Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  Oddly, it was the year 1676 when all this happened, exactly one hundred years before the “Second” American Revolution, and so much of the dispute, so many of the principles proclaimed, all sound so much the same. Unfair taxation by the Crown was one cry. Oppressive, aristocratic rule—in this case by the apparently senile Royal Governor Berkeley—was another.

  Bacon was by all accounts a riveting, persuasive speaker, and the solutions that he offered were forward-thinking. Outright, public defiance of Berkeley was one Baconian development. Outright defiance of the Crown and its re-inforcements due from England was another Baconian proposal. Still another, according to one contemporary source, was the possibility of an autonomous union of colony states, sort of a federation…sort of a United Colonies!

  Then, too, there was legislation enacted by the Virginia Assembly at the time of Bacon’s meteoric ascension in the summer of 1676—new laws, Bacon’s Laws, giving the people more say-so in their own lives, chipping away at the privileges of the aristocratic leadership.

  And in Bacon’s various proclamations and manifestoes, one of them signed, “General, by consent of the People,” later historians saw the first true pronouncements of democratic principles in America.

  As for the people who were Indians—Native Americans—Bacon unabashedly called for their extermination. And it was Indian “troubles”—raids, murders on frontier lands—that triggered Bacon’s Rebellion in the first place. When Governor Berkeley hesitated to mount an expedition in pursuit of the marauding Indians, their exact identity arguable at best, Bacon and his fellow homesteaders at the outlying edges of the Virginia Colony went after Indians of their own choice anyway, without authority, in open defiance of the royal governor’s orders.

  Bacon’s actions, his demeanor, and the things he said all apparently had their popular appeal. Despite being branded an outlaw by Berkeley, Bacon was elected to the House of Burgesses. This was an oddity in itself, for as Berkeley’s young protégé just a year earlier, Bacon had been appointed to the strictly blue-ribbon Council of State. Now he was both an aristocrat and a populist!

  At one point, on the theory that the “rogues shall harbor here no more,” Bacon indeed did burn Jamestown. He raised chivalrous eyebrows, too, when he used a thin line of captured women, his “white aprons,” as a screen forestalling enemy fire while his troops busied themselves behind the ladies in digging defensive earthworks outside of Jamestown.

  In any case, the argument between Bacon and Berkeley—the colony-wide upheaval, the occasional civil war—swayed back and forth all summer in 1676, on into the fall, with Bacon virtually ruling the Virginia Colony. But in October, on the heels of another Indian expedition in a grim swampland, Bacon succumbed to fever and, quite suddenly, was gone.

  In rash fury of his own, a resurgent Berkeley now tracked down and executed more than two dozen of Bacon’s key followers as the late rebellion collapsed. Within a year, back home in England to give an accounting to King Charles II, Berkeley died as well.

  Young Bacon’s burial place was kept secret because of his followers’ conviction that a vengeful Berkeley would exhume the body and hang it upon some gibbet in chains until it rotted away, an occasional custom of the day. It is said that a coffin filled with rocks was buried for Berkeley’s later discovery, while the real burial was secret—it might even have been in the nearby York River.

  Whatever the case, not only his burial place is unknown today, but his image, too. No known portrait exists of this firebrand who nearly toppled the royal governor of the Crown’s vaunted Virginia Colony in the First American Revolution.

  To Prevent Civil Insurrection

  HERE’S A SHOCKER HEADLINE ITEM FROM BOTH BOSTON AND NEW YORK—IN the 1680s, mind you. Colonists in revolt. Royal Governors sacked, booted out. Colonists running their own governmental affairs.

  Unlikely report? Not at all. Not in context with Virginia’s recent upheaval of the 1670s, known as Bacon’s Rebellion. For here was a revolt, an insurrection, whatever you may wish to call it, that was so sweeping it drove a powerful royal governor onto a narrow slice of land called the Eastern Shore; destroyed Jamestown, the colony’s capital; and produced all kinds of defiant, democratic-sounding, even “liberal” legislation known as “Bacon’s Laws.”

  It’s difficult to say now just how far into real revolution the incendiary events of 1676 might have carried England’s richest, most populous American colony, except for the rebellion’s collapse with the death of Nathaniel Bacon from a fever at the very zenith of his revolutionary career.

  Bacon today barely rates a footnote in the history of America. The leaders of the real American Revolution that came along a century later hardly ever mentioned him…but here’s one irony. Patrick Henry in 1765 delivered a stinging speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses, by that time meeting in the eighteenth-century colonial capital of Williamsburg. Henry responded to listeners shocked to hear his defiance of the Crown with the epithet, “If this be treason, make the most of it!” Oddly enough, just ninety years before, in a field at Middle Plantation—later the site of Williamsburg itself—Nathaniel Bacon allegedly told his listeners much the same thing: If this be treason, so be it!

  Interesting, too, that while Bacon’s Rebellion only ended in collapse and was never foremost in the minds of America’s Founding Fathers a century later, it did have one lasting, unsettling effect: It brought the king’s troops to the American colonies and brought them to stay!

  The first troops, perhaps as many as one thousand, plus an artillery train, were sent across the Atlantic in response to Royal Governor William Berkeley’s pleas for help in stamping out the upstart Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion. By the time the troops reached Virginia, however, Bacon was dead, and the rebellion was all over. But the troops were there. Thrust upon a population of only 40,000 they were the equivalent of “more than 150,000 soldiers poured into the state of Virginia in 1980 [population then more than three million] for the purpose of suppressing civil disorder,” estimated Douglas Edward Leach in his 1986 book Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763.

  The redcoats arrived in wintry January 1677 to a colony “ravaged and wrecked” by the recent civil war, its capital of Jamestown “in ruins,” its residents spread out on “scattered farms” and struggling merely to provide for themselves. “So it was that many of the soldiers had to remain unhappily quartered on board their fetid ships for a further period of time [after an Atlantic crossing taking weeks], until the army could establish a base camp at Middle Plantation. Men sickened and many died.”

  Eventually, a good many surviving soldiers were sent back to England, but not all. Some stayed on voluntarily as settlers. What really irritated the colonists, though, was the retention of about two hundred troops as a standing garrison—“a constant reminder of royal authority,” wrote Leach. To make matters worse, they had no barracks, no housing of their own—“many of these soldiers had to be quartered in civilian dwellings or outbuildings as unwelcome guests.” The promised rental compensation often came late…and so did pay for the soldiers themselves. “The soldiers and officers are now farr in arreare and the soldiers cloathing of all sorts quite worne out, soe that if they be not provided for against winter they will inevitably perish,” lamented their commander at one point.

  In the end, in 1682, the garrison was disbanded, with most of its members apparently melting into the colonial populace…but with bad feelings on both sides still remaining. On the one hand, the Colonials were smarting at the insertion of regular troops in their midst; on the other, the military professionals from England resented the hostility they felt from the Colonials.

  Move now to Boston, 1686: King James II had ordered a gigantic reshuffle and combination of the northern colonies. The once separate entities of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Plymouth Colony were all thrown under one administrative roof, one royal governor, as the Dominion of New England. Soon after, New York, New Jersey,
and Connecticut were tossed into the same pot. For a time, all of these colonies were ruled by newly appointed Royal Governor Sir Edmund Andros.

  Andros came to Boston and its Puritans as a military professional with no intention of granting them new freedoms, as the suspect minion of a Roman Catholic king, as the commander of a newly placed garrison of troops backed up by a warship in the harbor. He soon set about emplacing cannon that could sweep the waterfront and various streets nearby. Perhaps worst of all, he drafted Massachusetts men to join an English-led, midwinter expedition against Indians in the desolate Maine woods to the north. It was no time to attempt such a foray. The conditions were hard on the local men, but even tougher were the torturous abuses allegedly inflicted upon them by their British officers.

  That mission occurred in the winter of 1688–1689, and matters in Boston came to a head that spring. On April 18, some crew members from the frigate HMS Rose joined the townspeople in a bloodless coup that saw the ship’s captain taken prisoner on a Boston street. Later in the day Andros and his chief lieutenants surrendered themselves to the insurgents as well.

  Missing from that roundup was the former commander of the Boston garrison, Colonel Francis Nicholson. He, it turns out, had been dispatched earlier as a deputy governor for New York and New Jersey when they were conjoined to the Dominion of New England—with small redcoat garrisons stationed in Manhattan and Albany. The news of the uprising reaching New York from Boston in late April of 1689, of course, served to undermine his already none-too-popular regime. Although Nicholson, like Andros, was an Anglican, he was widely suspected of being a “closet Catholic” working against the best interests of local Protestants, especially the Dutch who actually founded New York and now were known to chafe under English rule.

  It didn’t help the cause of tranquility when a few soldiers from the disbanded Boston garrison arrived to bolster Nicholson’s Manhattan ranks—the fact that they were Irishmen made them suspect as Catholics as well. With trouble obviously brewing, one of the English regulars stopped a local militiaman from carrying out an order given by a militia officer. In a confrontation with the aggrieved officer afterward, Nicholson completely lost his temper and “flew into a rage,” reported historian Leach, “brandished a pistol and threatened to have the whole troublesome town set ablaze.”

  Already waiting in the wings at that point was New York militia officer Jacob Leisler, “a prosperous and influential merchant of German background who shared the anti-English resentment felt by most of the Dutch.” He also was “a staunch Calvinist” who “had become convinced that the integrity and perhaps the very life of the province [New York] were threatened by a secret Roman Catholic conspiracy involving Nicholson himself.” Now, thanks to his imprudent outburst, the deputy governor had played into the hands of his critics. The very next day, May 31, the militia arose and quietly took over Fort James in Manhattan. The disarmed regulars melted away. So did Governor Nicholson…aboard a vessel setting sail for England. The volunteer who then took command of the fort, the local militia and, in effect, the affairs of government was Leisler.

  With Protestant (and even Dutch-born) King William and Queen Mary now on the throne of England, Leisler apparently was happy to serve them as a loyal subject—and rump governor. So things drifted until January of 1691, when two companies of regulars, under Major Richard Ingoldesby, suddenly arrived in Manhattan. Colonel Henry Sloughter, a newly appointed royal governor, was said to be on his way as well.

  Leisler now took a fateful step…or two. He refused to relinquish control of Fort James to Ingoldesby in the absence of Governor Sloughter himself. By difficult negotiation, it then was agreed that Ingoldesby and his troops could occupy the town hall as their headquarters. Soon, there were minor brushes between their overlapping patrols. The newly arrived Ingoldesby managed to attract several hundred local men to his side as reinforcement for his regulars. Leisler also was busy recruiting added numbers for his own force. Then on March 17, the date now celebrated in New York (and elsewhere) as St. Patrick’s Day, Leisler issued a demand that Ingoldesby dissolve his local force. The English officer refused, and with new Governor Sloughter’s approaching ship nearly on hand (it arrived March 19), shooting broke out between the two vying factions. It wasn’t all out war, but it did have serious repercussions—not only were two persons killed and a number wounded in the gunfire, but Leisler two months later was hanged. It also was a historical benchmark. As Leach wrote, “Here for the first time in North America an armed, organized force of provincials was in actual combat with the standing army of the Crown.” (Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia, by contrast, was more a civil war between insurgents and the royal governor’s faction; the king’s troops were still on their way to Virginia when the rebellion’s bubble burst with the death of Bacon himself.)

  With the advent of William and Mary in England and the troubles in Boston and New York, the experiment of an amalgamated New England colony soon came to an end in North America. Connecticut and Rhode Island were allowed to tend their own knitting as “largely self-governing colonies.” New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey would be royal colonies. Further, “By terms of a royal charter issued in 169l, Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colony, along with the line of coastal settlements in Maine, became a single colony with a royally appointed governor and elected legislature.”

  In the years ahead, until the very eve of the real American Revolution, England and her satellites would be fighting four wars against the French and their various allies, both in the New World and the Old. As one result, the American Colonials often accompanied the British on expeditions against the French to Quebec, Louisbourg, the Caribbean, and in the Ohio territory. Rather than fully cooperating as steadfast allies in those situations, the Colonials and the British military often were at odds with one another. The professional British military considered the Colonials to be an unkempt, undisciplined, unreliable, even rowdy lot, while the Americans found the British to be arrogant, abusive, and unwilling to delegate authority to others.

  In sum, the seeds of enmity planted at the time of Bacon’s Rebellion simply multiplied thereafter. “There can be no doubt,” wrote Leach, “that nearly a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, redcoats in a colony were viewed by Americans as the arm of repressive authority.” From then on, as Leach also noted, “Every colonist, whatever his political stance, understood that the king’s forces were there to prevent civil insurrection.”

  Not for nothing would Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence “indict” the king of England “For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.”

  Rising Hope of Virginia

  PICTURE THIS: AN ISEFLOED RIVER IN THE WILDERNESS OF COLONIAL AMERICA. White waters churning…bubbling, boiling along. And out on the seething surface, two men perched on a makeshift raft.

  Their precarious platform, we are told by the younger of the pair, took hours to assemble with their “one poor Hatchet.” The chopping, trimming, and shaping were “a whole Day’s work” for himself and his companion. It was not until the early darkness of winter that they pushed out into the chilly Allegheny River for their eastward crossing.

  And then, “before we were Half Way over,” their raft became jammed—“jammed in the ice in such a Manner that we expected every Moment our Raft to sink, and ourselves to perish.”

  Who is speaking here? Who was it caught in this moment of peril? And worse, about to be hurled into the freezing water itself? To wit: “I put out my setting pole to try to stop the Raft, that the Ice might pass by, when the Rapidity of the Stream threw it with so much violence against the Pole, that it jerked me out into ten Feet water.”

  The man in the water was young, only twenty-one, not yet the Father of His Country, but rather an inexperienced militia officer at a moment of peril on the future nation’s frontier.

  Never mind that his location today would appear rather tame, an X-mark on a map of Pennsylvania. Back then, of course, th
e reality surrounding the young Virginian and his companion was a primitive wilderness where bear and buffalo still roamed—Indians and the French, too.

  Fortunately for George Washington (and for the future United States), he was able to react quickly after he was thrown into the water. With the raft still intact and close by, he found a handhold among the rough logs and managed to hang on. He and his companion, woodsman Christopher Gist, then found their craft too unwieldy for passage to either riverbank, so they left it for sanctuary on a nearby island, where they spent a cold December night—so cold, in fact, that the next morning they were able to walk across the now frozen river. The wilderness-wise Gist, acting as George Washington’s guide, suffered frostbite of fingers and toes, but not the young man with him. Washington, still fairly new to frontier life, had come through his river dunking with no harmful effect.

  As he now turned homeward for Virginia, he could count himself fortunate in more ways than one. It had been, overall, quite a risky mission to undertake alone and at such a tender age on behalf of his government, the British government of the middle eighteenth century. It had been an affair that would have intimidated many an older, experienced diplomat, soldier, or frontiersman. And the newly appointed militia major (and adjutant for eastern Virginia) was certainly not, by any definition of the word, experienced.

  The young George Washington, though, was an impressive, powerful-looking figure of well over six feet. All his life he would be noted for his large hands—the largest, said the Marquis de Lafayette many years later, he had ever seen on any man! He was well-traveled within the prestigious Virginia Colony’s highest social circles, from the entourage of the Crown’s governor in the capital city of Williamsburg, Lord Robert Dinwiddie, to the ranking gentry of the Northern Neck region running between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers, up to the site of today’s Washington, D.C.