Colonists, like residents of European monarchies, accepted class divisions and inequality as long as they believed that government officials ruled for the general good. When rulers violated that precept, ordinary people felt justified in rebelling. In 1676, Bacon's Rebellion erupted as a dispute over Virginia’s Indian policy. Before it was over, the rebellion convulsed Chesapeake politics and society, leaving in its wake death, destruction, and a legacy of hostility between the great planters and their poorer neighbors.

In June 1676, the new legislature passed a series of reform measures known as Bacon’s Laws. Among other changes, the laws gave local settlers a voice in setting tax levies, forbade officeholders from demanding bribes or other extra fees for carrying out their duties, placed limits on holding multiple offices, and restored the vote to all freemen. But elite planters soon convinced Governor Berkeley that Nathanial Bacon and his supporters among small planters and frontiersmen were a greater threat than the Indians.

When Bacon learned that Berkeley had branded him a traitor, he declared war against Berkeley and the other grandees. For three months, Bacon’s forces fought the Indians, sacked the grandees’ plantations, and attacked Jamestown. Berkeley’s loyalists retaliated by plundering the homes of Bacon’s supporters. The fighting continued until Bacon unexpectedly died, most likely from dysentery, and several English ships arrived to bolster Berkeley’s strength.

The rebellion did nothing to dislodge the grandees from their positions of power. If anything, it strengthened them. When the king learned of the turmoil in the Chesapeake and its devastating effect on tobacco exports and customs duties, he ordered an investigation. Royal officials replaced Berkeley with a governor more attentive to the king’s interests, nullified Bacon’s Laws, and instituted an export tax on tobacco as a way of paying the expenses of government without having to obtain the consent of the tightfisted House of Burgesses.

In the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, tensions between great planters and small farmers moderated. Bacon’s Rebellion showed, a governor of Virginia said, that it was necessary “to steer between … either an Indian or a civil war.” The ruling elite concluded that it was safer for the colonists to fight the Indians than to fight each other, and the government made little effort to restrict settlers’ encroachment on Indian land. Tax cuts also were welcomed by all freemen. The export duty on tobacco imposed by the king allowed the colonial government to reduce taxes by 75 percent between 1660 and 1700. In the long run, however, the most important contribution to political stability was the declining importance of the servant labor system. During the 1680s and 1690s, fewer servants arrived in the Chesapeake, partly because of improving economic conditions in England. Accordingly, the number of poor, newly freed servants also declined, reducing the size of the lowest stratum of free society. In 1700, when about one-third of the free colonists still worked as tenants on land owned by others, the Chesapeake was in the midst of transitioning to a slave labor system that minimized the differences between poor farmers and rich planters and magnified the differences between whites and blacks.

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