Finding the Founding (Part VI): Bacon and the Walking Dead

In the 1670s two cataclysmic events occurred in the newly formed English North American colonies that solidified what they would become. One receives little attention because there is no way any longer to find a positive spin to describe it, while the other has become part of the American mythos of democratic progression. King Philip’s War in New England and Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia laid the final bricks that began to lead America down the path to its founding. And I love bricks.

Neither of these events was about Liberty. Both of these events were about power. And while there are several other contributing factors to defining the economic and cultural systems in colonial America and then the Republic, these two events framed American History for …. well, maybe they still do within the context of this americahypothesis.

This picture might be the best thing
posted on this blog, at least the tastiest

Anything that involves Bacon can’t be that bad, can it? Even a Bacon Rebellion sounds delicious, but rebellions seldom are anything but bloody affairs where no one really wins. This Bacon is also not as tasty as he is normally depicted. The usual “mythos” of Bacon’s Rebellion was that Bacon got a bunch of regular guys to defy the tyranny of evil English government, and yes, Virginia (see what I did there?), this should sound familiar. Bacon’s story and Rebellion have been washed in the cleansing waters of the Founding to make him and it a rip roaring tale of an American revolution before the American Revolution. But it wasn’t.

Francis Bacon, scientist, statesman and the Viscount of Something or Other,
was also kin to Nathaniel Bacon

Bacon was not regular – Bacon came from a great family (which included pork, ham and hot dogs, not really). Back in old England the Bacon’s hob-knobbed with Kings and Queens and others of the sort who were born into power and privilege and abused those who were not. When Royal Government in Virginia put the damper on his ambitious ambitions (which was part of the prerogative of his birthright) he was not too happy and raised an army of those aforementioned abused to show the Governor what for. Governor Berkeley, which is pronounced Barclay (for some reason the English don’t even know their own language) fought back, as was the duty of his position. Rebellion. Bacon was born to command and lead and choose for himself, but those who followed him, his clients, his “peasants” were not born to do anything but obey and follow (and hope that in the Virginia wilderness they could find a place to be left the hell alone by the likes of Bacon).

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Rebellion. Bacon died. The leader of his own rebellion, and he died. What to do if you are a peasant without the prerogative to rebel? You keep on fighting because now it is your ass that is on the line and not Bacon – Bacon, even in rebellion, being of the gentlemanly sort, could eventually have come to the table and offered “this” and negotiated “that”, and kept his head. But regular people? In rebellion? There’s was not to “this” or “that,” there’s was but to doff their cap – or in this case to be killed for stepping out of their lowly station and questioning authority. In the world of English culture where at that point birth still defined your station in life (at least in England and Virginia, Massachusetts was a little different) Bacon could question authority because he was born into authority, but those born below could not. And without Bacon the lives of

An uprising of the Masses praying to breathe free
Bacon's Rebellion was not

his peasants and servants (most of whom were English indentured servants and small landholders and a small number of Africans in the same lot) were not going to be a happily ever after. When the rebellion failed those who lived on without Bacon were punished severely, and most departed this earth. Yes, this is also a cautionary tale, besides being historical, that a life without Bacon is not worth living.

The important consequence of the rebellion was to speed the process toward institutional race based slavery, which within a generation became the primary labor source for the Planters of Virginia and then for the rest of the southern colonies. The historical ramifications of this transition from English indentured servants, with the possibility of independent land holdings if they lived through their contract, to imported African slaves, who by their biology and later by their birth, could never be free are catastrophic and perpetual for southern culture. Sure slavery ended, thanks to Northern commercial interests who wanted a better labor system, but the real consequences of the Planter/slave connection have not died out. 

The South became ruled by a Planter aristocracy, similar to the society Planters like Bacon, and then the Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Lees, had all known back in monarchal Old England. In Old England these families had peasants to work the fields and to do their labor, but for the power of the aristocracy and high muckety muck non-aristocratic land holding families (like the Bacons and WJLs) Old England afforded too many changes where peasants could find other avenues to accumulate resources and even, with the English Civil War, find the means to take power for themselves in the world’s first modern democracy. This, after all, is what caused Bacon and the WJLs to come to America anyway – to re-establish the luxury of controlling other human beings – at first in Virginia the WJLs did it

A clear depiction of White over Black, 

and Wealth above all in the Old South

through English indentured servants from 1640s-1676 but then just like in Old England they rebelled. The Rebellion wasn’t successful, but it did demonstrate to the WJL set that to maintain control and max the rewards of their class dominating southern colonial society, economics and politics, they would need to convert to a population of laborers that could never claim the English right to having rights, because they were not English, they were African.

Why this is significant to the founding is not because of the horror of slavery per se, but rather the institutionalization of a capitalistic society in Virginia and the South where a small minority controlled almost all of the wealth and the great majority had nothing. The cultural psychology was not only based on white supremacy (which helped to justify slavery and form an alliance with have-whites and have not-whites) but the cultural psychology that still dominates the south is that of wealth supremacy. Not merely that the accumulation of wealth is good because it gives access to more resources (and therefore should be praise worthy), but that wealth in and of itself entitles the wealthy to dominate those without it. Such a psychology also, therefore, creates a platform where real democracy, the idea of equality before the law, the idea of the rule of law – the very premise of the Founding – is impossible. And do I really need to write another hundred pages to demonstrate that the South is still undemocratic? No, Virginia, you don’t.

The noted Historian, Peter Green, used to pepper his 

Lectures with this reference, and I had no idea what he was 

talking about. I just thought he was crazy and talking to someone

named Virginia.

In Massachusetts things were different, but not the motivation of wealth pursuit and economic independence which drove the Puritans to establish that colony, much like their Virginia cousins. We teach that the Puritans sought religious freedom, but that isn’t why they made the trek across the Atlantic – “straight cash, homey” was the major rationale. It’s nice that they also got to establish a fascistic religious regime in their own image, but that religious ideal (or nightmare) was not a primary motivating factor.

Unlike Virginia, or even the Pilgrims who were eventually absorbed into Massachusetts Bay, the founders of this New England “city upon a hill” were better funded and better prepared than Virginia and they happened upon Americans (Natives) that were friendlier than what the Chesapeake offered those in Jamestown – at least for a time. The Puritans were bent on replicating English patterns of culture, of society and of economy in the New World based on what they did in the Old. In the Old they did a modest bit of agriculture – you gotta eat – practiced trades, educated themselves and entered into commerce. This schema is what they replicated in New England. Most of the people had skills, most of the people could read, and many looked towards exploiting the resources of the North for commercial gain – fish, furs, lumber and whales, just to name a few of the important “industries” established in the first decades of settlement. And the colony flourished as far as population growth – unlike the Pilgrims in Plymouth or the “adventurers” in Jamestown, Massachusetts Bay had no dying time or starving time. Better nourished and in a better epidemiological environment, the population grew – more towns, more settlements, more encroachment on PAI ancestor homelands.

Metacomet

By the 1670s the PAI ancestor tribe of the Wampanoag could no longer tolerate the encroachment of the English on their traditional lands – and resource base. A generation earlier the Wampanoag under the leadership of Massasoit had been allies with the colonists, but in the quest for resources the colonists went a little Negan (see the Walking dead) on their native allies. In 1662 Massasoit died and was

Negan: The bad guy on 

Walking Dead who is about 

to kill someone with his bat

succeeded by his eldest son, who died, who was succeeded by Metacomet, called Philip by the colonists who kindly (probably forcibly) taught him English and schooled him in the ways of European life. So, Metacomet knew what he was dealing with. The peace between the Wampanoag PAI and the Puritans was a forced alliance, the demands of which kept on increasing. By 1671 the colonists wanted all of the Wampanoags guns, and Rick (oops, Walking Dead again), I mean, Metacomet saw the writing on the wall. The Puritans now held power and they exercised it, not with a baseball bat, but by executing some of King Philip’s (Metacomet) subjects ala Abraham and Glenn. The response was war.

But unlike the Walking Dead (where Rick will eventually overcome Negan) Metacomet entered a losing proposition. Early success turned into devastating defeat. The war started when a Native friend of the Puritans warned them that Metacomet was planning an attack on the Puritan’s sanctuary. We could call this Native Gregory, but his Puritan name was John Sassamon. Unlike Gregory, the turncoat in the Walking Dead, Sassamon turned up dead. The Puritan leadership rounded up three of Metacomet’s subjects and without evidence convicted and hanged them sparking Metacomet to attack.

Rick Grimes of the Walking Dead

Often in trouble like Metacomet

Metacomet raided villages and wreaked havoc Rick-style on colonial forces. He sought out allies, but not among the garbage people (again the Walking dead) but among long standing Wampanoag rivals, the Ganonsyoni Mohawk.

Artist Rendition of Mount Hope

The Mohawk lured Metacomet into a trap forcing him to flea back to his ancestral home and into the teeth of the Negan-esque Puritans. While Metacomet put up a resistance for nearly a year moving from place to place he was forced to retreat to his ancestral village of Mount Hope near what is now Bristol, Rhode Island.

Hilltop Mansion from Walking Dead

From this Hilltop Metacomet was besieged by the Puritan forces, which combined colonial militia and their own native allies. It was a native who finally shot Metacomet. His body was taken into custody and dismembered with his head being displayed on a pike for decades. I almost wonder if this is where the story line for Walking Dead came from and Rick will ultimately find a similar grisly end. Grisly it was, but rather liberating for the New England colonies as their expansion would have little resistance after this King Philip’s War.

The consequences of King Philip’s War are equally as profound in shaping the Northern ethos as Bacon’s Rebellion was to the ethos of the South. But this war did not establish the hegemony of a small class of landholding elite, but rather made it possible for the mixed economy of small landholdings and commerce to proceed. It also augmented the Puritan cultural psychology of personal independence as the basis for social, economic and political institutions. We’ve all been taught that the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony (cousins of Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony) were lovers of democracy because of the Mayflower Compact, where they all agreed to establish government of the people, by the people and for the people in that document. But that’s a little misleading.

The English Calvinists, which would include both Puritan and Pilgrim, believed in mutual agreements in all their endeavors. They made compacts when they started a church, where the members agreed to worship together and run the thing as equal members; they made compacts when they started businesses, where shareholders took part in the governance of making money; and they made compacts when they started their towns, where the residents agreed on how their “little commonwealth” should be run and administered.

The Little Commonwealth was technically

the Family unit, but Demos' book 

demonstrates the Puritan reliance on the

concept of the common wealth of society

Ok, they were not 100% egalitarian, but they did inherently believe in what we would call popularly based institutions, and definitely not rule by an elite, and definitely not rule by an elite whose only claim to status was that they were born in the right WJL family. In England the rationale of the English Civil War for the (primarily Puritan) forces opposed to the power of hereditary monarchy was much the same. Institutions need to reflect the power of members of society through an agreement of the people (google the Levellers) that would best protect the liberty of the individual. Liberty can not happen without inclusion of the majority of people, and it can’t happen in a world where there is a small minority who control wealth and power and people, and everyone else is just a peasant; or in the case of the South slaves. 

The ideal manifest in Puritan thinking, and in the Mayflower Compact (which was nothing original or significant at all, but was pretty standard operating procedure for Calvinists), was to enhance the possibilities of common people to live well and to restrain the growth of both the rich and the poor. This philosophy became central in the development of Old England’s democracy and the constitutional monarchy, which stabilized by the end of the 17^th century and was dominated by the House of Commons. It was also central to the social and political development of New England. More importantly, it became the premise of the American Revolution. That premise which grew in the English World in the 17^th and 18^th century is now called Classical Republicanism and if you want to find the Founding, then that is a concept that has to be understood – but not until next time.

Believe it or not, this guy, Machiavelli, is one of the Founders

Dedicated to Dr. Anthony P. Parish, who introduced me to TWD.

Finding the Founding (Part V): Power, Labor and the Origin of why Jefferson is a Fraud

Where power seeks better it is productive of Liberty. Where power seeks greatness it is destructive of Liberty. If we had a choice we believe we would always choose that which is productive, but history shows that we are more inclined towards destroying first …. Until we learn an alternative.

The settlement of America was more than likely always based on destruction and not just going back to the unprecedented cultural and population devastation of humans from the “Old World” coming to the “New,” but even going back to the Paleolithic Asian Immigrants and the smattering of Polynesians and Europeans who came over 10,000 years ago. The most prolific of the bunch were the PAI. The PAI are the primary genetic ancestors of what are now called Native Americans. There

Rule #1 Humans Need Resources
Rule #2 Human Migrate

seems to be some evidence that Polynesians reached South America and that Europeans reached North America but the consequence of their DNA seems miniscule, at least as evidence shows at this point. It was the PAI who settled the Americas maybe as far back as 20,000 years ago, or more, across land bridges that opened and closed like a slowly swinging gate. The exact timing and movement patterns is still debated by scholars, but one thing that is certain is that they were humans looking for resources to survive …. And that is the number one axiom of life. Stay alive, today, and hope to stay alive tomorrow.

In the 21^st century we hardly live by that axiom, and so are not really guided by some of the ugly corollaries of that rule. In nature, humans need resources to survive and perpetuate their DNA into the next generation. The Founding Generation saw this as Nature’s greatest law, but we should also get that it is, from our perspective, nature’s most brutal truth. In nature we will do whatever is necessary to save ourselves and our DNA. We protect our children, but if we have to kill someone else’s children to do so then so be it. We glory in power and live by the creed that “might makes right.” Because it is might, power, that keeps us alive. To think that the PAI did not live this way – when necessary – is a foolish thought. To think that nomadic hunter gatherers live by the reasonable assumption to do unto others as you would have them do is nonsense. And in the migration down two continents the friction between DNA groups would have caused killing to become a routine part of existence. Nature’s great law, Power is always right.

One possible mapping of the PAI Migration

Nature is never wrong and it still feeds our contemporary ambitions. I never would have thought so until the Trump phenomena, but here is a man with little talent, with no forethought and without empathy. He is correct when he says that he could shoot someone and his followers would not care. Because they perceive him as powerful, and they lust after that power in their own lives, so much so that they are willing to throw out all reason to gain power through the supposed might of their hero. Very, very human.

Through that nature of humanity that immigrants from Europe began coming to North America in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and as Europeans did in Central America and South America before that they did so with epic consequences. Life seeks power, and power breeds destruction, destruction brings death, and death is life. That’s not Mufasa’s circle of life, but it is the same, just not all Disney-fied. There were two different types of destruction, however, each with the same consequences, the destruction of native American life, but markedly different in their outcome for both the arriving immigrants and the meaning that America would undertake in the 18^th century. Might may make right, and power may seek to destroy liberty, but reason can temper both under certain conditions, but it can’t get rid of what nature has planted.

The Chesapeake society in Virginia and Maryland and the Puritan experiments of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were founded only about a generation apart, but in the evolution of those colonial “plantations” very different cultural models developed, and ones about which we in our 21^st century world should take note.

Virginia and Plymouth were similar in their founding. Both Jamestown and Plymouth were established by people without a plan and without any knowledge of what they would need to do to stay alive – other than result in what we would call the savagery of murder and pillaging. The result was death, and mostly for the colonists. The descendants of the PAI in both areas died more to disease, even before the founding of the settlements in the case of New England’s native people -- thanks to randy fishermen who brought disease to shore decades before Plymouth Rock landed on them.

How can you not love the murderous Pilgrims?
Look at how pious they are?
But I always thought the Rock was bigger.

Most of the dying was of the immigrants themselves. Ill prepared they were always short of food. They came in search of another Aztec or Inca empire. There were more soldiers than useful people – people to grow and procure food and work the land for what it could be, for what it would become. Pilgrims came to Plymouth and Pilgrims died. Adventurers came to Jamestown and they died too. But they kept coming, especially in the case of Virginia, but even in New England, at least, that is, when the Pilgrims lost out to the better supplied and financed Big Brother Puritan colony of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Big Brother works on two levels, one the obvious connection to 1984 that posits the Puritans as tyrants (who wanted freedom?), but also because they were an older and more mature (meaning not quite as rabid) co-Calvinists like the Pilgrims. The Puritans survived by replicating cultural and economic patterns that had developed in the eastern portions of England over the centuries – the Virginians survived by replicating the new patterns of the Atlantic Economy brought to the Americas by Columbus.

The “Starving Time” of Virginia’s first decade, where most of the population died from disease, starvation (maybe a little arsenic poisoning, too) and Indian warfare was abated by tobacco. One of history’s great ironies that tobacco once stopped dying, meh. With the introduction of a cheap grade of tobacco Virginia found a place in the Atlantic market and began the industrial production of tobacco – industrial in the sense of mass production coupled with mass consumption or industrial agriculture. This method was the same as that employed on sugar “plantations” in the Caribbean, where superior breeds of tobacco were also raised. The biggest problem was labor and where to get it. Virginians, being English, held on to the English abhorrence for slavery rather than adopting African slavery as the Columbian experiment of the Caribbean had … at least for a little while.

If you asked Arthur C. Clark. "They tried and failed?"

about the earliest English Colonies. He would reply,

"No, they tried and died." Great line from Dune.

Even after Africans were introduced in the 16-teens, the English favored English indentured servants for the next 5 or six decades. Servants signed themselves into a limited slavery (that’s an indenture) for 5-7 years with the hopes of reaping what they sowed – in almost literal terms. Indentured laborers worked in the hopes of surviving long enough to get their own piece of land to work and become their own boss (over other servants) – something that was hardly possible for the institutionally poor peasant population that was willing to sign the indenture in the first place.

Tobacco boomed and settlers came. When England’s Revolution in the 1640s changed the lot for those who supported the ill fated monarchy, which lost that civil war – they came to holdings in Virginia. And those who supported the King had maybe lost power in England, but they could find it anew in Virginia. And find it they did with all of its destructive consequences. The Washingtons, Jeffersons, Lees, Madisons and others like the Braxtons and Randolphs and Carters who are not part of the remembered founders – they all came at this time. They came with their coats of arms and capital resources to establish the Planter Class that would rule the South for the next 300 years. Their power, in pursuit of more power, bred destruction and within a generation of their arrival the legal corpus of institutional slavery was being put on the books that only this class of people could read. Another generation later, shortly before the turn to 1700, the deed was done and race based institutional slavery had overturned the incentive based system of labor, where even the poorest immigrant could own “Myne Own Ground.” (Myne Own Ground is a fantastic and short book about an African who rose from indenture to be a well regarded planter in the 1600s -- before slavery ended that possibility)

Power replaced the possibility of small landholdings, of Liberty, with the domination of land, government, society by the Planter Class. Now the 1% (which is really estimated at about 10% but that wouldn’t resonate, would it) dominated. Nearly a century later Adam Smith, the founder of theoretical capitalism, explained the error of their ways – that the adoption of slavery is economically stupid when compared to incentive based forms. This folly was especially made true because it also bore the cleavage of race, and there is no way to “Get Out” of that. By institutionalizing race based slavery the biggest problem would ultimately not be a diminishment of economic efficiency, but rather a culture based on man’s lust to control other men, and because freedom and slavery looked different, it was easy to tell who was superior in that equation.

Who says labor doesn't get credit. This Planter's
Tobacco label featured the reason he profited. Slaves

The real horror in regards to “Finding the Founding” is that even when a Virginian wrote that “all men are created equal,” this most famous phrase in American History, along with “Getting Jiggy with it,” was written by one of the Planter Class’ own. Jefferson thrived in a society where the 1% thrived, and most everyone else was reduced to subservient penury – with at least 40% of that population being locked into the most abject and debased labor system of destruction ever devised. And Jeff and his lot did it all for power, not for Liberty, but for Power.

Massachusetts Bay started the same way, but followed a different path to the Founding. To be Continued.