Episode 4 (Segment 2): Bacon's Rebellion and the Invention of Whiteness

Instead of sending help, Lord Berkeley resolved to fortify a chain of forts protecting the colonial elite in Jamestown – a solution that provided no comfort to those out on the frontier, so the frontiersmen (black and white) rallied behind Bacon to deal with the Native Americans themselves. The problem was that Bacon attacked friendly and hostile Native Americans without distinction. Wary that Bacon may touch of a new war with the Native Americans, Berkeley declared Bacon a rebel. Bacon then marched on Jamestown, captured it, and pillaged the estates of the pro-Berkeley elite and burned Jamestown to the ground. By the time an English force arrived to crush the revolt, Bacon himself had died dysentery, and his army of indentured servants, runaway slaves, and former servants was already falling apart. Bacon's rebellion led to tighter British control of the colony. It may also have hastened the movement toward a labor system based on black slavery. Some historians argue that Virginia planters, fearing other insurrection by former white servants, began to turn to Africa for laborers. The strategy 115 was to divide blacks and whites by creating an artificial color line. This is the moment when race and racism radically alters the system of forced labor that had been practiced by human civilizations for thousands of year by injecting race into the equation. Again Tim Wise explains: So, there was no white race, but in the colonies of what would become the United States, what did we see in the 1660s, 1670s? We began to see that Africans of indentured servant status (many of them not enslaved yet, they were not necessarily permanently enslaved- some were, others were indentured like many poor Europeans for periods of 7 to 11 years, they could work off their indenture and then they would be free labor, technically) realized, as did the white indentured servants (the Europeans, who hadn't been called white yet) that they had a lot of things in common, like the fact that they were all getting their clock cleaned by elites. So they would get together more than our history books taught us and foment rebellion against the elite to try to get a better deal for themselves on the basis of economic necessity and economic justice. And what did the elite do? When that you were outnumbered by black and white folks who are penniless landless peasants you have to do one of two things. You either have to kill them all - but you can't do that because who's going to work? Rich folks weren't going to. They had to get poor people to work. What will point was to be a person of leisure back in those days. That was the goal - was not to work. So, you couldn't kill them all. You didn't want to kill them all. You have to do the work yourself. You have to build your own levee, build your own house ... NO! Pick your own tobacco ... NO! Harvest your own cotton…NO! We are not going to do any of that. So, you can't kill them, but you can co-opt them, and so, the elite in Virginia, for example, the colony begins to give certain carrots to people of European descent saying things like, "Were going to let you own a little and… not much, but just a little. We're going to get rid of indentured servitude, now you're free labor. And, by the way, once your free labor, you get 50 acres of land just because you're free labor... See? So we're going to cut you in on this deal. We're going to let you enter into contracts. We're going to let you testify in court. And here's the best of all. We're going to put you on the slave patrol to keep those people in line. The idea was, you're still going to get your clock cleaned. We still don't like you. We still aren't going to really empower you or change your economic subordination, but we're going to make you honorary members of this team and you're going to help us keep those other people down. So, they got a little taste of power, and it did affect if we divide and conquer those coalitions. Those rebellions began to stop almost instantly. Did Bacon’s Rebellion hasten the establishment of a labor system based on black slave labor? Let’s review the evidence. It’s clear that the colonial elite were deeply concerned about the potential for blacks and poor whites to join forces. Notice that about the same time as Bacon’s rebellion we start to see in the Colonies laws that transform slave status from relatively ambiguous to institution associated exclusively with blacks. Many have argued that this was a strategy to create a color line between blacks and poor whites by elevating the status of poor whites just enough to keep the giddy multitude at bay and to create an artificial incentive for poor whites to protect status which was only slightly better that of black slaves. Any African-American caught in the commission of a crime was committed to slavery for life while white indentured servants simply had years added to their term. Slave status would now be based on the status of the mother – this is an odd development in a patrilineal society but it also marks the beginning of perpetual slavery in which slavery is passed down from generation to generation. By 1691 there were also laws against “abominable mixture" or miscegenation. Where it was common previously for black men to marry white women, now it was illegal. At the same time, as slave status is based on the status of the mother there is actually an economic incentive for white slave owners to *** black slave women – a dirty little secret about slavery that was a common experience for black women. Even before the Great Awakening, a religious movement in which figures like George Whitfield preached in a highly emotionally charged style to blacks and whites alike and many blacks began to convert to Christianity, it became necessary to further codify slave status as it relates to religion. A 1705 Virginia law provided that all servants imported and brought into the country by sea or land who were not Christians in their native country shall be slaves and as such be bought here and sold not withstanding their conversion to Christianity afterwards. In other words, while the enslavement of Africans was justified as a rescue from barbarism, even black Christians could now be enslaved.