And today, three and a half centuries after the Royal African Company received its charter, capitalism has continued to find a way to profit from—and exploit—Black bodies. Mass incarceration and prison labor are big business, and corporate America continues to extract every penny possible from the trauma and suffering of African Americans, creating new profit centers and intergenerational wealth streams. Unjust laws—enacted through lobbying and legalized bribery on the part of corporate America, corrections officers, the Fraternal Order of Police, and other groups—promote these predatory practices. The immigration industrial complex has criminalized undocumented immigration, and much as in the slave trade, private corporations profit from the detention of migrants and refugees as well as from the trafficking of babies and the separation of families. The Royal African Company may be long gone, but its spirit is very much alive.
1674–1679
BACON’S REBELLION
Heather C. McGhee
I found their names on a list that Virginia governor William Berkeley kept of the men executed for their part in a rebellion against his rule. My finger paused on “One Page,” and I underlined what came next: “a carpenter, formerly my servant.”
The description went on: “But for his violence used against the Royal Party, made a Colonel.” Five names later I found what I was looking for again: “One Darby, from a servant made a Captain.”
One Darby, one Page. Both were servants who became officers in Nathaniel Bacon’s rebel army in 1676, an army that included hundreds of white “bondsmen” and enslaved Africans. They nearly succeeded in overthrowing the colonial government, burning the capital of Jamestown to the ground before Bacon’s death. Governor Berkeley’s list was the first time I’d seen names and descriptions of the men who followed Bacon and changed history.
I let my imagination wander. Was Page a white indentured servant and Darby an enslaved African? Had these two men experienced, in the brief months of rebellion in 1676, something that has eluded Americans ever since: working-class solidarity across race?
I first discovered Bacon’s Rebellion while I was teaching myself American labor history. It’s a history that otherwise is full of stories of white workers fighting workers of color to maintain their place in the hierarchy of capitalism: from Irish dockworkers chasing Black longshoremen out of their jobs in the nineteenth century to white factory workers leading “hate strikes” to oppose Black promotions in the twentieth. I heard the same story when I traveled to Canton, Mississippi, in the wake of a failed union drive in 2017 and talked to autoworkers. “The whites [were] against it because the Blacks [were] for it,” one said. In the labor conflicts, the true victor was the boss, who used racial divisions as a wedge against organizing and kept employees competing for low wages.
In early colonial Virginia, work was brutal, often deadly, and for the large working class of Black, white, and Indigenous servants, it went unpaid and life was unfree. Even after servitude’s end (still a possibility under the law for some Africans at this time), common people had few opportunities to acquire land or gainful work. The colonial elite disdained and feared the mass of “idle” freedmen and fretted over the possibility of insurrection among the enslaved. The tempestuous young newcomer Nathaniel Bacon tapped into the widespread discontent in the colony and rallied more than a thousand men, waging what some historians have called America’s first revolution.
But as I read more about Bacon’s Rebellion, a fuller picture came into focus. Searching through the writings of Bacon himself (a wealthy Englishman from the same social class as his enemy, Governor Berkeley), I found few if any references to class, land, or bondage. What Bacon sought was all-out war with neighboring Indigenous tribes. He rebelled because Berkeley had made alliances with some tribes and preferred negotiation to war. Bacon’s anti-Native fervor was indiscriminate; his followers betrayed and massacred the group of Occaneechi people who helped them fight a group of Susquehannocks and relentlessly pursued a group of Pamunkey men, women, and children.
Knowing this, can we still think of Bacon’s Rebellion as a class-based, multiracial uprising against slavery, landlessness, and servitude, as some have described it? Or was it just an early example of the powerful making the powerless fight one another, this time with white and Black united, initially against Indigenous Americans?
And again we confront the problem of history: it’s usually the powerful who get to write it. Of the half-dozen or so remaining original documents about Bacon’s Rebellion, all were written by landowning white men. With only Page’s and Darby’s names and absent their stories, we may never know what drove them to war.
What we do know, however, is that the rebellion turned these captives into officers and set them free. The last men to surrender after Bacon’s death—not in battle but from dysentery—were a group of eighty Africans and twenty white men, who were tricked into surrendering with the promise of remaining free. Bacon had started his rebellion as an anti-Native crusade, but the multiracial alliance of landless freedmen, servants, and slaves who carried it on had their minds set on freedom.
But the governing white elite had their minds set on reinforcing slavery after putting down the rebellion. In 1680, four years after the rebellion, Virginia passed the Law for Preventing Negro Insurrections. It restricted the movement of enslaved people outside plantations; anyone found without a pass would be tortured with twenty lashes “well laid on” before being returned. At a time when white servants and African slaves often worked side by side, the hand of the law reached in to divide them. Prison time awaited “English, and other white men and women intermarrying with negros or mulattos.” Already any indentured white servant caught running away with an enslaved African person was liable for their entire lost term of service, meaning that the servant risked becoming permanently unfree.
The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class. The Virginia legislature ended the penalties imposed on rebels for the insurrection of 1676, but only the white ones, removing a source of lingering solidarity among them. Post-Bacon reforms forbade Black people to carry anything that could be considered a weapon, but they made sure that every manumitted indentured servant was given a musket. Even a free Indian or Black person was forbidden to “lift up his hand in opposition against any Christian,” no matter the provocation.
A decade after Bacon, the governing class made a final decision to ensure the loyalty of white servants: simply have fewer of them. A critical mass of white working people threatened their racial slavery order, so Virginia plantation owners imported more Africans, whose rights they could drastically limit through legislation. By the end of the eighteenth century, the gentry were relying almost entirely on Africans for their labor. They stopped importing white servants from England, save to meet a Britain-imposed quota to ensure the presence of enough armed white people to defend against slave rebellions.