Bacon's Rebellion Edmund Morgan Summary

Historian Edmund Morgan argues that Bacon’s Rebellion was a major turning point in the history of the Chesapeake Bay. Morgan explains that in the years leading up to the Rebellion, indentured servants were surviving longer so they began to have their terms lengthened and rules tightened. These servants became vital to the new cash crop, tobacco. The colonies provided a much better life for lower class Englishmen and thus, indentured servitude became extremely popular. The tobacco demand in Virginia and the desire to exploit the lower class farmer for profits thwarted lower class freedoms, resulting in frustration amongst the farmers. Morgan argues that these frustrated lower class Englishman wondering around the countryside without any land, eventually leading to Bacons Rebellion, was a major cause for the spread of slavery. Morgan

submits that slavery was a way to ensure hard labor workers would stay at the bottom of the social ladder. The introduction of slavery brings about many contradictions, first, lower class Englishmen gained freedom and some social status, while the gap between those same lower class and the large plantation owners grew. Morgan stats, “slavery relieved the small man of the pressures that had been reducing him to continued servitude”. Morgan emphasis that Bacon’s Rebellion, and confines slavery as strictly an American colonial issue, however other historians have other thoughts in regards to Morgan’s claim.
In contrast to Morgan, Alden T.

Vaughan argues that that racism and slavery for Africans was present long before Virginia. He identifies pieces of evidence which tend to indicate physical traits had already consigned Africans to the very lowest socioeconomic status from the time the first known Africans arrived in Virginia. Vaughan uses the experiences of Morgan Godwyn who was a clergyman in seventeenth-century Barbados and eventually Virginia. Vaughn argues that it was racism that caused slavery, not Bacon’s Rebellion. Racism was alive and well in Barbados and made its way into Virginia via merchants and traders evident in Morgan Godwyn’s observations. Another historian that contradicts Morgan’s thesis is April Hatfield. Hatfield argues that “the Atlantic context that encompassed Chesapeake localities defined the emerging institution of slavery in Virginia”. Hatfield believes that Virginia was heavily influenced by other colonies in the “Atlantic world” including Barbados and other Caribbean territories. She submits that colonies in the Caribbean “informed” slave owners in Virginia regarding the development of the slave

society.
Both Hatfield and Vaughan both shed their spotlights on other aspects regarding the development of a slave society in Virginia. Both agree that other colonies, mainly in the Caribbean, had a very large influence on slavery in Virginia and they were looked outside of Virginia to find answers to how slavery spread to this so called freed land. Each historian makes valid points and has a very interesting idea.
Morgan, Hatfield, and Vaughn are all correct in their thesis, it is very probably that the spread of Slavery in Virginia was caused by all three historians’ ideas. Bacon’s rebellion, along with racism being brought from Barbados, and ideas from the other Atlantic colonies in regards to developing a slave society all contributed to the spread of slavery in Virginia and each argument carries equal weight when discussing the spread of slavery. Morgan’s emphasis on the Bacon’s Rebellion is a valid argument and thus should not be viewed any more or less than Hatfield’s and Vaughn’s.