Bacon's Rebellion by Murray N. Rothbard

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Bacon's Rebellion

by Murray N. Rothbard

Conceived in Liberty (1975). In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon began a mutiny against the governor of Virginia, William Berkeley, because Bacon (and many other Virginians) wanted to pursue a more vigorous war against the Indians than Berkeley would allow. This mutiny was the spark that lit the flame of Bacon's Rebellion.

Why? Why revolution? This question is asked in fascination by contemporary observers and historians of every revolution in history. What were the reasons, the "true" motives, behind any given revolution? The tendency of historians of every revolution, Bacon's Rebellion included, has been to present a simplistic and black-and-white version of the drives behind the revolutionary forces.
Thus, the "orthodox" version holds Nathaniel Bacon to have been a conscious "torchbearer" of the later American Revolution, battling for liberty and against English oppression; the version of "revisionist" history marks down Bacon as an unprincipled and Indian-hating demagogue rebelling against the wise statesman Berkeley. Neither version can be accepted as such.
The very search by observers and historians for purity and unmixed motives in a revolution betrays an unrealistic naïveté. Revolutions are mighty upheavals made by a mass of people, people who are willing to rupture the settled habits of a lifetime, including especially the habit of obedience to an existing government. They are made by people willing to turn from the narrow pursuits of their daily lives to battle vigorously and even violently together in a more general cause.
Because a revolution is a sudden upheaval by masses of men, one cannot treat the motives of every participant as identical, nor can one treat a revolution as somehow planned and ordered in advance. On the contrary, one of the major characteristics of a revolution is its dynamism, its rapid and accelerating movement in one of several competing directions. Indeed, the enormous sense of exhilaration (or of fear, depending on one's personal values and one's place in the social structure) generated by a revolution is precisely due to its unfreezing of the political and social order, its smashing of the old order, of the fixed and relatively stagnant political structure, its transvaluation of values, its replacement of a reigning fixity with a sense of openness and dynamism. Hope, especially among those submerged by the existing system, replaces hopelessness and despair.
The counterpart of this sudden advent of unlimited social horizons is uncertainty. For if the massive gates of the political structure are at last temporarily opened, what path will the people now take? Indeed, the ever-changing and -developing revolution will take paths and entail consequences perhaps only dimly, if at all, seen by its original leaders.
A revolution, therefore, cannot be gauged simply by the motivations of its initiators. The paths taken by the revolution will be determined not merely by these motives, but by the resultant of the motives and values of the contending sides – as they begin and as they change in the course of the struggle – clashing with and interacting upon the given social and political structure. In short, by the interaction of the various subjective values and the objective institutional conditions of the day.
For masses of men to turn from their daily lives to hurl themselves against existing habits and the extant might of a ruling government requires an accumulation of significant grievances and tensions. No revolution begins in a day and on arbitrary whim. The grievances of important numbers of people against the state pile up, accumulate, form an extremely dry forest waiting for a spark to ignite the conflagration. That spark is the "crisis situation," which may be intrinsically minor or only distantly related to the basic grievances; but it provides the catalyst, the emotional impetus for the revolution to begin.
This analysis of revolution sheds light on two common but misleading historical notions about the genesis of revolutions in colonial America. Conservative historians have stressed that revolution in America was unique; in contrast to radical European revolutions, American rebellion came only in reaction to new acts of oppression by the government. American revolutions were, therefore, uniquely "conservative," reacting against the disruption of the status quo by new acts of tyranny by the state. But this thesis misconceives the very nature of revolution.
Revolutions, as we have indicated, do not spring up suddenly and in vacuo; almost all revolutions – European or American – are ignited by new acts of oppression by the government. Revolutions in America – and certainly this was true of Bacon's Rebellion – were not more "conservative" than any other, and since revolution is the polar archetype of an anticonservative act, this means not conservative at all.
Neither, incidentally, can we credit the myth engendered by neo-Marxian historians that revolutions like Bacon's Rebellion were "class struggles" of the poor against the rich, of the small farmers against the wealthy oligarchs. The revolution was directed against a ruling oligarchy, to be sure; but an oligarchy not of the wealthy but of certain wealthy, who had gained control of the privileges to be obtained from government. As we have pointed out, the Bacons and Byrds were large planters and the revolution was a rebellion of virtually all the people – wealthy and poor, of all occupations – who were not part of the privileged clique. This was a rebellion not against a Marxian "ruling class" but against what might be called a "ruling caste."