Takaki – Chapter 3 : 3 questions

(1&2) What were the cause and effects of Bacon’s Rebellion? How did it affect slavery?
Why did Africans join the fight?

Bacon’s Rebellion was the result of discontent among farmers who had taken the law into their own hands against government corruption and oppression. “Hopes of landownership became dreams deferred for many English colonists. Frustrated and angry, many white workers felt they had been duped into coming to America.” (62)

Nathaniel Bacon, “seeking to protect settlers against Indians, he helped raise a militia.” (63) Something I found curious is that Bacon fought for recognition for the right to bear arms, so that the common man could defend himself from hostile Indians but also to oppose a authoritarian regime, created by Berkley. After Berkeley’s resumption of power, this right was one of the first he repealed. (Could this be a reason for colonists’ insistence for the right to bear arms in the constitution?)

It was largely the indentured servants, slaves and poor farmers who rebelled. “Blacks joined Bacon’s army: they realized that they had a greater stake in the rebellion than their white brothers in arm, for many of them were bound servants for life.” (64) Before the rebellion, African slaves were rare in Virginia, “in 1650, Africans constituted only 300 of Virginias 15,000 inhabitants, or 2 percent” only. (58) But “Virginia was developing into a tobacco-producing colony, and the need for labor was expanding,” and the blacks knew it. (58)

Before the Rebellion, “African population increased slowly.” (58). Yet after the loss of the battle and the new growth of the tobacco industry, “the turn to slavery became sharp and significant.” (65) Due to the demand for labor and a decrease in immigrants from England, African slave imports grew rapidly. “Though the supply of white indentured servants seemed to have declined at this time, planters did not try to expand their recruitment efforts. Instead, they did something they had resisted until then- prefer black slaves over white indentured servants.” (65) New laws were created afterwards too. “After 1680, they enacted laws that denied slaves freedom of assembly and movement.” (66)
It did not stop there, “this cultural chasm between the whites and blacks of the ‘giddy multitude’ was transformed into a political separation as the landed gentry instituted new borders between white and black laborers.” (67) More Virginia laws made slavery lifelong and a status inherited by one’s children, creating a racially based class system with Africans at the bottom. (67) Even the poorest European indentured servants were above them. This new separation of class between the indentured white servants and the blacks broke the common interest between the poor English and Africans of Virginia, which had existed during Bacon’s Rebellion.

(3) What of mixed race children? Their parents?

It is evident that the mixing of races was prohibited. “In 1691 the Virginia Assembly passed a law that prohibited the ‘abominable mixture and spurious issue’ of interracial unions and that provided for the banishment of white violators.” (67) “The affects f these laws was not only to make mulatotoes slaves but also to stigmatize them as black.” (67) It was evident that there was a hatred for blacks in general, whether or not they were pure in blood had no importance in the matter. Racism is purely a skin color issue.