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.

Opechancanough, the Algonquian chief who had led the Indian uprising of 1622 in Virginia, mounted another surprise attack in 1644 and killed about five hundred Virginia colonists in two days. During the next two years of bitter fighting, the colonists eventually gained the upper hand, capturing and murdering the old chief. After the war, the Indians relinquished all claims to land already settled by the English. Wilderness land beyond the fringe of English settlement was supposed to be reserved exclusively for Indian use. The colonial government hoped this arrangement would minimize contact between settlers and Indians and thereby maintain the peace.

If the Chesapeake population had not grown, the policy might have worked. But the number of land-hungry colonists multiplied. In their quest for land, they encroached steadily on Indian land. During the 1660s and 1670s, violence between colonists and Indians repeatedly flared along the frontier. The government, headquartered in the tidewater region near the coast, far from the danger of Indian raids, tried to calm the disputes and reestablish the peace.

Frontier settlers thirsted for revenge against what their leader, Nathaniel Bacon, termed “the protected and Darling Indians.” Bacon proclaimed his “Design not only to ruine and extirpate all Indians in Generall but all Manner of Trade and Commerce with them.” Bacon also urged the colonists to “see what spounges have suckt up the Publique Treasure.” He charged that grandees, or elite planters, operated the government for their private gain, a charge that made sense to many colonists. In fact, officeholders had profited enough to buy slaves to replace their servants; by the 1660s, they owned about 70 percent of all the colony’s slaves. Bacon crystallized the grievances of the small planters and poor farmers against both the Indians and the colonial rulers in Jamestown.

Hoping to maintain the fragile peace on the frontier in 1676, Governor Berkeley pronounced Bacon a rebel, threatened to punish him for treason, and called for new elections of burgesses who, Berkeley believed, would endorse his get-tough policy. To Berkeley’s surprise, the elections backfired. Almost all the old burgesses were voted out of office and replaced by local leaders, including Bacon, who chafed at the rule of the elite planters.

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 Berkeley that Bacon and his men were a greater threat than Indians.

When Bacon learned that Berkeley had once again 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. With the rebellion crushed, Berkeley hanged several of Bacon’s allies and destroyed farms that belonged to Bacon’s supporters.

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 to pay the expenses of the colony’s 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.