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.