A Century Too Soon: The Age of Tyranny

by John R. Musick

Robert was roused. He was in a frenzy and vowed that if no one else would go, he would himself pursue the savages and rescue his relatives.

"You will have aid," assured Mr. Drummond. "The people are enraged at the carelessness of the governor, and if they can secure a leader, they will go and punish the Indians."

"Leader or no leader, I shall go to the rescue of my relatives. My father's sister and children are captives; think you I would remain at home for lack of a leader?"

"We will find one in Nathaniel Bacon."

"Who is he?" asked Robert, as if he still feared the willingness or ability of the proposed leader to conduct the crusade against the savages. Mr. Drummond answered:

"Bacon is a young man who has not yet arrived at thirty years. His family belongs to the English gentry, for he is a cousin of Lord Culpepper and married a daughter of Sir John Duke. He run out his patrimony in England and hath, by his liberality, exhausted the most of what he brought to Virginia. He came here four years ago and settled at Curies on the upper James River. His uncle, who lives in Virginia, was a member of the king's council. He is Nathaniel Bacon, senior, a very rich politic man and childless, who designs his nephew, Nathaniel Bacon, junior, for his heir."

"Has he ability for a leader?" asked Robert.

"He hath; his abilities have been so highly recognized, that he was appointed soon after his arrival to a place in the council."

This was a position of great dignity, rarely conferred upon any but men of matured age and large estate, and Bacon was only twenty-eight, and his estate small. His personal character is seen on the face of his public career. He was impulsive and subject to fits of passion, or, as the old writers say, "of a precipitate disposition."

Bacon came near being the Virginia Cromwell. Though he never wholly redeemed his adopted country from tyranny, he put the miscreant Berkeley to flight. On that May night in 1676, Bacon was at his Curles plantation, just below the old city of Henricus, living quietly on his estate with his beautiful young wife Elizabeth. He had another estate in what is now the suburbs of the present city of Richmond, which is to-day known as "Bacon's Quarter Branch." His servants and overseers lived here, and he could easily go thither in a morning's journey on his favorite dapple gray, or by rowing seven miles around the Dutch Gap peninsula, could make the journey in his barge. When not at his upper plantation or in attendance at the council, he was living the quiet and unassuming life of a planter at Curles, where he entertained his neighbors, and being by nature a lover of the divine rights of man, he boldly denounced the trade laws, the Arlington and Culpepper grants, and the governor for his lukewarmness in defending the frontier against the Indians. Though one of the gentry, who had it in his power to become a favorite, the manifest tyranny of Governor Berkeley so shocked his sense of right and justice, that he was ready to condemn the whole system of government.