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The First Revolution - The Showdown
This is the scene the season has been building toward. Nathaniel Bacon comes down the James River with five hundred armed men; Governor William Berkeley, able to raise barely forty, throws open the gates of Jamestown and meets him on the steps of the statehouse — where the old governor tears open his shirt, bares his chest, and dares the rebel to shoot. Bacon wants one thing: a commission, in writing, and an assembly that will not rise until he has it.
What follows is the most dramatic confrontation in colonial American history, and the most revealing. A governor's masterstroke of a pardon. A…
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