Bacon's Rebellion: The Multiracial Uprising That Invented American Racism

In the summer of sixteen seventy-six, the Virginia colony nearly collapsed. A planter named Nathaniel Bacon organized an army of poor white indentured servants and enslaved Black Virginians, a coalition that historians have struggled to characterize ever since, and led it against both the Indigenous nations of the Virginia frontier and the colonial government itself. His forces burned Jamestown to the ground. Royal Governor William Berkeley fled across the Chesapeake Bay.

Bacon died of dysentery that October before he could consolidate his victory. Berkeley returned, hanged more than twenty of the rebels, the exact count is disputed among historians, and wrote to London that the situation was under control. What neither Berkeley nor Bacon understood was that the rebellion had not been about them. It had been about the arithmetic of a colony where wealthy planters controlled the land, where poor men, white and Black, had almost nothing, and where the gap between them produced the conditions for exactly this kind of coalition.

The planter class drew a clear lesson from what had nearly destroyed them. The solution was not land reform or economic redistribution. The solution was to make the racial categories mean something. Over the following decades, the Virginia legislature passed a series of laws that gave poor white colonists specific legal advantages over enslaved Black people: the right to carry weapons, the right to serve in militias, reduced punishments for certain offenses, access to land in frontier territories. The racial solidarity being constructed was a political tool, engineered to prevent the coalition from forming again.

The historian Edmund Morgan argued in his nineteen seventy-five book American Slavery, American Freedom that this moment is the structural origin of American racism: not a natural prejudice but a deliberate political construction, designed by an economic elite to manage a restive multiracial underclass. Other historians have refined and challenged Morgan's thesis. The debate continues. What is documented is the legislation: the laws are in the archive, and they date to precisely the years after Bacon's Rebellion.