The First Revolution - The Spark

American Political History · Jul 24, 2021 · 14m

It did not begin with a manifesto or a meeting. It began with an unpaid debt and some stolen pigs — and from that squalid little quarrel on the Virginia frontier, a chain of killings unwound that no one could stop. A debt, a beating, a dead herdsman. A militia that emptied its muskets into the wrong cabin in the dark and killed fourteen of the colony's own allies. A siege, a flag of truce, and the murder of the men who came out to talk under it.

This is the episode where the pressure becomes a war. Governor William Berkeley, thirty years on the job, reads the danger better than anyone alive —…