The First Revolution - Two Men, One Colony

American Political History · Jul 24, 2021 · 22m

Before the rebellion there were two men, and the only way to understand what happened is to understand each of them. William Berkeley had governed Virginia for thirty years — grown it from a starving outpost into a functioning colony, held it loyal through a civil war, and earned a place among the eight Lords Proprietors of Carolina. He was sixty-six, proud to the bone, and the Virginia he had built had become something he could no longer quite see. Nathaniel Bacon had been in the colony two years: Cambridge-educated, shipped west under a cloud after a inheritance fraud, holding a frontier…