Nathaniel Bacon (1647–1676)

Colonist responsible for the outbreak of Bacon’s rebellion in the Virginia Colony in the 1670s.
Born January 2, 1647, in Suffolk, England, to wealthy parents, Nathaniel Bacon graduated from Cambridge University. His family, staunch supporters of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans, who gained control in England after the beheading of Charles I during the Great Civil War, fell out of favor, and Bacon himself had already earned the reputation of being a hot-tempered, landless young man with little future. Unwelcome in England, Bacon was sent to the Virginia Colony to make his fortune. He arrived well-connected in 1674—his cousin was the wife of the governor, William Berkeley. Bacon soon had a seat on the governor’s council and a generous land grant. But he gravitated toward the rivals of the long-serving, royalist Berkeley, especially those newly arrived in the colonies or recently freed from indenture. Many of these people became squatters on the Western frontier, and they clashed with Berkeley over his policy of fur trade with the Native Americans, a policy that limited new settlement on Indian lands.
Following a series of squabbles between settlers and Indians in 1676, in which his overseer died, Bacon assumed command of a large force of vigilantes who pushed for allout war on the local Native American population after the government refused to retaliate against an Indian attack. When Berkeley refused to grant Bacon official command and declared him a rebel against the colonial government, Bacon attacked Jamestown and burned it, forcing Berkeley to flee to safety and summon help from England. Meanwhile, Bacon and his men ruthlessly pursued all of the natives they could find to fight, pushing the Pamunkey into the Great Dismal Swamp, where Bacon caught a terrible swamp fever and died on October 26, 1676. Without Bacon, the movement fell apart, and Berkeley executed many of its leaders. Although Bacon’s rebellion failed, it opened new lands on the frontier belonging to the defeated Indian tribes, and it opened the corridors of power in Virginia to newer arrivals because the Crown removed Governor Berkeley from office after the rebellion.

References
Middlekauff, Robert. Bacon’s Rebellion. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964.
Washburn, Wilcomb A. The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, 1957.
Web, Stephen Saunders. 1676: The End of American Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
See also: Bacon’s Rebellion.