The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
other discontents, was instrumental in making the colony so unstable that Bacon was able to pull off his rebellion.64 The state could neither force people into obedience nor defend them, clearly failing in the use of force both externally and internally, thus leaving its sovereignty subject to question.65
Whether Bruen, maybe with fifteen-year-old George, was still in Henrico or already at Tappahannock, he must have felt vulnerable. That vulnerability might have inclined him to side with Nathaniel Bacon, a recently arrived landholder and member of the minor British aristocracy, who resented his geographic marginalization on the dangerous colonial frontier and perhaps also the power of low-born, newly rich planters under Governor Berkeley’s rule. With Berkeley denying the right to take up arms independently against the Indians, and failing to send adequate militia defense, Nathaniel Bacon apparently saw his chance to claim status for himself. Lacking power to oppose the elite land monopoly, colonists had largely taken out their anger at lack of land on Native people, who, in effect, were enforcing the elite’s monopoly on land by keeping new colonists from spreading west. Bacon used that anger and then redirected it against Berkeley, who governed with very little reference to the authority of the Crown, and with very little reference to the desires of the frontier elites who rose to lead the rebellion.66 Bacon’s plan included a genocidal attack on Native people, which he would parlay into regime change in Jamestown. Frontier elites like Bacon would replace the old established elites like royal governor Berkeley and his allies, as the Crown’s government.67
Bacon organized an army, went with the army to Jamestown, and intimidated Berkeley into giving him a legalizing military commission. He led his army against all Indians, including English allies. He terrorized Berkeley’s administration into permitting new elections in which all free men voted, and was elected to the Assembly along with a lot of other men from the colony’s periphery—not the entrenched Tidewater elites who were Berkeley’s cronies. Together they passed laws that at least paid lip service to dismantling elite institutionalized power and proposed that defense of the periphery be paid for by the sale of Indian captives as slaves. But feeling that the essential power structure was unchanged, the rebels then turned on Berkeley’s militia and Berkeley in turn declared Bacon a traitor. Bacon and his army attacked and burned Jamestown in response and advocated a changed relationship to the Crown that might have amounted to independence from England. Bacon eventually died of fever; British ships and then the navy finally put down the rebellion. By the end, six hundred to a thousand English and an even larger number of Indians were dead in the Indian-English conflict. An uncounted number more died from the direct and indirect results of the English-English Rebellion.68
The fascinating part of all this to me is not Bacon or Berkeley, despite all the attention they have received. What interests me is the way in which the exploited laborers latched on to Bacon’s power grab and attempted to turn it to their own purposes. Together the people Berkeley quite accurately described as “poor, armed and desperate,” both free and unfree, English and African (and probably some Native), demanded and fought for freedom, land, a voice, and even talked “openly of sharing men’s estates among themselves”—land redistribution, that perennial bugbear of the elite.69 Those who were most committed to the armed struggle—the poor and the unfree, Virginia’s labor force—did indeed have a vision of a different kind of Virginia, not a Virginia in which one set of ruling elites was exchanged for another. Four hundred of them held out to the very end against what had become improbable odds, and ultimately the final one hundred fighters, all unfree, eighty of them African, succumbed to trickery and the false offer of freedom.70 In essence, that motley army of poor, dispossessed, and desperate English and Africans had hijacked the rebellion and repurposed it, pushing Bacon, in order to keep their support, into demanding land reform or redistribution and a voice in government.71
It might make sense to think of the whole rebellion as two overlapping revolts. One was a revolt of middling planters fed up with Indian attacks and Berkeley’s “Indian-lover” policies and corrupt taxation, led by newly arrived wannabes who believed their aristocratic heritage gave them both the ability and the birthright to rule, as opposed to the nouveaux riches who surrounded Berkeley.72 The other was a revolt of the unfree and the poor that took advantage of the chaos of the first rebellion and the structure provided by the rebels’ army to rise against the whole system of exploitation. That they rose up together would have been no surprise—African and English laborers worked together and often resisted masters together. To a significant extent they identified with one another as exploited laborers. In fact, one-tenth of Virginia’s unfree Africans joined the rebellion, and English and African unfree workers made up two-thirds of Bacon’s field army—they were the rebellion in a very real sense.73 This is what made the rebellion particularly threatening. It was no mere shift of power among elites, the substitution of one set of elites for another—although that certainly seems to be what Bacon and the planters who followed him had in mind.
From the point of view of the English Crown, both sides were problematic challenges to its increasingly imperial ambitions. Berkeley needed to be removed for two reasons. First, because he intended a more or less autonomous Virginia ruled as a private fiefdom for himself and his cronies, not an imperially governed province within an empire. And second, because his policies were so inept that the resistance they aroused made Virginia practically ungovernable by anybody—and an “orderly” society is required for wealth creation.74 Bacon, on the other hand, depending on how you read him, might have intended to undo the social hierarchy that made for the unimpeded flow of wealth toward the elite. Or he might have intended to substitute himself and his wannabes at the top of that lucrative hierarchy, at the head of a still more or less autonomous Virginia only nominally under Crown control. But in either case, from the Crown’s perspective, both Berkeley and those who had rebelled against him needed to be brought to heel.
CONTROL OF PUNISHMENT QUICKLY became the critical issue at stake in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. It even raised its head during the rebellion, as Bacon attempted to take away from Berkeley the control of punishing friendly Indians by advocating they be outlawed and thus removed from Berkeley’s “protection.”75 After the rebellion, Berkeley, in the months after the last unfree laborer had been returned to captivity and before he himself was recalled to England and removed from power, went on a punishing rampage, executing, whipping, and extracting huge fines. Bruen doesn’t appear on the lists of those punished, and neither do any of the other people from the Radford connections on the Rappahannock. John Burnham, of course, was a Berkeley supporter, his property “much worsted” and himself imprisoned by Baconians.76 Berkeley supporters like Burnham were not subject to punishment. And many low-level rebels also went unpunished and simply returned to life as normal—even Berkeley couldn’t punish nearly the whole population of Virginians.77 But it seemed like he was trying. According to some accounts, King Charles commented: “The old fool has taken more lives in that naked country than I did for the murder of my father.”78
Just as the English and Powhatan had fought earlier over the right to punish, Berkeley and the king’s commissioners, sent to Virginia to establish the Crown’s sovereignty and return Virginia to governability, eventually fought over who was going to control the punishing of the rebels. Turning back to the Introduction a moment to explain the importance of this struggle, theorist Achille Mbembe said, “The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”79 If the Crown was to establish itself as the legitimate ruler, forming Virginia as a province under the sovereignty of the English state, then gaining control of punishing was critical. The Crown, not Berkeley, must determine “who may live and who must die,” who must be a prisoner and who may be free.
Because Berkeley was on a punishing rampage, the Crown simply taking over the punishing wasn’t much of an option: Virginians wouldn’t be able to distinguish between Berkeley and the Crown. Since deciding which people may live and be free is just as much an expression of sovereignty as is killing them, the Crown pardoned just about everyone involved in the revolt who had survived Berkeley’s punishment (although it reneged on the promise of freedom that had been used to trick the last of the rebels into surrendering) and hauled Berkeley back to England. That pardon proclamation