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

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