Seeds of Racial Conflict in North America in the 17th Century

The uniquely English notions of civilization prefigured the disastrous relations the early colonists established with the local Algonkians and other Native American groups. In addition to constrictive and ethnocentric definitions of civilization, the early English settlers in the Chesapeake brought a sense of religious superiority and an enormous thirst for acquiring more land. All these factors converged in 1676 with the first race war in North American history-Bacon’s Rebellion. Although he came to Virginia with a fair amount of wealth, Nathaniel Bacon created a doctrine that would inspire the thousands of poor and landless Englishmen, who had rapidly multiplied in the colony.

In the decades before the rebellion, impoverished Englishmen were lured to the colony with the hope of gaining land and becoming yeomen farmers. In exchange for their passage across the Atlantic, however, they had to give their allotment of land and between four and seven years of labor as indentured servants to tobacco planters who financed their voyage. Once their term of indenture was finished, these former servants would receive freedom dues-a small allotment of land, tobacco seed, guns, livestock, and some currency. Because this system created a steady stream of competitors for the tobacco-planter elite, they conspired to eliminate the land allotment portion of the freedom dues, which allowed them to monopolize all arable land in the colony. As a direct result, Virginia had a growing population of landless, hopeless, but armed, young Englishmen in the decade leading up to 1676.

Although this growing group of landless poor could have vented their collective anger and frustration at the white landed elite, Nathaniel Bacon found a different solution-one that would doom American race relations from that time forward. Bacon’s doctrine elevated the status of the landless poor by reinforcing the notion of white supremacy. His plan was to attack all Native Americans-friend and foe alike-and take their land. This diverted the anger of the English poor away from the English elite and toward a common racial enemy. His war, ”against all Indians in general,” allowed poor whites to rally around notions of white supremacy and racial scapegoating in an all too familiar pattern.1 This unique form of race consciousness worked against attempts to forge collaborative efforts across racial lines in the colonial and antebellum South. It may also explain why poor southern whites supported, and even fought to protect, the system of racialized slavery, despite the fact that slavery’s very existence guaranteed them a degraded socioeconomic status.

During the decade leading up to Bacon’s Rebellion, another terrible transformation was underway. When the planter elite realized that indentured servitude would not be a permanent solution to their labor needs, they turned to a group that had recently been imported into the colony-Africans. Between 1619 and 1641, some 300 Africans had entered Virginia. Ironically, they were not legally defined as slaves. Instead, they were treated much like other indentured servants; once they gave four to ten years of labor, they would be freed and given freedom dues. For a variety of complex reasons, the landed elite moved to legalize racialized slavery in 1667. One of the most compelling reasons for this shift was Bacon’s Rebellion, which provided the best rationale for the permanent substitution of black slaves for white servants. The legalization of racial slavery was not only the crowning moment in the creation of the American paradox, it also prefigured an enormous amount of racial violence in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.