Reinterpretting "Bacon's Rebellion"

 Race had nothing to do with Bacon's Rebellion was what I was taught in K-12 history classes. But like most EVERYthing in American history, dig a little deeper and there is race, lurking over the whole thing and playing a large role in explaining why what happened happened.

A good quote from the Wikipedia entry for the rebellions: Edmund S. Morgan's classic 1975 American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia connected the calamity of Bacon's Rebellion, namely the potential for lower-class revolt, with the colony's transition over to slavery: "But for those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. Virginians did not immediately grasp it. It would sink in as time went on."

Divide and conquer. Make white skin privilege the lever to separate oppressed from oppressed. Offer land rights (in the hinterlands) to the servant-class whites; deny it even to the free blacks, and make the unfree more clearly and forcefully slaves not just for life but on into perpetuity for their descendants.

Of course, race is complex and messy, and so things are not so simple. There is also the Native American angle here--the most pressing concern that triggered the rebellion was that the rebels (black and white, free or not, poor or middlin') wanted to completely rid Virginia of "the savages," whereas the colonial government actually had the gall to recognize a few rights (for the time being), like the right to live, for those folks who had inhabited the land since time immemorial and in some of them's own lifetimes had first encountered these pasty-faced savages (24 rebels were hung after the affair) who acted like they owned the world.