14. The Aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion in the Other Southern Colonies

As Bacon’s Rebellion entered its radical phase, Bacon tried to spread the revolutionary movement to the neighboring colonies, each of which had severe and often similar grievances against its government and the Crown. At the height of Bacon’s Rebellion, in September 1676, sixty persons, led by William Davyes and John Pate, assembled in Calvert County, Maryland, to declare their opposition to crushing taxation and to Lord Baltimore’s disfranchisement of the freemen. They also declared their refusal to swear to a new loyalty oath proposed by the proprietor. They refused to obey the governor’s order to disband on promise to consider their grievances in the next Assembly, pointing out that the manipulated Assembly no longer represented the people. But the death of Bacon caused the quick collapse of the embryo Davyes-Pate rebellion, and Davyes and Pate were hanged after being denounced as traitors. The governor observed with satisfaction that the people were now suitably “terrified.” The threat was over, but the governor wrote in warning to Lord Baltimore that never had a people been “more replete with malignancy and frenzy.” Apparently, the Maryland regime had had a close call. The result increased the bitterness in the colony against the proprietor.

However, the struggle against the oppression of the feudal proprietary in Maryland had not been crushed. The veteran rebel Josiah Fendall of Charles County, elected to the Assembly but barred from his seat for his rebellious activities in 1660, now took up the libertarian torch. In particular, Fendall led a movement against high taxes and quitrents imposed by the proprietor. Fendall also championed freedom of speech — a rarity in that era. Philip Calvert denounced Fendall for “telling the people they were fools to pay taxes” and for allegedly saying that “now nothing was treason... a man might say anything.” Assisting Fendall were Thomas Gerrard, a veteran rebel and a Catholic, and John Coode, an ex-Catholic and ex-clergyman, in a welcome display of religious amity. In 1681 Lord Baltimore had a law passed forbidding the dissemination of “false” news—that is, news aiming to stir up unrest and rebellion—in an attempt to hamper the Fendall movement. Finally, in the same year, a Fendall-Coode plan for rebellion was betrayed and the leaders imprisoned. The jury, drawn necessarily from the populace, favored the defendants, whereas the judges, being appointees of the proprietor, were hostile. Fendall was convicted, fined heavily, and exiled forever from the province. Coode, an Assemblyman, won acquittal. Lord Baltimore denounced Fendall and Coode as “rank Baconists” and wrote afterwards to a friend that had these leaders not “been secured in time, you would have heard of another Bacon.”

North Carolina (Albemarle) was also in a rebellious frame of mind in the mid-1670s. Most grievous was the Navigation Act of 1673, which placed a prohibitory tax of one penny per pound on all intercolonial trading of tobacco. The tobacco farmers of North Carolina, growing over one million pounds of tobacco a year, were heavily dependent on New England shipping for exporting their tobacco, and in turn for importing other products needed by the Carolinians. The tax crippled Carolinian trade, and the result was continual evasion, and sporadic attempts by the government to crack down on the now illegal trade. Another important grievance was the feudal quitrent that the proprietary tried to extract from the North Carolinian land-holders. At first, land grants were made there at a relatively small quitrent of two shillings per 100 acres, the usual quitrent rate in Virginia. Then, in the 1660s the proprietary tried to double the imposed quitrent to one-half penny per acre, payable in specie. After vigorous protests, the proprietary in the Great Deed of 1668 retained the quitrent at the former rate. However, the proprietary tried again to raise the quitrent, this time to quadruple the rate to one penny per acre. Rumors, indeed, circulated about an eventual sixpence per acre levy. Attempts (eventually abandoned) to enforce the quadrupled quitrents fanned the flames of rebellion.

To encourage settlement, the Assembly of 1669 limited land grants to 660 acres, but this limitation did not apply to land given out by the proprietors directly. Land was to be subject to forfeit if not worked by the grantees within six months. Trouble began to come to a head in Albemarle upon the passage of the crippling Navigation Act of 1673. With the colonists determined to avoid payment of the tax, Governor Peter Carteret resigned and fled the colony and John Jenkins remained as acting governor. Jenkins, a precharter settler of Albemarle, belonged to the poplar opposition to the proprietary rule, opposition led by wealthy tobacco planter George Durant, one of the founders of the original settlement. Upon his assumption of office, Jenkins heroically determined not to enforce the Navigation Act upon the colony—in short, to occupy the post of ruler in order to diminish the extent of his rule. Jenkins simply ignored the order of the king to appoint collectors of customs with the duty of enforcing the hated levy. Finally, in two years, in 1675, the king appointed a collector for the colony. Until the arrival of the collector, Governor Jenkins could appoint a temporary collector, and so he chose his closest associate, Valentine Byrd, who again simply failed to enforce the law.

The Durant-Jenkins forces, though backed strongly by the bulk of the Albemarle people, were opposed by a faction led by the Speaker of the Assembly, Thomas Eastchurch, and by Thomas Miller. When Eastchurch and Miller moved to appeal to England for enforcement of the Navigation Act, Jenkins moved swiftly to crush the counterrevolution by jailing Miller for “treasonable utterances” and dissolving the Eastchurch-controlled Assembly. The Assembly, however, deposed and summarily imprisoned Jenkins, and Eastchurch went to England to induce the proprietary to crack down on the rebellious and independent colony. There he was joined by Miller, freed by the intervention of Sir William Berkeley.

Thus, when Bacon’s Rebellion broke out in 1676, Albemarle was fortunate enough to be without a governor and the hated Navigation Act was still not being enforced. This happy state was not to last for long, however, for the proprietors proceeded to select the two leaders of the pro-Navigation Act clique as the new rulers of the colony: Eastchurch as governor, and Miller as secretary and collector of the customs. On the way to America in 1677, the two men stopped in the West Indies. Eastchurch decided to stay for a while to get married, and sent Miller on to North Carolina to act as governor in his stead.

Miller quickly proceeded to use his double power with predictable ruthlessness. He zealously tried to suppress the illegal tobacco trade, and also to enforce the higher quitrents. In addition, Miller interfered with elections and arbitrarily set a price on the head of many prominent leaders of the province. On the always convenient pretext of “defense against the Indians,” Miller organized a military guard that terrorized Albemarle and imposed a heavy debt on the struggling colony.

With Miller now added to the provocation of the Navigation Act and other grievances, North Carolina was truly ripe for rebellion. George Durant had fearlessly threatened the proprietors with revolt upon hearing of East-church’s appointment. The revolutionary ferment was stirred further by the example of Bacon’s Rebellion in neighboring Virginia, by the influx of rebellious Baconian refugees from that colony, and by the influence in Albemarle of former governor William Drummond, one of the Baconian leaders. Furthermore, the popular opposition had another dynamic leader in John Culpeper, surveyor-general of Carolina, who had years ago been arrested in South Carolina for sedition and rebellion, and had escaped north to avoid the hangman. Arriving in Albemarle, he joined Durant and the opposition, and called upon the people to resist the enforcement of the Navigation Act. The revolution, in short, needed but a spark to be ignited into flame. It found its spark in December 1677, when a New England merchantman arrived at Albemarle with a cargo of supplies. Miller arrested the skipper, who promised to leave at once and not return. When the North Carolinians tried to persuade the master of the cargo to stay, Miller arrested the eminent George Durant on the charge of treason. This tyrannical act touched off the rebellion and Culpeper, Valentine Byrd, and their men arrested the governor and his Council and called free elections for a new Assembly. The elections revealed the overwhelming popular support for the rebellion, and the newly elected Assembly appointed a Council and chose John Culpeper as governor and collector of the customs. The Assembly proceeded to indict Miller, appoint new justices in the colony, and warn Eastchurch, hurrying to the American mainland, to stay out of Albemarle.

Culpeper and his allies governed Albemarle for a period of two years. Culpeper justified his actions in a manifesto charging Miller with tyranny and corruption. The new governor was clearly in a difficult spot. With Virginia again tightly under the rule of the Berkeleyan oligarchy, and with the rebellion in Maryland a failure, Culpeper’s tiny colony could hardly hold out in independence indefinitely against the might of England. Culpeper could hardly take the route of ultimate independence, which Bacon had begun to envision before his death. An immediate threat from Virginia loomed when Governor Eastchurch arrived and prepared to lead a military force against the colony. Eastchurch’s death, however, ended that menace. Culpeper felt that he had to move quickly. Going to England, he pleaded his case there in conflict with Miller, who had escaped from prison in Albemarle. Culpeper convinced the proprietors of the Tightness of his case, but the Crown, more sensitive to rebellion, arrested Culpeper for treason. Culpeper was defended by the leading Carolina proprietor, the Earl of Shaftesbury (Lord Ashley Cooper), and was acquitted, but he had been permanently deposed from power.

Miller was deposed and Durant freed by the proprietors, but the whole system against which the rebellion had protested—including the attempt to levy a quitrent of a penny an acre—remained intact. For a few years, affairs proceeded smoothly, as the newly appointed governor, Seth Sothel, who had bought the Earl of Clarendon’s one-eighth share of Carolina, was captured on his way to America by pirates and held captive for three years. In the interim, the Durant party remained in control with Jenkins selected by the Council as acting governor, but now meekly enforcing the British regulations. Attempts by Miller and his associates to stir up counterrevolution met with no success. In 1683, however, the supposedly moderate Sothel was released from captivity, and the North Carolinians were soon to find that if they had been chastised with whips they were now to be chastised with scorpions. For Sothel proceeded to terrorize and plunder the colony without mercy. One of his favorite devices was to seize any property that he fancied, and then to imprison any owner who had the temerity to object. A typical incident: when two ships arrived from the West Indies, Sothel seized their perfectly legitimate captains as “pirates” and confiscated their property. One of the captains died in prison from maltreatment. Before death, the captain made a will naming as executor of his estate one of the leading men of the Albemarle colony, Thomas Pollock. Governor Sothel, however, refused to probate the will and seized the dead man’s property hinself. When Pollock threatened to tell the story to England, Sothel imprisoned Pollock as well. The chain of imprisonments continued to lengthen: when George Durant protested against such proceedings as unlawful, Sothel immediately jailed Durant and confiscated his entire estate. Sothel withheld and pocketed the salaries of subordinate officials and accepted bribes from criminals. To make the cup of the Carolinians still more bitter, Virginia passed a law in 1679 prohibiting any importation of Carolina tobacco. The motives for the law were twofold: to stifle the competition of Albemarle tobacco and to assert an irredentist Virginia territorial claim to sovereignty over Albemarle. This crippled Albemarle’s tobacco still further and left it even more dependent on the illegal smuggling to New England. Moreover, the Virginians incited border Indians to make war upon the Albemarle settlers.