The Story of Bacon's RebellionStanard, Mary Newton
History
The Story of Bacon's Rebellion
Stanard, Mary Newton
Bacon's Rebellion, 1676; Virginia -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
Indeed, the savages, not the colonists, were the protected ones, for the
gain from the Indian beaver and otter fur trade, which the Governor and
his friends monopolized, was believed to be a stronger argument with Sir
William Berkeley for keeping in league with the red men than the
massacre of the King's subjects was for making war upon them. The
helpless people could only shake their heads despairingly and whisper
under their breath, "Bullets cannot pierce beaver skins."
In a "Complaint from Heaven, with a Huy and Crye and a Petition out of
Virginia and Maryland. To Owr great Gratious Kinge and souveraigne
Charles ye ii King of Engel'd etc. with his parliament," it is charged
that "Old Governr. Barkly, altered by marrying a young Wyff, from his
wonted publicq good, to a covetous Fole-age, relished Indians presents
with some that hath a like feelinge, so wel, that many Christians Blood
is Pokketed up wth other mischievs, in so mutch that his lady tould,
that it would bee the overthrow of ye Country."
The most ghastly accounts of the sly and savage incursions of the
Indians, and of the way in which they served their victims, such as
flaying them alive, knocking out their teeth with clubs and tearing out
their finger-nails and toe-nails, flew from lip to lip. The
terror-stricken planters upon the frontiers and more exposed places
deserted their homes, left the crops upon which they depended for
existence to waste and ruin, and huddled together in the more sheltered
places, still not knowing "upon whom the storm would light."
Truly was the colony under the "greatest distractions" it had known
since the frightful Indian massacre of the year 1622.
In such a state of horror and demoralization, and remembering all that
those of earlier times had suffered, no wonder the colonists did not
question whether the natives had any rights to be considered, and came
to scarcely regard them as human beings, or that the sentiment "the only
good Indian is a dead Indian" should have prevailed. Indeed, the one
chance for the divine law of the survival of the fittest to be carried
out in Virginia seemed to be in the prompt and total extermination of
the red race.
III.
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
The beginning of serious war with the Indians happened in this wise. One
Sunday morning in the summer of 1675, as some of the settlers of
Stafford County took their way peacefully to church, with no thought of
immediate danger in their minds, they were greeted, as they passed the
house of one Robert Hen, a herdsman, by the ghastly spectacle of the
bloodstained bodies of Hen himself, and an Indian, lying across Hen's
doorstep. Though scarred with the gashes of the deadly tomahawk, life
was not quite gone out of the body of the white man, and with his last
breath he gasped, "Doegs--Doegs," the name of a most hostile tribe of
Indians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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