O YE DRYBONES: THE BACON REBELLION / the invention of white race

 Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, the largest and most consequential slave revolt in the history of the continent. At first a small opposition movement within the Anglo-American ruling class, over profit-making opportunities in Virginia, the revolt became hurriedly a mass rebellion of bond-laborers, their sights set on the chief garrison and magazine at West Point. Nathaniel Bacon was a member of the colony council and a militant opponent of Virginia land policy. He had prepared the revolt a few years earlier by organizing an armed mutiny of angry taxpayers at Lawnes Creek Parish, and, in November of 1676, proclaimed freedom to all bond-laborers, in anticipation they would join his cause against the big tobacco bourgeoisie. He was right. Thousands of bond-laborers – six thousand European Americans and two thousand African Americans – took up arms against the numerically tiny Anglo-American slave-owning planter class. Seizing the day, dramatically, they drove Governor Berkeley back to England, hat in hand, and shut down all tobacco production for fourteen straight months.The slave rebellion introduced a near terminal crisis in the young British imperial system, and, for the Anglo-American slave owners and planters, the frightening prospect of losing forever the entire Chesapeake, home to some of the richest tidewater land on the planet, which they had been exploiting massively and ceaselessly for the previous sixty years, through a system of bond-labor servitude known as chattel slavery.The rebel leaders weren’t having it, and, according to Grantham himself in the official report he penned weeks later, recommended “cutting me in peeces.” Grantham described the rebel leaders as “foure hundred English and Negroes in Armes.” This is no small point, as the historical record of Virginia verifies.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/o-ye-drybones-archive--6500709/support.