Last episode ended with Sir William Berkeley, on the deck of a ship in the James, watching Jamestown burn to the ground in the wee hours of September 19, 1676. The rebels under Nathaniel Bacon were ascendant, and Berkeley resolved to return to his refuge on the Eastern Shore and plot the next phase of his increasingly desperate war. Little did he know that the tide of the war was about to turn again in his favor.

This episode begins in London in the summer of 1676, where Crown officials were just beginning to figure out what to do about the turmoil in Virginia, over which they had incomplete and very emotional news. Charles II made some decisions with long-term consequences for Virginia.

At about the same time, in a stroke of luck – good or bad, depending on one’s point of view – Bacon died rather horribly. He had done a good job building an organization with an orderly succession plan, but the rebellion had lost its most charismatic leader.

A few weeks before Bacon died, at the end of September, the first of several armed merchant ships arrived in the Chesapeake, and after learning about the revolt their captains pledged their service to Berkeley. They would provide crucial support in an amphibious war against rebels along the James and York rivers. One of the captains, Thomas Grantham of the powerful 500-ton Concord, emerged as a courageous and wise diplomat, and would do more than anyone to end the rebellion in early January, 1677.

At the end of the war, Berkeley mopped up, and prosecuted and executed most of the leaders of the rebellion. Richard Lawrence, however, disappeared, and was never seen again.

The episode ends with the arrival of royal commissioners and a thousand English regular infantry at the end of January, which would be more bad news for Sir William Berkeley.

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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

Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690

Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia

Virginia Governor Sir William Berkeley has fled to the Eastern Shore with a small group of loyalist planters and a detachment of perhaps only fifty armed men. Nathaniel Bacon has occupied Berkeley’s estate near Jamestown, and dispatched men to capture loyalist ships anchored there. Bacon’s “navy” has out in search of Berkeley, but Berkeley turned the tables in an audacious amphibious attack and grabbed control of the Bay and the rivers. While Bacon was mucking around in the Dragon Swamp hunting notionally allied Pamunkeys, Berkeley recaptured Jamestown. Loyalist victory seemed at hand, but Bacon forced Berkeley to retreat from Jamestown a second time in part by grabbing the wives of loyalist planters and using them as human shields, and this time the rebels burn it to the ground.

At the end of the episode, it appears that the rebels had the upper hand. Little did they understand that the loyalist cause was far from lost, and the rebellion was, unbeknownst to anybody, on the brink of disaster.

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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

Various authors, for the National Park Service, “Mapping the Dragon:
AN INDIGENOUS HISTORY OF BACON’S REBELLION” (pdf)

Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690

Nathaniel Bacon and his army of volunteers have returned from beating up on the friendly Occaneechees (Occaneechis) on the Roanoke River in southern Virginia. It is election day, and Henrico County will elect Bacon and his sidekick, James Crews, to the Virginia Assembly, which has been called into session on June 5, 1676. This episode describes the dramatic session of that Assembly, which began with Bacon’s arrest and ended with he and his army holding the Assembly at gunpoint. Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, demonstrates his own flair for the dramatic along the way, but by the end of this episode has taken refuge with other loyalists on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Oh, and there is a “manifesto.” Never a good sign.

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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

Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

Nathaniel Bacon, “Declaration of the People,” July 30, 1676

Nathaniel Bacon, “Bacon’s Manifesto,” July 1676

The Susquehannocks, having successfully escaped from their beseiged fort on Piscataway Creek in Maryland, fled through the Virginia Piedmont to set up winter quarters on the James and Roanoke Rivers. In January 1676, they launched a measured counterattack. The settlers on the frontier panicked and evacuated. Rumors of war spread. The horrors of King Philip’s War loomed large, especially in the thinking of Sir William Berkeley, the governor. A fundamental debate over how to respond to those Susquehannock attacks set up the confrontation between Nathaniel Bacon and his populist – and it should be said, hard-drinking – frontiersmen on the one hand, and Berkeley and his loyalist supporters on the other. Along the way we consider Governor Berkeley’s background and the experiences that shaped him, and the political challenges that he now confronted. The episode ends with Bacon’s massacre of the Occaneechees (Occaneechis), heretofore allies of Virginia, on their island in the Roanoke River.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

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

Various authors, for the National Park Service, “Mapping the Dragon:
AN INDIGENOUS HISTORY OF BACON’S REBELLION” (pdf)

The year is 1675, and we are in Virginia. All kinds of social, demographic, fiscal, and economic pressures have been building for decades, and the common people are restive. There have been a string of small revolts and disruptions in the years since 1660, but they all failed for lack of effective leadership. The “masterless men” in the colony needed a leader, and the leader, when he arose, would need a cause.

Nathaniel Bacon, a ne’er do well son of a wealthy gentleman in English, would be that leader. He arrived in Virginia in 1674 with a fat bankroll, sent there by his father after he got in a scrape with the law. By 1675 he owned two plantations, one of them at the falls of the James River, just at the edge of Indian country.

The spark that would set off the chain of events that would lead to Nathaniel Bacon stepping forward as the leader of a rebellion would be the theft of some hogs by Indians in Northern Virginia who had been stiffed for payment in an ordinary trading transaction. The English colonials would blow their response, and blunder into war. Waging that war would be Nathaniel Bacon’s cause.

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Map of relevant indigenous nations c. 1675 (Credit Matthew Kruer) :

Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

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

Charles McLean Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690

We are back in Virginia, finally! In my defense, offered in response to the many listeners who have asked for “more Virginia,” the thirty years before the Third Anglo-Powhatan War and Bacon’s Rebellion are almost blank spaces on published timelines of Virginia history, most noting only the legalization of slavery in 1661. Well, we are now on the brink of the civil war known as Bacon’s Rebellion, which was ramping up as the tide was turning in King Philip’s War in the spring of 1676. To understand that sorry state of affairs, however, we have to step back and look at the evolution of Virginia in the years between 1644, the onset of the last Anglo-Powhatan War, and 1675. How was it that civil war broke out among the English of Virginia during the tumultuous 1670s? This episode explores the root causes of the civil instability that led to Bacon’s Rebellion, and will therefore be more thematic than narrative. Along the way we consider the severe gender imbalance in Virginia, the sorry state of indentured servants, the persistance of a brutally high death rate into the second half of the century, the relentless efforts of Virginia’s great planters to control the growing population of “masterless men” who roamed the colony, and the arrival in the region of the Susquehannocks, much reduced from the peak of their power mid-century, but still a formidable military force.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

“The Sadder But Wiser Girl For Me” (YouTube)

I got the idea for this episode talking to a bartender in Prague. The place was empty, and the fellow was garrulous and quickly said he loved American history, which naturally prompted me to suggest a podcast where he could find some. The barkeep called my bluff – “did I know who Augustine Herrman was?” Uh, noooo.

It turns out he was a Bohemian – now we would say Czech – from Prague who became one of the wealthiest and most influential men in mid-17th century English and Dutch America, particularly in New Netherland and Maryland. He would live and trade in the early colonies for more than 40 years before his death in Maryland in 1686, and such diverse characters as Pieter Stuyvesant and Lord Baltimore would rely on him for their most sensitive diplomatic matters. Most famously, Herrman would draw the most detailed map of the Chesapeake Bay, at a time when maps were evidence in the settling of disputes between empires. Hermann’s map would, among other things, determine the border between Virginia and Maryland on the Eastern Shore, and – through twists and turns – play a role in the establishment of the colony of Delaware. The Czechs are understandably proud of Augustine Herrman, so in gratitude to that bartender and his surprising knowledge of 17th century America, this episode is about Herrman, through the story of his map.

Augustine Herrman’s Map:

Augustine Herrman’s woodcut of New Amsterdam, mid 1650s:

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Earl L. W. Heck, Augustine Herrman: Beginner of the Virginia Tobacco Trade, Merchant of New Amsterdam and First Lord of Bohemia Manor in Maryland

Christian J. Koot, “The Merchant, the Map, and Empire: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake and Interimperial Trade, 1644–73,” The William and Mary Quarterly, October 2010.

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Dr. Phillip W. Magness is an economic historian and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute. Magness’ research has appeared in multiple scholarly venues, including the Economic Journal, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Business Ethics, the Southern Economic Journal, and Social Science Quarterly. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The 1619 Project Myth, which is the subject of this conversation.

Our conversation was wide-ranging, including an overview of the original 1619 Project of the New York Times, conceived of and edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones; how it was a departure from similar historical projects of the Times before it; the strengths of the 1619 Project; the particular shortcomings of the Project’s claims about the economic consequences of slavery; the attempt by the 1619 Project to tie slavery to capitalism; the actual anti-slavery origins of capitalist theory, starting with Adam Smith; the anti-capitalism ante-bellum arguments in the philosophical defense of slavery; the flawed scholarship of the “New History of Capitalism” school; the Project’s distortion of the importance of cotton to the American economy before the Civil War, and the strange rehabilitation of “King Cotton” theory; the criticisms of leading historians of the colonial and revolutionary era of Hannah-Jones’s claims about the importance of slavery to support for the American Revolution in the South; the status of the “20 and odd” enslaved Blacks who were brought to Jamestown in 1619; the varied influence of the Sommersett ruling in the colonies; Lord Dunmore’s famous declaration after the American Revolution had begun; Hannah-Jones’s dismissive response to academic criticisms of her claims; that Hannah-Jones was correct in her assessment of Abraham Lincoln’s advocacy of “colonization” as a solution to emancipation; the New York Times’s strange unwillingness to correct its 1619 Project errors transparently, as it would otherwise do in other contexts; the explicit political and policy agenda behind the 1619 Project; the slow walking-back of some of the Project’s most controversial claims via ghost-editing; the insertion of The 1619 Project in public school curricula; and how to develop a school history curriculum that does give a balanced treatment of the history of slavery and Reconstruction.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Philip W. Magness, The 1619 Project Myth

Nikole Hannah-Jones and other authors, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

An interview with historian James McPherson on the New York Times’ 1619 Project

An interview with historian Gordon Wood on the New York Times’ 1619 Project

Philip W. Magness, “The 1619 Project Unrepentantly Pushes Junk History”

Jake Silverstein, New York Times Magazine, “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project” (free link)

This is the last episode of our telling of King Philip’s War. We cover the fate of the last Algonquian sachems, including the daring capture of Annawon, and the consequences of the war for the Indians who fought it and the colonies of New England. We consider the wisdom of the war, and especially the morality, or lack thereof, in the fighting of it. Finally, we explore the fates of the main characters who were still alive at the end of the fighting.

[Errata: Sam from Marietta, Georgia points out that in referring to the marker on Benjamin Church’s gravestone I said it was a Ranger tag, and it should be a “tab.” Good correction, insofar as I don’t need a lot of Rangers rolling their eyes, or worse.]

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War

James D. Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People

Daniel Gookin (Wikipedia)

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War

In May 1676 the tide of King Philip’s War had turned against the Algonquians of southern New England, but the New English settlers didn’t know it yet. They would soon. Suddenly, in a matter of a few weeks, the Algonquian resistance collapsed. This episode looks at that collapse through the eyes of Benjamin Church, whose men would finally catch and kill Metacom on August 12, 1676. Along the way, Church would persuade the Sakonnets, a Wampanoag group, to switch sides. They would teach him a new way of war, and Church would eventually be considered the “first American ranger,” at least by people who haven’t thought to give that credit to Nompash, the Sakonnet commander who taught Church.

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Regicides on the Run!

Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Thomas Church, The History of Philip’s War: Commonly Called the Great Indian War, of 1675 and 1676

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People

Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip’s War

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War