Execution of Drummond.
After Berkeley had occupied the York peninsula little work remained for him but that of the hangman. Not all the leaders were easy to find. Richard Lawrence, thoughtful as always, escaped from the scene. “The last account of him,” says T. M., “was from an uppermost plantation, whence he and four other desperadoes, with horses, pistols, etc., marched away in a snow ankle-deep.” Here the scholarly rebel vanishes from our sight, and whether he perished in the wilderness or made his way to some safer country, we do not know. On a cold day in January his friend Drummond, hiding in White Oak Swamp was found and taken to the governor. “Aha!” cried the old man, with a low bow, “you are very welcome. I would rather see you just now than any other man in Virginia. Mr. Drummond, you shall be hanged in half an hour!” “What your honour pleases,” said the undaunted Scotchman. He was strung up that afternoon, but not until his wife’s ring had been pulled from his finger, for rapacity vied with ferocity in the governor’s breast. Before the end of January some twenty more had been hanged. An election was then going on, and the newly-elected assembly called upon Berkeley to desist from this carnival of blood. “If we had let him alone,” said Presley, the venerable member for Northampton, to T. M., the member for Stafford, “he would have hanged half the country!”
Death of Berkeley.
The governor’s rage had carried him too far. His conduct did not meet with the approval of the commissioners, whose report on the disturbances is written in a fair and impartial spirit. He treated the commissioners with crazy rudeness. It is said that when they had called on him at Green Spring and were about to return to their boat on the river, he offered them his state-coach with the hangman for driver! whereupon they preferred to walk to the landing-place. Fresh seeds of contention were sown, to bear fruit in the future. The complaints of Drummond’s widow and others found their way to the throne. “As I live,” quoth the king, “the old fool has put to death more people in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father.” In the spring the royal order for Berkeley’s removal arrived, and on April 27 he sailed for England, apparently expecting to return, for he left his wife at Green Spring. Sir Herbert Jeffries, one of the commissioners, succeeded him with a special commission as lieutenant governor. Berkeley’s departure was joyfully celebrated with bonfires and salutes of cannon. He cherished hopes of justifying himself in a personal interview with the king, but the interview was delayed until, about the middle of July, the old man fell sick and died. It was believed that his death was caused by vexation and chagrin. A few weeks afterward the other two commissioners, Sir John Berry and Colonel Morison, returned to England; and we are told that one day the late governor’s brother, Lord Berkeley, meeting Sir John Berry in the council chamber, told him “with an angry voice and a Berkeleyan look,” that he and Morison had murdered his brother.[59] In October a royal order for the relief of Sarah Drummond declared that her husband “had been sentenced and put to death contrary to the laws of the kingdom.”
Significance of the rebellion.
Thus ended the first serious and ominous tragedy in the history of the United States, a story preserved for us in many of its details with striking vividness, yet concerning the innermost significance of which we would fain know more than we do. It may fairly be pronounced the most interesting episode in our early history, surpassing in this regard the Leisler affair at New York, which alone can be compared with it for intensity of human interest. As ordinarily told, however, the story of Bacon presents some features that are unintelligible. It is customary to liken the little rebellion of 1676 to the great rebellion of 1776, and we are thus led to contemplate Bacon and Virginia as arrayed against Berkeley and England. In such a view the facts are unduly simplified and strangely distorted. If it were possible thus fully to identify Bacon’s cause with the cause of Virginia, it would become impossible to explain the ease with which his followers were suppressed by Virginians, without any aid from England. But when all the facts are considered, we can see at once that such a result was inevitable.
Careful inspection of the relevant facts will show us that Bacon was contending against four things:—
1. The Indian depredations.
2. The misrule of Sir William Berkeley.