History of the United States I / Unit 3 USH1 0326 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Bacon's Rebellion and the Turn to Slavery
The idea
In sixteen seventy-five Susquehannock warriors attacked the frontier, destroying plantations including Bacon's. In sixteen seventy-six Bacon attacked them without the governor's approval, and when Berkeley ordered his arrest, Bacon marched on Jamestown, forced Berkeley to flee, and burned the city. English royal troops restored order, Berkeley's side prevailed, and several leaders were executed. Bacon escaped execution and died of dysentery. Wealthy planters had already grown alarmed at the large indentured servant class and its relative freedom, and they were alarmed most of all because Black and White servants had allied during the rebellion.
In practice
Four consequences the anchor names together: replacing indentured servitude with Black slavery reduced reliance on troublesome White servants, created a racially defined labouring caste with strictly controlled movement, diminished the possibility of future Black and White worker alliances, and helped unite wealthy and poor Whites as a supposedly superior racial group.
Where people slip
Two corrections, both from the witnesses. First, the rebellion accelerated a shift already underway rather than beginning one. Virginia and Maryland had been hardening slavery in law through the sixteen sixties and seventies, and Maryland had ruled as early as sixteen thirty-nine that baptism did not make an enslaved person free. An account that treats sixteen seventy-six as the origin of racial slavery is wrong by roughly fifteen years of statute. Second, fear of a united lower class was not the only motive. The American Yawp gives weight to the increasing availability of enslaved workers through the Atlantic slave trade, and both mechanisms operated together. What is beyond dispute across all three sources is that planters afterwards chose a labour force set apart by a distinctive skin colour, and chose it deliberately.
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