Finns. By midcentury, these settlers lived in a half-dozen fortified areas—from Fort Christina in the south, to Fort New Korsholm on the Schuylkill in the north, to Fort Elfsborg on the eastern shore of the Delaware in New Jersey. Despite the meager size of this Swedish colony, the Dutch always viewed it as an incursion into their domain. In 1638, William Kieft, governor of New Netherland, warned Peter Minuit that the Netherlands considered the colony to be illegitimate, adding that he considered Minuit a traitor for accepting the post of governor of New Sweden. Insisting that Minuit had no authority to construct forts along the river, Kieft declared, “We do, therefore protest against all injury to property, and all the evil consequences of bloodshed, uproar, and wrong which our Trading Company may thus suffer.” The letter ended with the threat that New Netherland would “protect our rights in such manner as we may find most advisable.” Military action followed. By 1656, Dutch forces had seized the Swedish forts, meeting little resistance from the colonists. In 1664, however, control of the area again changed hands, as New Netherland fell, also without resistance, to the naval assault of the English Duke of York. Surprisingly, the Duke of York pursued a liberal policy toward the Dutch citizens of what was now the colony of New York. The Dutch Reform Church was allowed to continue to serve the largely Calvinist population, Dutch property holdings were honored, and Dutch inheritance patterns, strikingly different from the English, remained legal. The Dutch tolerance of diversity within the colony also seemed to be acceptable to the new English proprietor. Indeed, between 1665 and 1685, the colony became a religious refuge for Scottish Presbyterians, English Quakers, and French Huguenots. By the time James ascended to the throne of England in 1685, New York was a thriving colony of fifteen thousand, representing the greatest variety of faiths, races, and ethnic backgrounds the English colonial world had yet seen.

If New York was multicultural, its colonists did not always live in harmony. English, Dutch, and German merchants engaged in sometimes ruthless competition over control of the City’s trade. The three ethnic groups were equally fierce in their rivalry to dominate the cultural life of the City. A similar struggle for dominance characterized life in Albany. The only thing that could possibly have united these quarreling factions was a shared threat to their prosperity and autonomy. That threat came in 1685, when James II decided to reorganize the northern mainland colonies, abolishing the separate governments of New England and New York and creating a single administrative unit called the Dominion of New England. New Englanders no less than New Yorkers chafed at the merger, and all came to loathe the profiteering by the Dominion’s leadership.

In 1689, news reached New York of the Glorious Revolution in England and the consequent end to James’s rule. Four years of burning resentment burst into flame and revolts broke out in Boston, Long Island, and New York City. While Bostonians imprisoned Edmund Andros, the hated governor of the Dominion, Jacob Leisler, a German merchant, led the uprising against Dominion authorities in New York City. Leisler had personal reasons to resent Andros, whose favoritism toward English colonists had dealt a blow to the German immigrant’s social and political ambitions. Thus when several towns on Long Island revolted against the Dominion, Leisler extended the revolt to New York City. He seized control of the fort, imprisoned Andros’s representatives—and then, for good measure, jailed some of his local non-German business rivals.

By the end of the summer, Leisler had declared himself commander in chief of the entire colony. Acting as head of a ten-man “committee of safety,” he proceeded to imprison more opponents and drive others into exile. Insisting that he was the legitimate head of a constitutional government under William and Mary, Leisler looked for, and received, support from many of the less Anglicized Dutch colonists. Not all the Dutch citizens of the colony backed him, however. In fact, the Dutch community in Albany strongly opposed him, fearing his policies would do their city more damage than those of Andros. In the end, Leisler’s Rebellion seemed to be an uprising of two distinct groups: New York City merchants and shopkeepers who were disadvantaged by the Dominion and Long Island communities of Puritan background

Despite Albany’s refusal to acknowledge his authority, Leisler proceeded to establish a colonial government, create courts, and raise taxes. He believed he had initiated an era of home rule, but to his surprise, William and Mary did not support his efforts or reward them. Instead they sent a new governor from England. When Jacob Leisler refused to turn over the reins of power, the coalition that supported him dissolved, and he was eventually arrested, convicted of treason, and executed. Hanged, disemboweled while still alive, and then drawn and quartered, Leisler and his son-in-law now became local martyrs to the German community. For many years to come, New York’s political life was marked by conflict between Leislerites and supporters of the royal governor and the Crown.

While colonies like New York and Pennsylvania opened their doors to a wide variety of Protestant sects and European settlers, the colonies to the south were not without some pockets of diversity. Seventeenth-century Virginia’s eastern shore contained immigrants from the Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and even Turkey. Maryland, founded as a Catholic refuge by the Calvert family, never attracted a majority of Catholic colonists. Settled largely by Protestants, the colony was frequently torn apart by its religious divisions. Protestants and Catholics were often as antagonistic as Dutch and English or Puritan and Indian, and over the course of the seventeenth century, despite the efforts of the Calverts to enforce and encourage religious toleration, violence erupted. When Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan government repealed Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore’s Act of Toleration and took the colony from its proprietor, civil war broke out in Maryland. The Protestants triumphed, but Cromwell’s government crumbled and, with the Restoration, the Calvert family became Maryland’s proprietors once more. Anti-Catholic sentiment did not vanish, however; rebellions were attempted in 1659, 1676, and again in 1681. When William and Mary ascended the throne in 1688, Maryland’s Protestants saw their chance. Led by Anglican minister John Coode, the Protestant Association defeated the Catholics and persuaded the new monarchs to make Maryland a royal colony. Coode was no hero, however, to many Maryland Protestants, and his abrasive personality, like Jacob Leisler’s, soon generated strong opposition. When the Calverts converted to Anglicanism in the early eighteenth century, Maryland was returned to their keeping, much to the relief of many of the colonists.

Despite Maryland’s origins as a Catholic haven, the majority of the immigrants to both Chesapeake colonies were young, single Englishmen, driven from their family farms by the economic dislocation of the era. Traveling from depressed areas of the English countryside into local market towns, then on to major port cities such as Bristol or London, these increasingly desperate young men agreed to bind, or indenture, themselves to ship captains or Chesapeake, contracting to work from 3 to 7 years in exchange for passage to America, meager sustenance during their term of servitude, and the promise of land ownership when their term of service ended. Even Maryland, originally conceived of as a Catholic refuge by its proprietors, the Calverts, was largely populated by young, impoverished English Protestants.

Tobacco was the magnet that drew both independent settlers and tens of thousands of indentured servants to the Chesapeake. Cultivation of this crop was time-consuming, tedious, and exhausting; more important, it was labor-intensive, for tools and machinery were in short supply in the colonial world. There seemed to be an insatiable need for field hands, as planters expanded their production to increase profits in boom times and to cover costs when prices fell. Most planters believed that indentured servitude was the most economical labor system, given the realities of the region. The disease-ridden environment of the Chesapeake resulted in high mortality rates, and only the small purchase cost for a bound servant compensated the planter for the loss of labor when malaria or dysentery claimed the worker’s life. Few tobacco planters considered the preferred labor force of the Caribbean, the African slave, for supplies were limited on the mainland, prices were high, and the initial investment of capital would be lost if the slave fell victim to disease.

A shift to slave labor did begin by century’s end, however. Several factors came into play: mortality rates dropped as colonists learned how to protect themselves within the disease environment; the supply of English indentured servants dried up as economic conditions—and employment possibilities—improved at home; and finally, the monopoly on the slave trade, once enjoyed by the Dutch, was wrested away by the English, thus increasing the supply of African workers to all English colonies and lowering the purchase price. The mass importation of enslaved workers and the rise of a slave society in the Chesapeake was still decades away, in the eighteenth century, but the process had begun before the close of the seventeenth century.

Before midcentury, most slaves in the mainland colonies came from Angola, a region that stretched along the Central African coast of the Atlantic from Cape Lopez to Benguela. While some of the wealthiest residents of Virginia’s eastern shore could afford to purchase slaves directly from Africa from the Dutch shipmasters, most of the blacks transported to Virginia had, as historian Douglas Deal notes, endured years of service on the sugar plantations of British, Spanish, or Dutch Caribbean islands. Many of these “seasoned” servants could speak English well and were accustomed to English cultural patterns. But however these black colonists were acquired, they remained a rarity in the colonial tobacco world until the 1680s.

Laws and regulations based on race developed slowly and unevenly in the counties and parishes of the Chesapeake. In the early decades, white and black servants cooperated, feeling they had more in common with one another than with their masters. English servant James Revel, who left behind a remarkable poem recounting his arduous and dreary life in the tobacco fields, attested to the camaraderie felt among all servants, black and white. Court records demonstrate that blacks and whites drank, caroused, and fornicated together. More important, they occasionally plotted their escape from servitude together. In 1640, for example, seven African and English servants stole weapons and a small boat and attempted to reach Dutch-held territory by water. White men were willing to put their faith in black ones whose skill or daring might insure the success of an escape plan.

Although African workers did not sign indenture contracts, they were not always deemed servants for life before the eighteenth century. Records remain of black landowners who enjoyed most of the rights their white neighbors enjoyed, including legal recognition of their marriages, ownership of property, and the right to distribute that property in their wills. Marriages between free black men and free white women continued to occur throughout the 1650s and 1660s on the eastern shore, and African landowners purchased white indentured servants to help them work their lands.

By 1662, however, racial barriers began to be erected and the outlines of enslavement for life were drawn. In that year, for example, Virginia’s legislature declared that a child’s condition followed that of the mother rather than that of the father, thus condemning all children born to slave women to a lifetime of servitude. This law stood in stark contrast to the English assumptions that paternal rather than maternal status defined the status of offspring. Nonmarital sex between the races was punished more severely than fornication or adultery between whites, and by 1691, any white colonist who married an African, an Indian, or a mulatto was banished from Virginia forever.

The regulation of interracial contact and the distinctions between white and black conditions of service were, in part, the result of the slow increase in the number of African field hands. But other factors contributed to the growing number of distinctions based on race. In 1676, the violent and protracted revolt known as Bacon’s Rebellion, pitting backcountry planters against the tidewater or coastal planter elite, proved to have deleterious consequences for black Virginians.

Nathaniel Bacon was a gentleman, not a former servant, but like many would-be planters after midcentury, he found the best of the coastal lands already claimed by a local elite. These tidewater planters dominated the tobacco economy and the legislature as well. Struggling to find prosperity on lands that bordered Indian territories, men like Bacon were caught between hostile enemies to the west and self-interested enemies in the House of Burgesses. Tidewater planters were willing to tax the backcountry colonists, but they were rarely willing to use that tax money to mount the military protection these western farmers believed was needed. When a new round of violence erupted between Indians and colonists in 1676, Nathaniel Bacon took the lead in demanding that the royal governor and his Tidewater supporters send military assistance. The governor refused—and Bacon and his followers took their revolt to the colonial capital. Along the way, the ranks of the rebellion swelled; servants rallied to Bacon’s side, including roughly 10 percent of the black male population of the colony. Although the revolt was eventually suppressed, Virginia’s political and economic elite feared the possibility of further cooperation between lower class whites and blacks. Many historians feel that Bacon’s Rebellion marked a turning point in racial history in the colony, propelling the planter elite to a conscious policy of racial divisiveness.

By the late seventeenth century almost three-quarters of the Africans imported into the Chesapeake came primarily from two regions: Senegambia, at the mouth of the Gambia River, and the Bight of Biafra. Their numbers grew steadily: between 1670 and 1700, six thousand slaves arrived directly from Africa. The nature of the black population in the Chesapeake was thus changing: the new arrivals rarely spoke English and were unfamiliar with English customs, work patterns, or religion. In addition, although the sex ratio among the “seasoned” blacks had been equal, the slaves imported directly from Africa were almost exclusively young men and boys. Thus by the end of the century, the Chesapeake faced an influx of genuinely foreign colonists, Africans who had come not by choice but by force.

To the south of the tobacco region lay Carolina, a vast area that included swamps and lowlands that King Charles had granted to eight of his wealthy supporters. Although these proprietors drafted an elaborate scheme for a feudal society in Carolina, the colony actually developed much as Virginia had by offering land to anyone willing to emigrate. After experimenting with several cash crops, including tobacco, sugar cane, and even olives, the Carolina planters soon focused their efforts on rice cultivation. Although the significant development of the Lower South, as the Carolinas and Georgia were called, would lie in the eighteenth century, the biracial outlines of that society were already evident in the seventeenth. The Barbadian planters who were among the earliest settlers of the Carolinas brought slaves with them to the mainland; unlike the Chesapeake tobacco farmers, these West Indian émigrés did not need to evolve a rationale or a legal structure for racial slavery.

The colonies were separated from their mother country by three thousand miles of ocean, but they did not escape the consequences of England’s aggressive foreign policy. England’s slow rise to power during the seventeenth century made that nation a central player in the competition to control North America and its resources and to dominate the Atlantic trade. This competition influenced key aspects of colonial life, from settlement patterns to Indian alliances to militia activity and its funding. The mainland colonies, situated between the French North American empire to the north and the Spanish territories to the south and southwest, were quickly drawn into the four wars for empire among Spain, France, and England—and their allies and satellites—that began in earnest in the 1680s.

The succession to the throne of William and Mary in 1688 sparked the first major conflict between France and England. English allies included Holland, Sweden, and Spain, but for the colonists, the alliance between the French and the powerful Hurons was more important. Like their European counterparts, Indians of the Great Lakes and Northern New York regions were divided into competing camps of Huron and Iroquois. Their struggle for control of the richest fur regions was now joined to the European struggle known in America as King William’s War as Hurons allied themselves with the French and the Iroquois with the English.

Few British or French military forces took part in the American theater of war. Instead, Canadian militias battled New England militia companies while Iroquois and Huron troops staged raids and incursions on enemy territories. New England colonies rushed to enforce militia laws that required service by all but ministers, magistrates, doctors, schoolmasters, fishermen, and students. In Massachusetts, each town was required to raise a band or company of militiamen, amateur soldiers led by elected officers. Canadians organized in a similar fashion, calling on tenants to do military service as a duty to their landlords. The first serious blow had been dealt even before war was officially declared, when Iroquois warriors attacked the French outpost at Lachine in July of 1689, killing somewhere between sixty and two hundred inhabitants and taking more than a hundred prisoners. The French Canadians were quick to retaliate. Well-planned raids in Maine and New Hampshire destroyed garrison houses and cost the lives of local militia leaders. The violence spread quickly from Canadian border towns like Dover, New Hampshire, to upstate New York. In February 1690, a force of Indians and French troops struck the village of Schenectady, leveling the town in only a few hours, and killing sixty residents.

Accounts of atrocities began to spread early in the war—many of them true: children’s heads dashed against staircases or apple trees; women hacked to death by hatchets. When these murders were perpetrated by the Indian allies of the French, the colonists decried them as savagery, but when Hannah Duston, a matron from Haverhill, Massachusetts, killed ten of her captors while they slept, scalping them in the bargain, she was hailed as a Christian heroine, honored in sermons by such distinguished divines as Cotton Mather. When the war finally ended in 1697, at least 650 English colonists were dead, killed in battle, in raids, or in captivity. The Iroquois death toll was far greater, reaching somewhere between six hundred and thirteen hundred.

England’s rivalry with France would grow even more intense in the next century, and colonists would draw upon their memories, real and imagined, of what they called Indian savagery. But the French were the true objects of their hatred, and a fierce anti-Catholicism, synonymous for many with anti-French sentiments, became the rallying cry until this old enemy became the colonists’ new ally during the American Revolution.

By 1700, a clear ethnic and racial map of the mainland English colonies had emerged. To the north, New England remained the most homogeneous of the regions, populated primarily by English Calvinists in the countryside but with a growing urban population of Anglicans once Massachusetts became a royal colony in 1692. Few Indians remained in the area, for the wars against Pequot, Narragansett, and Wampanoag had ended the era of cooperation and coexistence between the races. The black population was small, concentrated in the slave-trading towns of Rhode Island and on the docks of Boston. The shortage of available land, already a problem by the end of the century, would discourage the waves of immigrants from Ireland and Germany that would fill the backcountries of the middle and southern colonies in the next century.

South of New England, Pennsylvania was just beginning to attract European settlers, drawn to the colony by its liberal land policies and religious tolerance. New York, and particularly New York City, remained the most cosmopolitan, heterogeneous spot on the English mainland, with the Dutch, German, and English in lively competition for cultural hegemony, and with Jews, French Huguenots, and Africans adding to the city’s tradition of diversity.

The transition of the Chesapeake and the Lower South from a society with slaves to a slave society, defined by the presence of a social caste based on race, had begun by 1700. Despite the arrival of Scotch-Irish, Irish, and German immigrants in the next century, race rather than ethnicity would be the defining characteristic of this southern culture.

I cannot but admire to hear that some Gentlemen still have a good Opinion of the late Disorders committed by Capt. Jacob Leysler, and his Accomplices, in New-York, as if they had been for His Majesties Service, and the Security of that Province; and that such Monstrous Falshoods do find Credit, That the Persons before in Commission, and did labour to oppose and prevent those Disorders, were Jacobites, or Persons ill affected to the Happy Revolution in England. But it has been often the Calamity of all Ages to palliate Vice with false Glosses, and to criminate the best Actions of the most Virtuous and most Pious Men. So that Truth and Innocency, without some Defence, has not proved at all times a sufficient Bullwork against malitious Falshoods and Calumnies. Wherefore I shall endeavour to give you a true and brief Account of that matter, as I my self have been a Personal Witness to most of them.

It was about the beginning of April, 1689, when the first Reports arrived at New-York, that the Prince of Orange, now his present Majesty, was arrived in England with considerable Forces, and that the late King James was fled into France, and that it was expected War would be soon proclaimed between England and France.

The Leiut. Governour, Francis Nicholson, and the Council, being Protestants, resolved thereupon to suspend all Roman Catholicks from Command and Places of Trust in the Government, and accordingly suspended Major Baxter from being a Member of Council and Captain of a Company at Albany, and Bartholomew Russel from being Ensign in the Fort at New-York, they both being Papists, who forth-with left their Command, and departed the Province.

And because but three Members of the Council were residing in New-York, viz. Mr. Frederick Phillips, Coll. Stephanus Cortlandt, and Coll. Nicholas Bayard, all of Dutch Birth, all Members, and the two last, for the space of near thirty Years past, Elders and Deacons of the Dutch Protestant Church in New-York, and most affectionate to the Royal House of Orange, It was Resolved by the said Lieut. Governor and Council, to call and conveen to their Assistance all the Justices of the Peace, and other civil Magistrates, and the Commission Officers in the Province, for to consult and advise with them what might be proper for the Preservation of the Peace, and the Safety of said Province in that Conjuncture, till Orders should arrive from England.

Whereupon the said Justices, Magistrates and Officers were accordingly convened, and stiled by the Name of The General Convention for the Province of New-York; and all matters of Government were carried on and managed by the major Vote of that Convention.

And in the first place it was by them agreed and ordered, Forth-with to fortifie the City of New-York.

And that for the better Security of the Fort (since the Garrison was weak, and to prevent all manner of Doubts and Jealousies) a competent Number of the City Militia should keep Guard in said Fort, and Nicholas Bayard, Coll. of said Militia, recommended to give suitable Orders accordingly.

And that the Revenue should be continued and received by some Gentlemen appointed by that Convention, for Repairing the Fort, and Fortifying of the City; but against this Order Capt. Leysler (who as a Captain was a Member of that Convention) did enter his dissent, with some few others.

It was also recommended to said Coll. Bayard to hasten to fortifie the City with all possible speed, who upon the Credit of the Revenue did advance what Money was needful for Materials, And by the Assistance of the Militia Officers, and daily Labour of the Inhabitants, had the same finish’t before the end of May, excepting Capt. Leysler’s Quota.

About the middle of May the Ship Beaver, John Corbit Master, being ready to sail for England, the Lieut. Governour and Council sent in her by Mr. John Riggs, and in several other Ships that soon followed, Letters to the Earl, now Duke, of Shrewsbury, then Principal Secretary of State, and to the Lords of the Committee for Trade and Plantations, wherein they signified their rejoycing at the News of his Royal Highness the Prince of Orange, now his present Majesties, arrival in England, in order to Redress the Grievances of the Nation, and giving a particular Account of the state of Affairs of this Province, and that they would endeavour to preserve its Peace and Security till Orders should arrive from England, which they humbly prayed might be hastened with all possible speed. Which said Letters were most graciously received, and answered by his Majesties Letter, bearing date the 30th of July, 1689.

But against Expectation it soon happened, that on the last day of said Moneth of May, Capt. Leysler having a Vessel with some Wines in the Road, for which he refused to pay the Duty, did in a Seditious manner stir up the meanest sort of the Inhabitants (affirming, That King James being fled the Kingdom, all manner of Government was fallen in this Province) to rise up in arms, and forcibly possess themselves of the Fort and Stores, which accordingly was effected whilest the Lieut. Governour and Council, with the Convention, were met at the City Hall to consult what might be proper for the common Good and Safety; where a party of Armed Men came from the Fort, and forced the Lieut. Governour to deliver them the Keys; and seized also in his Chamber a Chest with Seven Hundred Seventy Three Pounds, Twelve Shillings, in Money of the Government. And though Coll. Bayard, with some others appointed by the Convention, used all endeavours to prevent those Disorders, all proved vain; for most of those that appeared in Arms were Drunk, and cryed out, They disown’d all manner of Government. Whereupon, by Capt. Leysler’s perswasion, they proclaimed him to be their Commander, there being then no other Commission Officer amongst them.

Capt. Leysler being in this manner possest of the Fort, took some Persons to his Assistance, which he call’d, The Committee of Safety. And the Lieut. Governour, Francis Nicollson, being in this manner forced out of his Command, for the safety of his Person, which was daily threatned, withdrew out of the Province.

About a week after, Reports came from Boston, That their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princes of Orange were proclaimed King and Queen of England. Whereupon the Council and Convention were very desirous to get that Proclamation, and not only wrote for it, but some of them hearing that two Gentlemen were coming from Connecticut with a Copy of said Proclamation, went out two days to meet them, in expectation of having the Happiness to proclaim it; but Major Gold and Mr. Fitz, missing them, having put the Proclamation into Capt. Leysler’s hands, he, without taking any Notice of the Council or Convention, did proclaim the same, though very disorderly, after which he went with his Accomplices to the Fort, and the Gentlemen of the Council and Magistrates, and most of the principal Inhabitants and Merchants, went to Coll. Bayards House and drank the Health and Prosperity of King William and Queen Mary with great Expressions of Joy.

Two days after, a printed Proclamation was procured by some of the Council, dated the 14th of February, 1688, whereby their Majesties confirmed all Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace, Collectors and Receivers of the Revenues, etc., being Protestants; which was forth-with published at the City Hall by the Mayor and Alder-men, accompanyed with the Council, and most of the chief Citizens and Merchants. And pursuant thereunto the Collector, Mat. Plowman, being a Papist, was forth-with suspended by the Convention; and Coll. Bayard, Alderman, Paul Richards, Capt. Thomas Winham, and Lieut. John Haynes, Merchants, were by them commissionated and appointed to collect the Revenue until Orders should arrive from England. Whereupon those Gentlemen were sworn by Coll. Cortland, then Major of the City, they being the first in this Province that took the Oathes to their Majesties appointed by Act of Parliament, instead of the Oathes of Allegiance and Supreamacy.

But as soon as those Gentlemen entered upon the Office, Capt. Leysler with a party of his Men in Arms, and Drink, fell upon them at the Custom-House, and with Naked Swords beat them thence, endeavouring to Massacree some of them, which were Rescued by Providence. Whereupon said Leysler beat an Alarm, crying about the City, “Treason, Treason,” and made a strict search to seize Coll. Bayard, who made his escape, and departed for Albany, where he staid all Summer, in hopes that Orders might arrive from England to settle those Disorders.

The said Capt. Leysler, finding almost every man of Sence, Reputation, or Estate in the place to oppose and discourage his Irregularities, caused frequent false Alarms to be made, and sent several parties of his armed Men out of the Fort, drag’d into nasty Goals within said Fort several of the principal Magistrates, Officers and Gentlemen, and others, that would not own his Power to be lawful, which he kept in close Prison during Will and Pleasure, without any Process, or allowing them to Bail. And he further publish’t several times, by beat of Drums, That all those who would not come into the Fort and sign their hands, and so thereby to own his Power to be lawful, should be deemed and esteemed as Enemies to his Majesty and the Country, and be by him treated accordingly. By which means many of the Inhabitants, tho’ they abhor’d his Actions, only to escape a nasty Goal and to secure their Estates were by fear and compulsion drove to comply, submit and sign to whatever he commanded.

And though Capt. Leysler had at first so violently opposed the collecting of the Revenue, alledging it unlawful, as soon as his Wines were landed, and that he got into some Power, he forth-with set up for himself the collecting of said Revenue by Peter d’ Lanoy, allowing him a great Sallary, and all the Perquisits of that Office.

Upon the 10th of December following returned the said Mr. John Riggs from England, with Letters from his Majesty and the Lords, in answer to the Letters sent by the Lieut. Governour and Council above recited, Directed, “To Our Trusty and Well-beloved Francis Nicholson, Esq; Our Lieutenant Governour and Commander in chief of Our Province of New-York in America, and in his absence To such as for the time being, take care for the Preservation of the Peace, and administring the Laws in Our said Province.” Whereby his Majesty approved of the Proceedings and Care that had been taken by said Lieut. Governour and Council for the Peace and Safety of the Province, with further Power and Directions to continue therein till further Orders. Which said Letters the said Mr. Riggs designed to deliver on the following Morning to the Gentlemen of the Council, to whom they properly did belong, being an answer to their said Letter; but was obstructed therein by said Leysler, who sent a party of his Men in Arms, and brought said Riggs to the Fort, where he forced said Letters from him, though some Gentlemen of the Council, that went the same time to the Fort, protested against it, but he drove them out of the Fort, calling them Rogues, Papists, and other opprobious Names.

Soon after the Receipt of said Letters, said Capt. Leysler stiled himself Lieutenant Governour, appointed a Council, and presumed further to call a select Number of his own Party, who called themselves The General Assembly of the Province, and by their advice and assistance raised several Taxes and great Sums of Money from their Majesties good Subjects within this Province. Which Taxes, together with that 773£. 12s. in Money, which he had seized from the Government, and the whole Revenue, he applyed to his own use, and to maintain said Disorders, allowing his private men 18d. per Day, and to others proportionably.

On the 20th of January following Coll. Bayard and Mr. Nicolls had the ill fortune to fall into his hands, and were in a barbarous manner, by a party in Arms, drag’d into the Fort, and there put into a Nasty place, without any manner of Process, or being allowed to bayl, though the same was offered for said Coll. Bayard, by some of the ablest and richest Inhabitants, to the Sum of Twenty Thousand Pounds, either for his appearance to answer, or depart the Province, or to go for England; but without any Cause given, or Reasons assigned, laid said Coll. Bayard in Irons, and kept him and Mr. Nicolls close Prisoners for the space of fourteen Moneths, where they, with several others, that had been long detained Prisoners, were set at Liberty by Governour Slaughter.

And whilest he kept those Gentlemen in Prison, he quartered his armed Men in their Houses, where they committed all manner of Outrages; And to give one Instance of many others, A Party of twelve Men were quartered at the House of Coll. Bayard, with directions to pillage and plunder at discretion, which was bought off with Money and plentiful Entertainment. But the same day, when that party had received their Money, another party came in with Naked Swords, opened several Chambers and Chests in said House, and did Rob and carry away what Money and other Goods they found.

At the same time Coll. Bayard and Mr. Nicolls were taken, strict search was made for Coll. Cortlandt, but he, with several other Gentlemen, having made their escape, were forced to leave their Families and Concerns, and remain in Exile, till relieved by the arrival of Governour Slaughter.

It is hardly to be exprest what Cruelties Capt. Leysler and his Accomplices imposed upon the said Prisoners, and all others that would not own his Power to be lawful. Neither could the Protestant Ministers in the Province escape their Malice and Cruelty; for Mr. Selyns, Minister of New-York, was most grosly abused by Leysler himself in the Church at the time of Divine Service, and threatned to be silenced, etc. Mr. Dellius, Minister at Albany, to escape a nasty Goal, was forced to leave his Flock, and fly for shelter into New-England. Mr. Varick, Minister of the Dutch Towns on Nassaw-Island, was by armed men drag’d out of his House to the Fort, then imprisoned without bayl, for speaking (as was pretended) Treasonable words against Capt. Leysler and the Fort; then prosecuted, and decreed by Peter d’ Lanoy, pretended Judge, without any Commission or Authority, To be deprived from his Ministerial Function, amerced in a Fine of 80£. and to remain in close Prison till that Fine should be paid; yea, he was so tormented, that in all likelyhood it occasioned and hastened the suddain Death of that most Reverend and Religious Man. The French Ministers, Mr. Perret and Mr. Dellie, had some better Quarters, but were often threatned to be prosecuted in like manner, because they would not approve of his Power and disorderly proceedings.

None in the Province, but those of his Faction, had any safety in their Estates; for said Capt. Leysler, at will and pleasure, sent to those who disapproved of his Actions, to furnish him with Money, Provisions, and what else he wanted, and upon denyal sent armed men out of the Fort, and forcibly broke open several Houses, Shops, Cellars, Vessels, and other places where they expected to be supplyed, and without any the least payment or satisfaction, carried their Plunder to the Fort; all which was extreamly approved of by those poor Fellows which he had about him, and was forced to feed and maintain; and so he stiled those his Robberies with the gilded Name and Pretence, That it was for their Majesties King William and Queen Mary’s special Service, though it was after found out, that whole Cargo’s of those stolen goods were sold to his Friends in the City, and Shipt off for the West Indies and else where.

In this manner he the said Leysler, with his Accomplices, did force, pillage, rob and steal from their Majesties good Subjects within this Province, almost to their utter Ruin, vast Sums of Money, and other Effects, the estimation of the Damages done only within this City of New-York amounting, as by Account may appear, to the Sum of Thirteen Thousand Nine Hundred and Fifty Nine Pounds, besides the Rapines, Spoils and Violences done at Coll. Willets on Nassaw-Island, and to many others in several parts of the Province.

And thus you may see how he used and exercised an Exorbitant, Arbitrary and Unlawful Power over the Persons and Estates of his Majesties good Subjects here, against the known and Fundamental Laws of the Land, and in subvertion of the same, to the great Oppression of his Majesties Subjects, and to the apparent decay of Trade and Commerce.

In this Calamity, Misery and Confusion was this Province, by those Disorders, enthrawled near the space of two years, until the arrival of his Majesties Forces, under the command of Major Ingoldsby, who, with several Gentlemen of the Council, arrived about the last day of January, 1690/1, which said Gentlemen of the Council, for the Preservation of the Peace, sent and offered to said Leysler, That he might stay and continue his Command in the Fort, only desiring for themselves and the Kings Forces quietly to quarter and refresh themselves in the City, till Governour Slaughter should arrive; but the said Leysler, instead of complying, asked Mr. Brooke, one of his Majesties Council, Who were appointed of the Council in this Province? and Mr. Brooke having named Mr. Phillips, Coll. Cortland and Coll. Bayard, he fell into a Passion and cry’d, “What! those Papist Dogs, Rogues! Sacrament! if the King should send Three Thousand such I would cut them all off”; And without any cause given, he proclaimed open War against them. Whereupon they, for Self-preservation, protection of the Kings Forces and Stores, and the safety of the City, were necessitated to perswade to their assistance several of their Majesties good Subjects then in Opposition against the said Leysler, with no other intent, as they signified to him by several Letters and Messages, but only for self-security and Defence; yet notwithstanding, the said Leysler proceeded to make War against them and the Kings Forces, and fired a vast Number of great and small Shot in the City, whereby several of his Majesties Subjects were killed and wounded as they passed in the streets upon their lawful Occasions, tho’ no Opposition was made on the other side.

At this height of Extremity was it when Governour Slaughter arrived on the 19th of March, 1691, who having publish’t his Commission from the City Hall, with great signs of Joy, by firing all the Artillary within and round the City, sent thrice to demand the surrender of the Fort from Capt. Leysler and his Accomplices, which was thrice denyed, but upon great Threatnings, the following Day surrendered to Governor Slaughter, who forth-with caused the said Capt. Leysler, with some of the chief Malefactors, to be bound over to answer their Crimes at the next Supream Court of Judicature, where the said Leysler and his pretended Secretary Millborn did appear, but refused to plead to the Indictment of the grand Jury, or to own the Jurisdiction of that Court; and so after several hearings, as Mutes, were found guilty of High Treason and Murder, and executed accordingly.

Several of the other Malefactors that pleaded were also found Guilty, and particularly one Abraham Governeer for Murdering of an Old Man peaceably passing along the Street, but were Reprieved by Governour Sloughter, and upon Coll. Fletcher’s arrival by him set at liberty, upon their Submission and promise of good Behaviour.

Sir, All what is here set down is True, and can be proved and justified by the Men of greatest Probity and best Figure amongst us. If I were to give a particular Narrative of all the Cruelties and Robberies perpetrated upon their Majesties most affectionate Subjects in this Province, they would fill a Volumn: There was no need of any Revolution here; there were not ten Jacobites in the whole; they were all well known, and the strictest Protestants, and men of best Figure, Reputation and Estates were at the Helm, it may plainly be perceived by the several steps and measures were followed at that time, and by their Letters to the then Earl, now Duke of Shrewsbury, and to the Lords, and the Kings Answer thereunto. The Copy of which Answer, and some other Papers worthy of your perusal, are inclosed.

So soon as Governour Sloughter arrived, an Assembly was called, which upon the 18th of April, 1691, did present an Address to his Excellency, signed by their Speaker, together with the Resolves of that House, which when you are pleased to read, gives the Conclusive Opinion and Judgment of the General Assembly of this Province, of all those disorderly Proceedings, for which those two have suffered Death, and their Sentence was since approved by Her Majesty, of ever blessed Memory, in Council.

Many worthy Protestants in England, and other parts of the world, being sincerely devoted to his Majesties Interest, have yet notwithstanding (unacquainted with our Circumstances, and not duely apprized of the truth) been more easily induced to give credit to the false Glosses and Calumnies of byassed and disaffected Persons from this Province. But in my Observation, most Gentlemen that have come hither so prepossessed, after some time spent here have been thorowly convinced of their Mistake, and that those men who suffered Death, did not from pure zeal for their Majesties Interest, and the Protestant Religion, but being of desperate Fortune, thrust themselves into Power, of purpose to make up their wants by the Ruin and Plunder of his Majesties Loyal Subjects, and were so far engaged in their repeated Crimes, that they were driven to that height of Desperation, had not the Providence of Almighty God prevented it, the whole Province had been Ruined and Destroyed.

I have put this in writing at your Request, to assist your Memory, and leave it to his Excellency Coll. Fletcher, and your own Observations, to enlarge upon the Characters of those Persons who have been the greatest Sufferers in the time of those Disorders, and of their Patience and Moderation since your arrival; also, of the Disaffected, and the Causes which you have frequently observed to hold this Province in Disquiet and Trouble. Notwithstanding all which, and the frequent Attachs of the French and Indians upon our Fronteers, this Province has not lost one foot of ground during the War, but have had considerable Advantages upon the Enemy, which, under God, is due to the prudent and steady Conduct and great Care and Diligence of Coll. Fletcher, our present Governour.

You have been an Eye Witness, and have had Time and Experience enough to enable you to inform others in England, which if you will please to do, I doubt not but it will gain Credit, and be an extraordinary piece of Service to this Province. I am,

Beseeching yo’r hono’r will vouchsafe to allow, that in 30 years, divers occurrences are laps’d out of mind, and others imperfectly retained.

So as the most solemn obedience can be now paid, is to pursue the track of bare-fac’d truths, as close as my memory can recollect, to have seen, or believed, from credible ffriends, with concurring circumstances.

And whatsoever yo’r celebrated wisdom shall finde amisse in the composure, my intire dependence is upon yo’r candour favourably to accept these most sincere endeavo’rs of …

The one was a large comet, every evening for a week or more, at southwest, thirty-five degrees high, streaming like a horse’s taile, westwards, untill it reach’d (almost) the horrison, and setting toward the northwest.

Another was, fflights of pigeons, in breadth nigh a quarter of the midhemisphere, and of their length there was no visible end; whose weight brake down the limbs of large trees whereon these rested at night, of which the ffowlers shot abundance and eat ’em; this sight put the old planters under the more portentous apprehensions, because the like was seen as they said) in 1640 when th’ Indians committed the last massacre, but not after, until that present year 1675.

The third strange appearance was swarms of fflyes about an inch long, and as big as the top of a man’s little finger, rising out of spigot holes in the earth, which would eat the new sprouted leaves from the tops of the trees without other harm, and in a month left us.

My dwelling was in Northumberland, the lowest county on the Potomack river, Stafford being the upmost, where, having also a plantation, servants, cattle, &c., my overseer there had agreed with one Robert Hen to come thither and be my herdsman, who then lived ten miles above it ; but on a Sabbath day morning in the summer anno 1675, people in their way to church, saw this Hen lying thwart his threshold, and an Indian without the door, both chopt on their heads, arms, and other parts, as if done with Indian hatchets, th’ Indian was dead, but Hen when ask’d who did that? answered: Doegs, Doegs, and soon died, then a boy came out from under a bed, where he had hid himself, and told them, Indians had come at break of day and done those murders.

From this Englishman’s bloud did (by degrees) arise Bacon’s rebellion with the following mischiefs which overspread all Virginia and twice endangered Maryland, as by the ensuing account is evident.

Of this horrid action, Colonel Mason, who commanded the militia regiment of ffoot, and Capt. Brent, the troop of horse of that county (both dwelling six or eight miles downwards), having speedy notice, raised 30, or more men, and pursu’d those Indians 20 miles up and 4 miles over that river into Maryland, where, landing at dawn of day they found two small paths each leader with this party took a separate path and in less than a furlong, either found a cabin, which they (silently) surrounded. Capt. Brent went to the Doegs’ cabin (as it proved to be) who speaking the Indian tongue called to have a “matchacomicha, weewhio,” i.e. a councill called presently such being the usuall manner with Indians) the king came trembling forth, and wou’d have fled, when Capt. Brent, catching hold of his twisted lock (which was all the hair he wore) told him he was come for the murderer of Robert Hen, the king pleaded ignorance and slipt loos, whom Brent shot dead with his pistoll, th’ Indians shot two or three guns out of the cabin, th’ English shot into it, th’ Indians throng’d out at the door and fled, the English shot as many as they cou’d, so that they killed ten, as Capt. Brent told me, and brought away the king’s son of about 8 years old, concerning whom is an observable passage, at the end of this expedition; the noise of this shooting awaken’d the Indians in the cabin, which Coll. Mason had encompassed, who likewise rush’d out and fled, of whom his company (supposing from that noise of shooting Brent’s party to be engaged) shott (as the Coll. informed me) ffourteen before an Indian came, who with both hands shook him (friendly) by one arm saying Susquehanoughs netoughs i.e. Susquehanough friends and fled, whereupon he ran amongst his men, crying out “ffor the Lords sake shoot no more, these are our friends the Susquehanoughs.

This unhappy scene ended; Collo. Mason took the king of the Doegs son home with him, who lay ten dayes in bed, as one dead, with eyes and mouth shutt, no breath discern’d, but his body continuing warm, they believed him yett alive; th’ aforenamed Capt. Brent (a papist) coming thither on a visit, and seeing his little prisoner thus languishing said “perhaps he is pawewawd i. e. bewitch’d, and that he had heard baptism was an effectuall remedy against witchcraft wherefore advis’d to baptize him Collo. Mason answered, no minister cou’d be had in many miles; Brent replied yo’r clerk Mr. Dobson may do that office, which was done by the church of England liturgy; Coll. Mason with Capt. Brent godfather and Mrs. Mason godmother, my overseer Mr. Pimet being present, from whom I first heard it, and which all th’ other persons (afterwards) affirm’d to me; the ffour men return’d to drinking punch, but Mrs. Mason staying and looking on the child, it open’d the eyes and breath’d, whereat she ran for a cordial, which he took from a spoon, gaping for more and so (by degrees) recovered, tho’ before his baptism, they had often tryed the same meanes but could not by no endeavours wrench open his teeth.

This was taken for a convincing proofe against infidelity.

But to return from this digression, the Susquehanoughs were newly driven from their habitations, at the head of Chesepiack bay, by the Cineca Indians, down to the head of Potomack, where they sought protection under the Pascataway Indians, who had a fort near the head of that river, and also were our ffriends.

After this unfortunate exploit of Mason and Brent, one or two being kill’d in Stafford, boats of war were equipt to prevent excursions over the river, and at the same time murders being (likewise) committed in Maryland, by whom not known, on either side the river, both countrys raised their quota’s of a thousand men, upon whose coming before the ffort, th’ Indians sent out 4 of their great men, who ask’d the reason of that hostile appearance, what they said more or offered, I do not remember to have heard; but our two comanders caused them to be (instantly) slaine, after which the Indians made an obstinate resistance shooting many of our men, and making frequent, fierce and bloody sallyes, and when they were call’d to, or offered parley, gave no other answer, than “where are our four cockarouses, i.e. great men?

At the end of six weeks, march’d out seventy five Indians with their women children &c. who (by moonlight past our guards hallowing and firing att them without opposition, leaving 3 or 4 decrepits in the ffort.

The next morning th’ English followed, but could not, or (for fear of ambuscades) would not overtake these desperate fugitives the number we lost in that siege I did not here was published.

The walls of this fort were high banks of earth, with fflankers having many loop-holes, and a ditch round all, and without this a row of tall trees fastned 3 foot deep in the earth, their bodies from 5 to 8 inches diameter, watled 6 inches apart to shoot through with the tops twisted together, and also artificially wrought, as our men could make no breach to storm it nor (being low land) coud they undermind it by reason of water neither had they cannon to batter itt, so that ’twas not taken, untill ffamine drive the Indians out of it.

They escap’d Indians (forsaking Maryland) took their rout over the head of that river, and thence over the heads of Rapahanock and York rivers, killing whom they found of th’ upmost plantations untill they came to the head of James river, where (with Bacon and others) they slew Mr. Bacon’s overseer, whom he much loved, and one of his servants, whose bloud hee vowed to revenge if possible.

In these frightfull times the most exposed small families withdrew into our houses of better numbers, which we fortified with pallisadoes and redoubts, neighbours in bodies joined their labours from each plantation to others alternately, taking their arms into the ffields, and setting centinels; no man stirr’d out of door unarm’d, Indians were (ever and anon) espied, three 4. 5. 6 in a party lurking throughout the whole land, yet (what was remarkable) I rarely heard of any houses burnt, though abundance was forsaken, nor ever, of any corn or tobacco cut up, or other injury done, besides murders, except the killing a very few cattle and swine.

Frequent complaints of bloodshed were sent to S’r Wm. Berkeley (then Govern’r) from the heads of the rivers, which were as often answered with promises of assistance.

These at the heads of James and York rivers (having now most people destroyed by the Indians fflight thither from Potomack) grew impatient at the many slaughters of their neighbours and rose for their own defence, who chusing Mr. Bacon for their leader sent oftentimes to the Govern’r, humbly beseeching a comission to go against those Indians at their own charge which his hono’r as often promisd but did not send; the misteryes of these delays, were wondred at and which I ne’re heard any coud into, other than the effects of his passion, and a new (not to be mentioned) occasion of avarice, to both which, he was (by the comon vogue) more than a little addicted: whatever were the popular surmizes and murmurings, vizt.

“that no bullets would pierce bever skins.

“rebbells forfeitures would be loyall inheritances &c.

During these protractions and people often slaine, most or all the officers, civill and military with as many dwellers next the heads of the rivers as made up 300 men taking Mr. Bacon for their coman’r, met, and concerted together, the danger of going without a comiss’n on the one part, and the continuall murders of their neighbors on th’ other part (not knowing whose or how many of their own turns might be next) and came to this resolution vizt. to prepare themselves with necessaries for a march, but interim to send again for a comission, which if could or could not be obteyned by a certaine day, they woud proceed comission or no comission.

This day lapsing and no com’n come, they march’d into the wilderness in quest of these Indians after whom the Govern’r sent his proclamacon, denouncing all rebells, who shoud not return within a limited day, whereupon those of estates obey’d; but Mr. Bacon with 57 men proceded untill their provisions were near spent, without finding enemy’s when coming nigh a ffort of ffriend Indians, on the’ other side a branch of James river, they desired reliefe offering paym’t. which these Indians kindly promised to help them with on the morrow, but put them off with promises untill the third day, so as having then eaten their last morsells they could not return, but must have starved in the way homeward and now ’twas suspected, these Indians had received private messages from the Governo’r. and those to be the causes of these delusive procrastinations; whereupon the English waded shoulder deep thro’ that branch to the ffort pallisado’s still intreating and tendering pay, for victuals ; but that evening a shot from the place they left on the other side of that branch kill’d one of Mr. Bacon’s men, which made them believe, those in the ffort had sent for other Indians to come behind ’em and cut ’em off.

Hereupon they fired the palisado’s, storm’d & burnt the ffort and cabins, and (with the losse of three English) slew 150 Indians.

The circumstances of this expedicn Mr. Bacon entertain’d me with, at his own chamber, at a visit I made him, the occasion whereof is hereafter menconed.

Ffom hence they return’d home where writts were come up to elect members for an assembly, when Mr. Bacon was unanimously chosen for one, who coming down the river was comanded by a ship with guns to come on board, where waited Major Hone the high sheriff of Jamestown ready to seize him, by whom he was carried down to the Govern’s and by him receiv’d with a surprizing civillity in the following words “Mr. Bacon have you forgot to be a gentleman. No, may it please yo’r hon’r answer’d Mr. Bacon; then replyed the Gover’r I’ll take yo’r parol, and gave him his liberty in March 1675–76 writts came up to Stafford to choose their two members for an assembly to meet in May; when Collo. Mason Capt. Brent and other gentlemen of that county, invited me to stand a candidate; a matter I little dreamt of, having never had inclinacons to tamper in the precarious intrigues of govern’t. and my hands being full of my own business; they preas’t severall cogent argum’ts. and I having considerable debts in that county, besides my plantation concerns, where (in one and th’ other) I had much more severely suffered, than any of themselves by th’ Indians disturbances in the sumer and winter foregoing. I held it not (then) discreet to disoblige the rules of it, so Coll. Mason with myself were elected without objection, he at time convenient went on horseback ; I took my sloop and the morning I arriv’d to James town after a weeks voyage, was welcomed with the strange acclamations of All’s over Bacon is taken, having not heard at home of the southern comotons, other than rumours like idle tales, of one Bacon risen up in rebellion, no body knew for what, concerning the Indians.

The next forenoon, th’ assembly being met in a chamber over the generall court & our speaker chosen, the govern’r sent for us down, where his hono’r with a pathetic emphasis made a short abrupt speech wherein were these words.

“If they had killed my grandfather and grandmother, my father and mother and all my friends, yet if they come to treat of peace, they ought to have gone in peace and sat down.

The two chief comanders at the forementioned siege, who slew the ffour Indian great men, being present and part of our assembly.

The govern’r stood up againe and said “if there be joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner that repenteth, there is joy now, for we have a penitent sinner come before us, call Mr. Bacon; then did Mr. Bacon upon one knee at the bar deliver a sheet of paper confessing his crimes, and begging pardon of God the king and the govern’r. Whereto (after a short pause) he answered “God forgive you, I forgive you, thrice repeating the same words ; when Collo. Cole (one of the councill) said, “and all that were with him, Yea, said the govern’r and all that were with him, twenty or more persons being then in irons who were taking coming down in the same and other vessels with Mr. Bacon.

About a minute after this the govern’r starting up from his chair a third time said “Mr. Bacon! if you will live civilly but till next quarter court (doubling the words) but till next quarter court, Ile promise to restore you againe to yo’r place there pointing with his hand to Mr. Bacons seat, he having been of the council before these troubles, tho’ he had been a very short time in Virginia but was deposed by the foresaid proclamacon, and in th’ afternoon passing by the court door, in my way up to our chamber, I saw Mr. Bacon on this quondam seat with the govern’r and councill, which seemed a marveilous indulgence to one whom he had so lately proscribed as a rebell.

The govern’r had directed us to consider of meanes for security from th’ Indian insults and to defray the charge &c. advising us to beware of two rogues amongst us, naming Laurence and Drumond both dwelling at Jamestown and who were not at the Pascataway siege.

But at our entrance upon businesse, some gentlemen took this opportunity to endeavor the redressing several grievances the country then labour’d under, motions were made for inspecting the publick revenues, the collectors accompts &c. and so far was proceeded as to name part of a committee whereof Mr. Bristol (now in London) was and myself another, when we were interrupted by pressing messages from the govern’r to medle with nothing, until the Indian business was dispatch’t.

This debate rose high, but was overruled and I have not heard that those inspections have since then been insisted upon, tho’ such of that indigent people as had no benefits from the taxes groand under our being thus overborn.

The next thing was a committee for the Indian affaires, whereof in appointing the members, myself was unwillingly nominated having no knowledge in martiall preparations, and after our names were taken, some of the house moved for sending 2 of our members to intreat the govern’r wou’d please to assign two of his councill to sit with, and assist us in our debates, as had been usuall.

When seeing all silent looking each at other with many discontented faces, I adventur’d to offer my humble opinion to the speaker “for the committee to form methods as agreeable to the sense of the house as we could, and report ’em whereby they would more clearly see, on what points to give the govern’r and council that trouble if perhaps it might bee needful.

These few words rais’d an uproar, one party urging hard “it had been customary and ought not to be omitted; whereto Mr. Presly my neighbour an old assembly man, sitting next me, rose up, and (in a blundering manner replied) “tis true, it has been customary, but if we have any bad customes amongst us, we are come here to mend ’em which set the house in a laughter.

This was huddl’d off without coming to a vote, and so the committee must submit to be overaw’d, and have every carpt at expression carried streight to the governor.

Our commitee being sat, the Quenn of Pamunkey (descended from Oppechankenough a former Emperor of Virginia) was introduced, who entred the chamber with a comportment gracefull to admiration, bringing on her right hand an Englishman interpreter, and on the left her son a stripling twenty years of age, she having round her head a plat of black and white wampum peague three inches broad in imitation of a crown, and was cloathed in a mantle of dress’t deer skins with the hair outwards and the edge cut round 6 inches deep which made strings resembling twisted frenge from the shoulders to the feet; thus with grave courtlike gestures and a majestick air in her face, she walk’d up our long room to the lower end of the table, where after a few intreaties she sat down; th’ interpreter and her son standing by her on either side as they walked up, our chairman asked her what men she woud lend us for guides in the wilderness and to assist us against our enemy Indians, she spake to th’ interpreter to inform her what the chairman said, (tho’ we believed she understood him) he told us she bid him ask her son to whom the English tongue was familiar, and who was reputed the son of an English colonel, yet neither woud he speak to or seem to understand the chairman but th’ interpreter told us, he referred all to his mother, who being againe urged she after a little musing with an earnest passionate countenance as if tears were ready to gush out and a fervent sort of expression made a harangue about a quarter of an hour often, interlacing (with a high shrill voice and vehement passion) these words “Tatapatamoi Chepiack, i.e. Tatapamoi dead Coll. Hill being next me, shook his head, I ask’d him what was the matter, he told me all she said was too true to our shame, and that his father was generall in that battle, where diverse years before Tatapatamoi her husband had led a hundred of his Indians in help to th’ English against our former enemy Indians, and was there slaine with most of his men; for which no compensation (at all) had been to that day rendered to her wherewith she now upbraided us.

Her discourse ending and our morose chairman not advancing one cold word toward asswaging the anger and grief her speech and demeanor manifested under her oppression, nor taking any notice of all she had said, neither considering that we (then) were in our great exigency; supplicants to her for a favour of the same kind as the former, for which we did not deny the having been so ingrate, he rudely push’d againe the same question “what Indians will you now contribute, &c.? of this disregard she signified her resentment by a disdainfull aspect, and turning her head half aside, sate mute till that same question being press’d, a third time, she not returning her face to the board, answered with a low slighting voice in her own language “twelve, tho’ she then had a hundred and fifty Indian men, in her town, and so rose up and gravely walked away, as not pleased with her treatment.

Whilst some daies passed in setling the quota’s of men arms and amunicon provisions &c. each county was to furnish, one morning early a bruit ran about the town Bacon is fled, Bacon is fled, whereupon I went straight to Mr. Lawrence, who (formerly) was of Oxford university, and for wit learning and sobriety was equall’d there by few, and who some years before (as Col. Lee tho’ one of the councill and a friend of the govern’rs inform’d me) had been partially treated at law, for a considerable estate on behalf of a corrupt favourite; which Lawrence complaining loudly of, the govern’r bore him a grudge and now shaking his head, said, “old treacherous villain, and that his house was scarcht that morning, at day break, but Bacon was escaped into the country, having intimation that the governor’s generosity in pardoning him, and his followers and restoring him to his seat in councill, were no other than previous weadles to amuse him and his adherents and to circumvent them by stratagem, forasmuch as the taking Mr. Bacon again into the councill was first to keep him out of assembly, and in the next place the govern’r knew the country people were hastning down with dreadfull threatnings to double revenge all wrongs shoud be done to Mr. Bacon or his men, or who-ever shou’d have had the least hand in ’em.

And so much was true that this Mr. Young Nathaniel Bacon (not yet arrived to 30 yeares) had a nigh relation namely Col. Nathaniel Bacon of long standing in the councill a very rich politick man, and childless, designing this kinsman for his heir, who (not without much paines) had prevailed with his uneasy cusin to deliver the forementioned written recantation at the bar, having compiled it ready to his hand and by whose means ’twas supposed that timely intimation was conveyed to the young gentleman to flee for his life, and also in 3 or 4 daies after Mr. Bacon was first seiz’d I saw abundance of men in town come thither from the heads of the rivers, who finding him restor’d and his men at liberty, return’d home satisfied; a few daies after which the govern’r seeing all quiet, gave out private warrants to take him againe, intending as was thought to raise the militia, and so to dispose things as to prevent his friends from gathering any more into a like numerous body and coming down a second time to save him.

In three of ffour daies after this escape, upon news that Mr. Bacon was 30 miles up the river, at the head of four hundred men, the govern’r sent to the parts adjacent, on both sides James river for the militia and all the men could be gotten to come and defend the town, espress’s came almost hourly of th’ army’s approaches, who in less than 4 daies after the first account of ’em att 2 of the clock entered the town, without being withstood, and form’d a body upon a green, not a flight shot from the end of the state house of horse and ffoot, as well regular as veteran troops, who forthwith possest themselves of all the avenues, disarming all in town, and coming thither in boats or by land.

In half an hour after this the drum beat for the house to meet, and in less than an hour more Mr. Bacon came with a file of ffusileers on either hand near the corner of the state house where the govern’r and councill went forth to him; we saw from the window the govern’r open his breast, and Bacon strutting betwixt his two files of men with his left arm on Kenbow flinging his right arm every way both like men distracted; and if in this moment of fury, that enraged multitude had faln upon the govern’r and council we of the assembly expected the same imediate fate; I stept down and amongst the crowd of spectators found the seamen of my sloop, who pray’d me not to stir from them, when in two minutes, the govern’r walk’d towards his private apartm’t. A coits cast distant at th’ other end of the state house, the gentlemen of the council following him, and after them walked Mr. Bacon with outragious postures of his head arms body, and leggs, often tossing his hand from his sword to his hat and after him came a detachment of ffusileers (musketts not being there in use) who with their cocks bent presented their ffusils at a window of the assembly chamber filled with faces, repeating with menacing voices “we will have it, we will have itt, half a minute when as one of our house a person known to many of them, shook his handkercher out at the window, saying you shall have it, you shall have itt, 3 or 4 times; at these words they sate down their fusils unbent their locks and stood still untill Bacon coming back, followed him to their main body; in this hubub a servant of mine got so nigh as to hear the govern’rs words, and also followed Mr. Bacon, and heard what he said, who came and told me, that when the govern’r opened his breast he said “here! shoot me, foregod fair mark shoot, often rehearsing the same, without any other words; whereto Mr. Bacon answer’d “no may it please yo’r hono’r we will not hurt a hair of yo’r head, nor of any other mans, we are come for a comission to save our lives from th’ Indians, which you have so often promised, and now we will have it before we go.

But when Mr. Bacon followed the govern’r and councill with the forementioned impetuos (like delirious) actions whil’st that party presented their ffusils at the window full of ffaces, he said “Dam my bloud I’le kill govern’r councill assembly and all, and then I’le sheath my sword in my own heart’s bloud; and afterwards ’twas said Bacon had given a signall to his men who presented their fusils at those gasing out at the window, that if he shoud draw his sword, they were on sight of it to fire, and slay us, so near was the massacre of us all that very minute, had Bacon in that paroxism of phrentick fury but drawn his sword before the pacifick handkercher was shaken out at the window.

In an hour or more after these violent concussions Mr. Bacon came up to our chamber and desired a comission from us to go against the Indians; our speaker sat silent, when one of Mr. Blayton a neighbor to Mr. Bacon and elected with him a member of assembly for the same county (who therefore durst speak to him) made answer, “’twas not in our province, or power, nor of any other, save the king’s viceregent our govern’r, he press’d hard nigh half an hours harangue on the preserving our lives from the Indians, inspecting the publick revenues, th’ exorbitant taxes and redressing the grievances and calamities of that deplorable country, whereto having no other answer, he went away dissatisfied.

Next day there was a rumour the govern’r and councill had agreed Mr. Bacon shou’d have a comission to go generall of the fforces, we then were raising, whereupon I being a member for Stafford, the most northern frontier, and where the war begun, considering that Mr. Bacon dwelling in the most southern ffrontier county, might the less regard the parts I represented, I went to Coll. Cole (an active member of the councill) desiring his advise, if applicacons to Mr. Bacon on that subject were then seasonable and safe, which he approving and earnestly advising I went to Mr. Lawrence who was esteemed Mr. Bacons principall consultant, to whom he took me with him, and there left mewhere I was entertained 2 or 3 hours with the particular relacons of diverse before recited transactions; and as to the matter I spake of, he told me, that th’ govern’r had indeed promised him the comand of the forces, and if his hon’r shou’d keep his word (which he doubted) he assured me “the like care shoud be taken of the remotest corners in the land, as of his own dwelling-house, and pray’d me to advise him what persons in those parts were most fit to bear comands I frankly gave him my opinion that the most satisfactory gentlemen to govern’r and people, would be comanders of the militia, wherewith he was well pleased, and himself wrote a list of those nominated.

That evening I made known what had past with Mr. Bacon to my colleague Coll. Mason (whose bottle attendance doubled my task) the matter he liked well, but questioned the govern’rs approbacon of it.

I confess’d the case required sedate thoughts, reasoning, that he and such gentlemen must either comand or be comanded, and if on their denials Mr. Bacon should take distaste, and be constrained to appoint comanders out of the rabble, the govern’r himself with the persons and estates of all in the land woud be at their dispose, whereby their own ruine might be owing to themselves; in this he agreed and said “If the govern’r woud give his own comission he would be content to serve under generall Bacon (as now he began to be intituled) but first woud consult other gentlemen in the same circumstances; who all concur’d ’twas the most safe barier in view against pernicious designes, if such shoud be put in practice; with this I acquainted Mr. Lawrence who went (rejoicing) to Mr. Bacon with the good tidings, that the militia comanders were inclined to serve under him, as their generall, in case the governor woud please to give them his own comissions.

Wee of the house proceeded to finish the bill for the war, which by the assent of the govern’r and councill being past into an act the govern’r sent us a letter directed to his majesty, wherein were these words “I have above 30 years governed the most flourishing country the sun ever shone over, but am now encompassed with rebellion like waters in every respect like to that of Massanello except their leader, and of like import was the substance of that letter. But we did not believe his hono’r sent us all the wrote to his majesty.

Some judicious gentlemen of our house likewise penn’d a letter or remonstrance to be sent his maj’tie setting forth the gradations of those erupcons, and two or three of them with Mr. Minge our clerk brought it me to compile a few lines forthe conclusion of it, which I did (tho’ not without regret in those watchfull times, when every man had eyes on him, but what I wrote was with all possible deference to the govern’r and in the most soft terms my pen cou’d find the case to admit.

Col. Spencer being my neighbor and intimate friend, and a prevalent member in the councill I pray’d him to intreat the govern’r we might be dissolved, for that was my first and shoud be my last going astray from my wonted sphere of merchandize and other my private concernments into the dark and slippery meanders of court embarrassments, he told me the govern’r had not (then) determined his intention, but he wou’d move his hono’r about itt, and in 2 or 3 dayes we were dissolved, which I was most heartily glad of, because of my getting loose againe from being hampered amongst those pernicious entanglem’ts in the labyrinths and snares of state ambiguities, and which untill then I had not seen the practice nor the dangers of, for it was observ’d that several of the members had secret badges of distinction fixt upon ’em, as not docill enough to gallop the future races, that court seem’d dispos’d to lead ’em, whose maximes I had ofte times heard whisper’d before, and then found confirm’d by diverse considerate gentlem’n vizt. “that the wise and the rich were prone to ffaction and sedition but the fools and poor were easy to be governed.

Many members being met one evening nigh sunsett, to take our leaves each of other, in order next day to return homewards, came Genll. Bacon with his hand full of unfolded papers and overlooking us round, walking in the room said “which of these gentlem’n shall I intreat to write a few words for me where every one looking aside as not willing to meddle; Mr. Lawrence pointed at me saying “that gentleman writes very well which I endeavouring to excuse, Mr. Bacon came stooping to the ground and said “pray Sir do me the hon’r to write a line for me.

This surprizing accostm’t shockt me into a melancholy consternation, dreading upon one hand, that Stafford county would feel the smart resentment if I should refuse him whose favour I had so lately sought and been generously promis’d on their behalf; and on th’ other hand fearing the govern’rs displeasure who I knew woud soon hear of it: what seem’d most prudent at this hazadous dilemma, was to obviate the present impending peril; so Mr. Bacon made me sit the whole night by him filling up those papers, which I then saw were blank comissions sign’d by the govern’r incerting such name and writing other matters as he dictated; which I took to be the happy effects of the consult before mentioned, with the comanders of the militia becausehe gave me the names of very few others to put into these comissions, and in the morning he left me with an hours worke or more to finish, when came to me Capt. Carver, and said he had been to wait on the Generall for a comission, and that he was resolved to adventure his old bones against the Indian rogues with other the like discourse, and at length told me that I was in mighty favor—and he was bid to tell me, that whatever I desired in the general’s power, was at my service, I pray’d him humbly to thank his hon’r and to acquaint him I had no other boon to crave, than his promis’d kindnesse to Stafford county, for beside the not being worthy, I never had been conversant in military matters, and also having lived tenderly, my service cou’d be of no benefit because the hardships and fatigues of a wilderness campaigne would put a speedy period to my daies little expecting to hear of more intestine broiles, I went home to Patomack, where reports were afterwards various: we had account that Generall Bacon was march’d with a thousand men into the fforest to seek the enemy Indians, and in a few daies after our next news was, that the govern’r had sumoned together the militia of Glocester and Middlesex counties to the number of twelve hundred men, and proposed to them to follow and suppress that rebell Bacon; whereupon arose a murmuring before his face “Bacon Bacon Bacon, and all walked out of the field, muttering as they went “Bacon Bacon Bacon, leaving the governor and those that came with him to themselves, who being thus abandon’d wafted over Chesepiacke bay 30 miles to Occomack where are two countres of Virginia.

Mr. Bacon hearing of this came back part of the way, and sent out parties of horse patrolling through every county, carrying away prisoners all whom he distrusted might any more molest his Indian prosecucon yet giving liberty to such as pledg’d him their oaths to return home and live quiet; the copies or contents of which oaths I never saw, but heard were very strict, tho’ little observed.

About this time was a spie detected pretending himself a deserter who had twice or thrice come and gone from party to party and was by councill of warr sentenced to death, after which Bacon declared openly to him “that if any one man in the army wou’d speak a word to save him, he shou’d not suffer, which no man appearing to do, he was excecuted, upon this manifestation of clemency Bacon was applauded for a mercifull man, not wiling to spill Christian bloud, nor indeed was it said, that he put any other man to death in cold bloud, or plunder any house; nigh the same time came Maj. Langston with his troop of horseand quarterd two nights at my house who (after high compliments from the generall) told me I was desired “to accept the lieutenancy for preserving the peace in the s. northern counties betwixt Potomack and Rappahannock rivers, I humbly thank’d his hon’r excusing myself; as I had done before on that invitation of the like nature at Jamestown, but did hear he was mightily offended at my evasions and threatened to remember me.

The govern’r made a 2d attempt coming over from Accomack with what men he could procure in sloops and boats forty miles up the river to Jamestown, which Bacon hearing of, came againe down from his fforest persuit, and finding a bank not a flight shot long, cast up thwart the neck of the peninsula there in Jamestown, he stormed it, and took the town, in which attack were 12 men slaine and wounded but the govern’r with most of his followers fled back, down the river in their vessells.

Here resting a few daies they concerted the burning of the town, wherein Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Drumond owning the two best houses save one, set fire each to his own house, which example the souldiers following laid the whole town (with church and state-house) in ashes, saying, the rogues should harbour no more there.

On these reiterated molestacons Bacon calls a convention at Midle plantation 15 miles from Jamestown in the month of August 1676, where an oath with one or more proclamations were formed, and writts by him issued for an assembly; the oaths or writs I never saw, but one proclamation comanded all men in the land on pain of death to joine him and retire into the wildernesse upon arrival of the forces expected from England, and oppose them untill they shoud propose or accept to treat of an accomodation, which we who lived comfortably could not have undergone, so as the whole land must have become an Aceldama if God’s exceeding mercy had not timely removed him.

During these tumults in Virginea a 2d danger menaced Maryland by an insurrection in that province, complaining of their heavy taxes &c. where 2 or 3 of the leading malecontents (men otherwise of laudable characters) were put to death, which stifled the father spreading of that flame, Mr. Bacon (at this time) press’t the best ship in James river carrying 20 guns and putting into her his lieutenant generall Mr. Bland (a gentleman newly come thither from England to possesse the estate of his deceased uncle late of the council) and under him the forementioned Capt. Carver formerly a comander of merch’ts ships with men and all necessaries, he sent her to ride before Accomack to curband intercept all smaller vessels of war comission’d by the govern’r coming often over and making depredations on the western shoar, as if we had been fforreign enemies, which gives occasion to his place to digresse a few words.

Att first assembly after the peace came a message to them from the govern’r for some marks of distinction to be sett on his loyal friends of Accomack, who received him in his adversity which when came to be consider’d Col. Warner (then speaker) told the house “ye know that what mark of distinction his hon’r coud have sett on those of Accomack unlesse to give them earmarks or burnt marks for robbing and ravaging honest people, who stay’d at home and preserv’d the estates of those who ran away, when none intended to hurt ’em.

Now returning to Capt. Carver the govern’r sent for him to come on shoar, promising his peacable return, who answer’d, he could not trust his word, but if he woud send his hand and seal, he wou’d adventure to wait upon his hono’r which was done, and Carver went in his sloop well armed and man’d with the most trusty of his men where he was caress’d with wine &c. and large promises, if he would forsake Bacon, resigne his ship or joine with him; to all which he answer’d that “if he served the Devill he woud be true to his trust, but that he was resolved to go home and live quiet.

In the time of this recepcon and parley, an armed boat was prepared with many oars in a creek not far off, but out of sight, which when Carver sail’d, row’d out of the creek, and it being almost calm the boat outwent the sloop whilst all on board the ship were upon the deck, staring at both, thinking the boats company coming on board by Carvers invitation to be civilly entertained in requitall of the kindness (they supposed he had received on shoar, untill coming under the stern, those in the boat slipt nimbly in at the gun room ports with pistols &c. When one couragious gentleman ran up to the deck, and clapt a pistoll to Blands breast, saying you are my prisoner, the boats company suddainly following with pistolls swords &c. And after Capt. Larimore (the comander of the ship before she was prest) having from the highest and hindmost part of the stern interchang’d a signal from the shoar by flirting his handkercher about his nose, his own former crew had laid handspikes ready, which they (at that instant) caught up &c. so as Bland and Carvers men were amazed and yielded.

Carver seeing a hurly burly on the ships deck, would have gone away with his sloop, but having little wind and the ship threatning to sink him, he tamely came on board; where Blandand he with their party were laid in irons and in 3 or 4 daies Carver was hang’d on shoar, which Sir Henry Chicheley the first of the councill then a prisoner, (with diverse other gentlemen) to Mr. Bacon, did afterwards exclaim against as a most rash and wicked act of the govern’r. he (in particular) expecting to have been treated by way of reprizall, as Bacons friend Carver had been by the govern’r. Mr. Bacon now returns from his last expedicon sick of a fflux; without finding any enemy Indians, having not gone far by reason of the vexations behind him, nor had he one dry day in all his marches to and fro in the fforest whilst the plantations (not 50 miles distant) had a sumer so dry as stinted the Indian corn and tobacco &c. Which the people ascribed to the pawawings i.e. the sorceries of the Indians, in a while Bacon dyes and was succeeded by his Lieuten’t Genll. Ingram, who had one Wakelet next in comand under him, whereupon hasten’d over the govern’r to York river, and with him they articled for themselves and whom else they could, and so all submitted and were pardoned exempting those nominated and otherwise proscribed, in a proclamation of indempnity, the principall of whom were Lawrence and Drumond.

Mr. Bland was then a prisoner having been taken with Carver, as before noted, and in few daies Mr. Drumond was brought in, when the govern’r being on board a ship came imediately to shore and complimented him with the ironicall sarcasm of a low bend, saying “Mr. Drumond! you are very welcome, I am more glad to see you, than any man in Virginia, Mr. Drumond you shall be hang’d in half an hour; who answered what yo’r hon’r pleases, and as soon as a council of war cou’d meet, his sentence be dispatcht and a gibbet erected (which took up near two houses) he was executed.

This Mr. Drumond was a sober Scotch gentleman of good repute with whome I had not a particular acquaintance, nor do I know the cause of that rancour his hono’r had against him, other than his pretensions in comon for the publick but meeting him by accident the morning I left the town, I advis’d him to be very wary, for he saw the govern’r had put a brand upon him he (gravely expressing my name) answered “I am in over shoes, I will be over boots, which I was sorry to heare and left him.

The last account of Mr. Lawrence was from an uppermost plantation, whence he and ffour others desperado’s with horses pistolls &c. march’d away in a snow ancle deep, who were thought to have cast themselves into a branch of some river, rather than be treated like Drumond.

Bacons body was so made away, as his bones were neverfound to be exposed on a gibbet as was purpos’d, stones being laid in his coffin, supposed to be done by Lawrence.

Near this time arrived a small ffleet with a regiment from England S’r John Berry admirall, Col. Herbert Jefferies comander of the land forces and Collo. Morrison who had one year been a former govern’r there, all three joined in comission with or to S’r William Barclay, soon after when a generall court and also an assembly were held, where some of our former assembly (with so many others) were put to death, diverse whereof were persons of honest reputations and handsome estates, as that the assembly petitioned the governour to spill no more bloud, and Mr. Presley at his coming home told me, he believed the govern’r would have hang’d half the countrey, if they had let him alone. The first was Mr. Bland whose ffriends in England had procured his pardon to be sent over with the ffleet, which he pleaded at his tryall, was in the govern’rs pocket (tho’ whether ’twas so, or how it came there, I know not, yet did not hear ’twas openly contradicted,) but he was answered by Coll. Morrison that he pleaded his pardon at swords point, which was look’d upon an odd sort of reply, and he was executed; (as was talked) by private instructions from England the Duke of York having sworn “by God Bacon and Bland shoud dye.

The govern’r went in the ffleet to London (whether by comand from his majesty or spontaneous I did not hear) leaving Col. Jefferyes in his place, and by next shipping came back a person who waited on his hono’r in his voyage, and untill his death, from whom a report was whisper’d about, that the king did say “that old fool has hang’d more men in that naked country, than he had done for the murther of his ffather, whereof the governo’r hearing dyed soon after without having seen his majesty; which shuts up this tragedy.