Nathaniel Bacon
Condemned as a rebel and a traitor in his own time, Nathaniel Bacon emerged in the late nineteenth century as a southern hero, a harbinger of the Confederate rebels of 1860–1865. The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, founded in 1888, commissioned this stained-glass window depicting Bacon in dual guises of a well-dressed gentleman and a rebel in body armor. Installing Bacon’s portrait in a window of the Powder Magazine in Williamsburg (built by Governor Alexander Spotswood in 1715), explained a leading member of the association, would connect “present Virginia with her great and noble past” and commemorate those who shed their “blood for Virginia and the South.” Preservation Virginia.