The History of the Americans Bacon’s Aftermath 1: Diplomacy and Conspiracy 1677-1685
This episode looks again at the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion in light of what we have now learned, before turning to the region of the Chesapeake in the years after the Rebellion.
There are two big themes in the post-Bacon Chesapeake. The first, the subject of this episode, is geopolitical. After Bacon, what changed in intercolonial affairs, in the relationship between the Chesapeake colonies and England, and between those colonies and the indigenous nations? The second theme, for part 2, is essentially domestic. How did Virginia itself change politically, economically, and socially, with a special emphasis on the terms of labor and the types of people performing it?
Along the way we look at the crazed conspiracy theories that roiled not only Virginia and Maryland, but England, how they affected the various protagonists, led to the negotiation of the “Covenant Chain” between the Iroquois and New York and the other English colonies of North America, and how the end of Bacon’s Rebellion unleashed explosive growth of the trade in enslaved Indians from the Carolinas and points south.
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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)
James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America
Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
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