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CHAPTER 2

Ancestor Tales of Dispossession and a Revolt of the Unfree

So here we leave imaginary X’s and turn to Radfords who aren’t imaginary, but will nevertheless have to be imagined, for their presence in the historical record, itself fragmentary, in the wills, the land titles, the court cases, is fleeting indeed. You see their shadows, the occasional historical marks their feet left on the sands of time. But who they were, why those marks were left, what the substance was that made those shadows, that will all have to be imagined. Historically, anthropologically, and sociologically placed, imagining, of course, chasing a reality that did once exist, and that lives on in the underpinnings of our world today.

This ancestral Radford is real, that is, John not Benjamin. John is my ancestor because seven generations later his descendant, Elizabeth Radford, married Thomas Davidson, great-grandson of the Alexander who crossed the ocean. It was her brother, my father’s great-uncle Ben—who, according to family mythology, watched an up-and-coming young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln play horseshoes.

So, what was this John Radford doing at age fifty-seven, heading for Virginia? We know he did indeed do that, an old man for those days, far older than the usual immigrant, voluntary or involuntary. We know because his mark is there, in the historical record. Why he did it, we will have to imagine. First, his mark: in 1652, Thomas Todd claimed 450 acres of what was once part of a Native polity, on Winter Harbor, on the coast in what is now Gloucester County, Virginia. Todd got the right (in English eyes) to those acres by claiming John Radford as a headright, along with headrights for seven other people. To make that claim, Todd would have paid the ship’s captain for their passage. In return, the eight should have become Todd’s indentured servants, owing him their labor for a contracted number of years—in essence they were selling themselves to him for a limited term.¹ However, it is unlikely that John was in fact indentured. I appear, at least on the Radford side of the family, to be descended from relative privilege from the moment this ancestral Radford set foot on invaded but not yet fully conquered Virginia soil.

I say “privilege” because the next we know of John is the shadow of activity that could not have occurred if he were indentured, and indicates that he had some kind of head start. He bought land, 160 acres in Northumberland County, from a man named Martin Cole in 1654, just about a year and a half after his arrival. The court record of the sale refers to him as “Gent,” an appellation reserved for those with money and position.² He clearly did not go through the standard procedure, which involved surviving indenture, then renting, and finally years later, with luck, for rental conditions were terrible, buying land and marrying.³ This was the common pattern for those indentured servants who actually succeeded in becoming planters themselves—and high school history to the contrary, not too many made it that far. Indeed, between the founding of Jamestown and the American Revolution, only one-fifth of the indentured servants who arrived in British North America became independent, as either farmers or artisans. The rest either died before they became free or became day laborers or paupers.⁴

Perhaps at this point I should make it clear that the privilege I am talking about here did not include the white privilege that, looking back from the vantage of the present, we might be inclined to read into John Radford’s experience of life in Virginia. What he had was class privilege and male privilege; whiteness in and of itself had not yet been legislated—and enforced with punishment—into privilege during the initial tightening of control over the exploited and resisting workforce that is characteristic of state formation. By the time John’s (probable) son Bruen died in (probably) 1687, however, whiteness had begun to mean privilege, particularly for the relatively well-to-do.⁵ By the time Bruen’s (probable) son George died, five decades after Bruen, however, whiteness conveyed some degree of privilege over free blacks to even the poorest and the unfree indentured, who could successfully claim an identity as English.

The laws that created difference between the two were, as we shall see, tightened after English and Africans revolted together, and were designed to control poor whites just as much as to control Africans. The key was being able to claim that it was the English part of your ancestry that identified you. Bear in mind that by this time there had been several generations of intermixture among English, Native American, and African, whose status ranged from freedom to varying degrees of servitude in a society which at first did not have strict racial lines. That mixture was the result of marriage, of unmarried consensual sex, and of rape performed primarily by English men, all of it producing numerous people of mixed ancestry. Before approximately 1670, there were few Africans in Virginia, and most of them, for most of those early decades, were in some form of indenture, very different from the slavery Venis and Adam would experience in the mid-1700s. There was not a clear and dramatic difference between English and African indenture; exploitation for both was frequently severe; and being white in itself brought no particular privilege until toward the end of the 1600s. So, it wasn’t whiteness that brought John Radford his bit of privilege compared to Africans or other English. It was class.

That class privilege came to him from England, for John Radford was a surgeon—a “chyruegeon [sic]”—as the records of one court controversy indicate.⁶ Medical fees, at least in 1664, were described as “exorbitant,” so his income in Virginia may have been high.⁷ Perhaps he actually paid for his own transportation, thus acquiring a headright for himself, but the ship’s captain might have lied, claiming he had borne John’s transportation costs, was given a headright for John, and sold it to Thomas Todd. Or perhaps John himself sold his headright to Todd, or perhaps Todd simply put together a list of names and claimed to have paid their transportation. In none of these cases would John have been actually indentured. Colonial authorities turned a blind eye to much of this maneuvering of headrights, some of which was clearly fraudulent, some in a legally gray area, but all certainly common—and it led to the wealthy, who could buy up many headrights, accumulating immense estates, often scattered over several counties, and to a corresponding land shortage for those coming out of indenture.⁸

By 1652, the catastrophic death rate of the early years had eased a little, but life was very far from secure. For newcomers, getting land was becoming harder and harder, and without it there were few ways to make a living. Tobacco was the only viable export crop, but it brought inconsistent returns. Even worse, tobacco was literally money, used to settle debts, make purchases, and pay tithes. Without land, you couldn’t grow money, and marriage would be unlikely. Indeed, 20 to 30 percent of men never married.⁹ Many people coming to the end of their indentures found themselves stuck, unable to move upward in the Virginia hierarchy.¹⁰ Deep poverty was increasing. Early deaths were normal. In Middlesex County, research by Darrett and Anita Rutman revealed that as late as 1689 sixty percent of children had lost one parent by age thirteen. Thirty-seven percent had lost both by the time they were eighteen, by which time girls might themselves be married.¹¹

WE NEED A DIGRESSION HERE. This idea of private property, that some could own land, on which all depended for life itself, to the exclusion of others, was a new idea on the Chesapeake, as it was for all Native polities. But it was an old idea to the English; indeed, the right to private property, or the dispossession from it, was the reason many of them had ended up on the Chesapeake. X Radford carried that tale of dispossession for us in England. In Virginia, as in England, the remains of the diarchic structure legitimized both ownership and its flipside, dispossession. Local parishes in Virginia, rather than church courts, as in England, regulated land rights. And by regulating property and inheritance, the church actually regulated who had the right to make a living and how they did it. John Nelson, in a study of the Anglican Church in colonial Virginia, describes the system of governance as joint parish/county.¹² The parish vestry consisted of twelve men, almost invariably representatives of the most powerful local families, plus the minister. Everyone, regardless of religion, paid the heavy parish levies that supported church and minister. As in England, a vague sense of the old commons made the parish responsible for the welfare of those in it. This meant, de facto, that the parish was responsible for people it kept dispossessed by its enforcement of property rights. Parish charity was a major expense.

The parish kept the land records and validated the boundaries of private property, every four years organizing “processioning,” in which members of the community were chosen to walk all boundaries, renew boundary marks as necessary, and settle any disputes—all accompanied, apparently, with a bit of conviviality, judging by at least one parish bill for ale.¹³ This was the church validating ownership—and by extension, validating landlessness for everyone else. Disputes that couldn’t be settled amicably through church intervention were turned over to the secular authority, the county court, with its ability to apply force if needed. Not only did the church validate the control of land, but it also, under the guise of responsibility for “poor relief,” played an important role in validating the use of labor. The parish “bound out” poor and orphan children, by the early 1700s at the rate of hundreds annually, who were thus legally obligated to provide free labor until adulthood for the family to which they were bound, in return for food and shelter and education (at least for the more fortunate).¹⁴ All this was exacerbated by Virginia’s dependence, not on mixed farming by individual families, as was common in the Northern colonies, but on tobacco, an extremely labor-intensive export crop that doubled as money, and grew well in Virginia’s climate.

Tellingly, it was on the monuments to these two pillars of governance, the church and the courthouse/jail (the jail was often in the courthouse basement, with a pillory out front), that the elites lavished money and care, generally with at least a modicum of consent from those who paid the levies that made such impressive buildings possible. This control was all in the hands of local elites. Theoretically, some were appointed by and answerable to the governor, who was appointed by the king, but typically the governor rubber-stamped local selections for the county courts and for parish ministers. And if he didn’t, the local elites were quite capable of strategically ignoring him.¹⁵ Wresting power out of their hands and into the hands of the state would turn out to be bloody, involving war, executions, and the English navy.

DIGRESSION FINISHED, BACK TO John Radford and the possible sale of his headright to Thomas Todd—and however Todd got that land, his right to it was legitimized by the church and enforced by the state. If John sold his headright, the sale could have enabled him to do as many did: leave to go and join relatives and connections in the colony. Darrett and Anita Rutman’s extensive study of the area just south of the Rappahannock River (which eventually became Middlesex and Essex counties), where there were many Radford connections, shows this pattern clearly—just about everybody lived within fairly easy reach of relatives or people with whom they had had long-term connections.¹⁶ John, however, went a bit farther up the coast, to Northumberland County, on the north side of the Wicomoco River. He did have connections there, through Martin Cole and a possible cousin, Roger Radford. Traveling to Middlesex by boat would have been a long trip. Cross-country would have been even harder, although by the 1650s, there were a few roads, ferries, and bridges in the regions that had been settled by English the longest.

Ferries and bridges marked a very different way of life for the English compared to the Powhatan. For the Powhatan rivers and streams had been connectors, and all had equal access. Everyone had canoes, so all could use the rivers and streams for traveling. Transportation of people and goods by canoe was quick and easy, far easier than cross-country travel. For at least some of the English, however, rivers quickly became barriers. Given the disparities in wealth and possessions, many would have been boatless.¹⁷ In the 1650s, horses were fairly rare; transportation by road often meant on foot. For those with boats, or who were connected with those with boats, the rivers were a lifeline to economic well-being. The well-to-do bought or patented land on the rivers; planters in the backcountry, without river access, were dependent on the big planters on the rivers for commercial connections to Jamestown for the sale of their tobacco.

So here was John, buying land from Martin Cole on the north shore of the Wicomoco—land with river access. He remained linked with the network of Rappahannock connections, however, despite the distance, through Martin Cole, who was a relative of Francys Cole, a wealthy planter on the south side of the Rappahannock. Francys was himself connected to Rowland Burnham, an even wealthier planter, whose son John was one of the elite that rebels later imprisoned. In addition to the wealth he inherited from his father, John Burnham was both a planter and one of the few Middlesex merchants. He exported tobacco to England and filled return voyages with English goods ordered mostly by the local gentry, as well as some merchandise for general sale. He is referred to as “Lt. Coll” (for colonel) and was a justice.¹⁸ High status indeed.

This whole set of connections appears to have been available to John through Roger Radford, his probable cousin, who was closely connected with Francys Cole, perhaps having been indentured to him previously. These connections appear to have carried over into the next generation, via John’s (probable) son, Bruen Radford, and Rowland’s son, John Burnham. Bruen appeared at John Burnham’s deathbed, signed his will, and inherited a substantial sum of money from him.¹⁹ His appearance to pay his respects to his dying patron reflected the attention a client owed his patron—and turned out to be well worth the trip he most likely made from Essex downriver by boat or by road to Middlesex. This was a common pattern in early Virginia, with the less powerful man dependent on the backing of the more influential merchants or wealthy planters, who might themselves be clients of even more powerful men. In return, the client would give service and loyalty, backing the patron’s economic and political strategies.²⁰

These networks of patron-client relationships helped make local elite governance possible. Clients were, to greater or lesser extents, dependent on patrons. Men like John Burnham had power not just as merchants and planters, but also had a surprising degree of influence over access to land, having patented enormous tracts. Their speculation paid off as they rented, and sometimes eventually sold, to newcomers and freed indentured servants. As centers of financial networks, they had at least some degree of influence over the lesser planters, like Francys and Martin, who were dependent on them, and who in turn had their lesser dependents—people like the Radfords.²¹ In addition, these were the men who were authorized by the church, as vestry members, to wield the legitimizing spiritual power of the church and, as justices, to wield the secular use of force. From the Powhatan perspective, this certainly would have been a subversion of dual sovereignty; too much of both spiritual and secular power was in overlapping hands. Wahunsonacock himself, however, with his expansionist, perhaps imperial, ambitions, might well have understood the benefits. From the English perspective, the institutions were separate but the overlap made that separation workable; one institution would not stymie the other.

A BIT OF AN ASIDE IS CALLED FOR here, about those shadowy figures in the historical record. It is often extremely difficult to tell for sure who is who when looking at court records and even at wills. People named children for parents and grandparents and siblings, so often there are several people of the same name, who may or may not be related, or may even be the same person. Is the John Radford who bought land in Northumberland the same John Radford who earlier testified in a murder trial? In this example, there is reason to think they are one and the same—in both cases, Martin Cole is also involved.²² And it is possible that this John Radford is not actually my ancestor, despite Radford family researchers who think he is, or that Bruen is not really his son. From the start, Bruen is elusive in the historical record. It isn’t clear that John is his father, nor, for that matter, that George Radford is his son, but starting with George the record that connects me to the Radford line is pretty clear. For John and Bruen there is very little evidence—no records of marriage or birth, for instance—which may indicate I’ve got it wrong, or it may simply be that the verifying records, as is often the case, were destroyed in rebellions, wars, or accidental fires. So what I am saying about all these ancestors must be accompanied by the caveat that, despite my best efforts at detective work, I may have gotten people mixed up. However, for the sake of the story I will go ahead, for after all, this is not only a family story, but the story of punishment and dispossession. For that, it doesn’t matter whether I have the ancestors quite right.

THE VIRGINIA THAT JOHN RADFORD encountered was far from a peaceful place or a land of opportunity. English policy toward the Powhatan and then toward other neighboring polities added another layer of difficulty to the life of the English in Virginia. It had been only thirty years since Opechancanough and the Powhatan had killed off nearly a third of all the English in Virginia, and just eight years previously had again tried to punish the English into proper behavior, killing about four percent of the population. By 1652, when John Radford arrived, the Powhatan were no longer a force to be reckoned with. However, the expansion of the Iroquois, whose imperial ambitions challenged those of the English and the French, was realigning the East Coast Native nations, both geographically and politically.²³ Iroquois conquest pushed other nations, particularly the Susquehanna, up against English settlement in Virginia, predictably leading to conflict with land-hungry English.

Most white Virginians had come to define all Indians as enemies, even those like the Pamunkey, who were allied with colonial governor Berkeley’s government. Berkeley was all for alliances and trade with Indians—but legally monopolized that trade for himself and his cronies, and was called an Indian-lover by poorer English. Consequently, most English Virginians, wanting land, opted not for alliance and trade but for incessant low-level warfare, with occasional flare-ups, along the outer reaches of the colony. And they bitterly resented Berkeley’s failure to provide reasonable protection, despite demanding increased tithes for forts. Those forts were supposedly to protect them, but instead were placed to protect elite holdings, while at the same time Berkeley forbade the local populace from forming militias to protect themselves. It was these resentments that eventually, along with landlessness and poverty among both English and Africans, free and unfree, led to class warfare in the bloody rebellion of 1676. And in the aftermath of the rebellion elites centralized power as they regained control, particularly the power to punish.²⁴ In 1652, those resentments were already bubbling noticeably.

A COMMENT ON THE UNDERSTANDING of colonial history is in order. Scholars have made it dramatically clear that Native American nations were major players in colonial history.²⁵ During the first century and a half the colonies had less military might than many of the surrounding native polities. And the English were competing for colonies with other Europeans—French, Spanish, Dutch. On their own, without Native allies, the English colonies were too weak to protect themselves against other Native attacks or to hold off other Europeans. And just as European polities fought with one another, so also did Indian polities. Alliances made sense on both sides for defensive purposes, but also for trade and for leverage in maneuvering through complex inter- and intra-polity rivalries. Native Americans, like the English, acted in their own interests, in relation to both other Indian polities and to European polities. They were far from being passive victims of European aggression. And the European states were far from being all-conquering. Even their guns did not convey a clear advantage over the bow and arrow.²⁶ Colonies frequently invited tribes to settle close by, or formed close trading partnerships and military alliances.²⁷

As we will see in a later chapter, pan-Indian organizing did not become a reality until sometime in the mid-1700s. Nevertheless, Indian resistance toward the end of the 1600s was fierce. This is the time when numerous Indian nations united in King Philip’s War against the English in New England (and although the English in Virginia probably didn’t know it, the Pueblos were on the verge of their 1680 revolt in which they successfully tossed out the Spanish). Closer to home, the Iroquois had imperial ambitions themselves, and were extending their reach into the Virginia colonial periphery, bringing into question the continued viability of the English and, elsewhere, the French hold on eastern North America. The English were unable to protect themselves against either the French or Indians and certainly not against both at once. They were eventually forced into alliance under Iroquois terms that successfully confined the English to the eastern seaboard, behind a frontier that gradually moved west, but at a speed held well in check by Native American military power.²⁸ That system held from 1676 for well over a hundred years, finally dying with Tecumseh’s death in the War of 1812 and the demise of any real possibility of a sovereign Indian state with frontiers that the US state would have to respect. But that is getting ahead of the story.

SO WE COME AT LAST TO THE PUZZLE of John’s presence in the Chesapeake at age fifty-seven. What was going on in England that made the risks of Virginia attractive to an elderly surgeon, presumably moderately well off, who apparently had a seven-year-old son to care for? Why would anyone voluntarily take such risks, even someone who could avoid indenture, as John did? The answer we were taught in school, “They came voluntarily to better themselves, worked for free for a while to pay back their passage, and then, joining those who were already free and independent, helped make this the land of the free and the home of the brave” is, as we have seen, a serious whitewash. Many English, like Africans, came at the point of a gun. They were rebels captured and exiled, they were vagrants, or hungry, they were criminals, they were kidnapped (a 1680 report says 10,000 were “spirited” annually).²⁹ They were street children and orphans rounded up and shipped off. Or they were women so desperate that they were willing to be sold as wives for 120 pounds of tobacco. The headright system, of course, made procuring servants to ship to the colonies, legally or illegally, a lucrative business. The school version also whitewashes what happened to indentured servants once they were in the colonies. Life for most was one long misery; life after indenture, if you survived that long, was for many so desperate that at the time of John Radford’s arrival, small-scale revolts were becoming common, long before the eruption of the widespread rebellion of 1676.³⁰

So what were the conditions in England that might have driven John Radford to Virginia? There is no identifiable record of his early life in England—or if there is, I haven’t found it—except that he was probably born in Devon, the son of Robert Radford and possibly Alice Leigh. Given the lack of facts, all I can do is put together a likely scenario of maybes, grounded in the history of the times.

When the imagined X Radford headed to Virginia, England, unlike Tsenacommacoh, was already a state, but a relatively weak one, without a clear grip on the right to use force and to keep others from using it.³¹ The Crown’s attempts to consolidate that grip had been a source of bitter contention for a century or more and, shortly before John Radford’s departure, erupted in a civil war and a royal beheading—Charles I was executed in 1649. Eruptions continued as the English Crown, like Wahunsonacock, struggled to control its borders, particularly with Scotland, a struggle that eventually propelled Alexander Davidson to the Chesapeake. However, unlike the Powhatan strategy, English kings were trying to tame diarchy, to become the dominant partner. The sword, not the church, would determine how and when force would be used, both in war and in punishment. The priest would be the servant of the king; the interests of the state, as defined by the king, would no longer be held hostage to legitimation by the church. What eventually resulted from these power struggles was what is now called a “modern” state, with both the internal use of force to punish and the external use of force to make war and control borders in secular hands.

Both Radfords and, a little later, Alexander Davidson, would have been living with the chaos, both religious and political, created by the power struggle between church and king. And at the same time, they would have been living with the not unrelated chaos that accompanied the deepening grip of capitalism on both economic and social relations. Native Americans who traveled to England invariably were shocked by the desperate poverty they saw there, and commented on the hypocrisy of the claim that Christian civilization was superior to their more egalitarian social systems.³² The power and right to exploit was shifting; people without birthright to status, power, or wealth, merchants and entrepreneurs, now had access to all three—and were bent on enhancing their grasp.³³ Without a feudal birthright to the use of people’s labor, the rising capitalist class was increasingly dependent on hiring workers, people dispossessed, as we have seen. Those dispossessed were desperate enough to take the abysmally small wages employers offered instead of the payment they preferred, in kind or in the right to use land, or in room and board, with token money perhaps added.

The religious arguments, though often appearing intensely esoteric, actually were pragmatic justifications for particular economic and political positions; arguments about Natural Law, or about the King’s Two Bodies, had real consequences in terms of shifts in the right to exploit, to punish, to exercise force, to rule.³⁴ They stood in for and expressed both the political and the economic malaise of the times. At the base of these arguments was the question of the source of the king’s sovereignty and thus his right to wield the power of the sword. All agreed it came ultimately from God, but did it go from God to the people (or to the aristocrats only, by bloodright) and, by their consent, to the king, or did it go to the church, and through the authority of the church to the king, or did it go directly to the king? The answer to that question had enormous implications: was the king answerable to the people? The arguments were often massively involuted—but nevertheless, they mattered. And these arguments may have led to John’s decision. He left during Cromwell’s rule, shortly after Charles I was beheaded, a time when many Royalists fled to Virginia.³⁵ If John was one of the Royalists, he may well have been one who believed sovereignty came to the king directly from God, in opposition to the position taken by Cromwell. Practically speaking, being on the losing side, he may have been subject to persecution, maybe in real danger, maybe simply unable to continue to make a living.

The claim that the king’s sovereignty comes directly from God without the mediation of the church provided a way around the restraints on the power of the English king, restraints such as the diarchic structures that empowered the religious elites, as we saw in chapter 1, and power grabs by lesser lords and rising capitalists. Monarchy, not diarchy, became a kingly goal. And absolute monarchy was even better, in which the two roles, priest and king or council and king, are rolled into a single authority, a monarch who is head of both church and state, who both speaks for and interprets the gods, and exercises the power to carry out their wishes and to punish those who don’t comply.³⁶ But in consolidating power this way, legitimizing spiritual authority is lost, and a king’s claim to both roles can be a pretty transparent power grab. That problem becomes particularly acute as the shift to capitalism supports the rise of a wealthy merchant class with no birthright claim to power. This merchant class exercises considerable economic power and is inclined to question the infallibility of the policies of an unrestrained monarch. As indeed they did for several centuries, with some backing the power of the church against the king, and others the power of the people against the king.

This seesawing kept England in turmoil for a few centuries, with one of its high points coming in 1534 when Henry VIII declared himself both head of state and head of church, giving him sufficient power to gain a greater monopoly on the use of force by reining in the great aristocrats’ private armies.³⁷ A shift in address marked his heightened sovereignty: he was “Your Majesty,” no longer “Your Grace,” king by the grace of God.³⁸ Diarchic forms remained, though with some redistribution of roles. Monasteries were confiscated and the state took over the former monastic roles of education and charity—much of the social control function was now backed directly by the state’s ability to exert force.³⁹

HERE WE TURN AGAIN TO VIRGINIA and Radfords, with, I hope, some sense of the ideas that were swirling around in the intellectual soup of the England in which X and John Radford had lived. Those who came first to Jamestown, people like X, tended to see the king as merely God’s lieutenant, with other lesser lieutenants. With John, or at least with many of the people who fled Cromwell, came a more absolutist vision of monarchy, one to which Henry VIII had subscribed, and for which Charles I lost his head. The monarchy was restored after John left for Virginia. Charles II reigned, and despite the enhanced position of Parliament and of the King’s Council, the possibility of absolutism again arose. With this changing of the guard, there was a new flood of refugees headed for Virginia. This time they were escaping royal punishment for supporting Cromwell. Members of the rising capitalist middle class and low-level aristocrats, they had seen in Cromwell and the religious beliefs that vested sovereignty in the people the possibility of public policy that resonated with their own desire for greater power and independence. These were people like Nathaniel Bacon, who eventually became a leader of the rebellion against Governor Berkeley and his autocratic rule.

The discontent that eventually led to rebellion was simmering when Bruen may have arrived as a seven-year-old with his father in 1652. Bruen is well situated, in time and space, to pick up the story of punishing, sovereignty, and state formation, a thread that weaves its way through Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 and its aftermath. He actually first shows up in the historical records in 1680 at age thirty-five, at John Burnham’s bedside. His probable son George, apparently his only child, was born in Henrico County in 1665, when Bruen would have been twenty, and though there is no record of Bruen himself in Henrico, George spent at least some time as an adult living there with his wife, judging by the fact that his children were born there. There is no record of Bruen’s marriage. This could be just a case of missing records, of course, and many are missing in Henrico. Even so, one would still expect some mention of a wife in someone’s will or in land transactions, in which the wife had to sign away her dower rights in the land to make a sale legal. Or a record of her death, or of her remarriage after Bruen died at age forty-two. Since there was still a shortage of English women in Virginia at this time, it is improbable that if she did exist, she didn’t remarry. Most widows did, and many men managed to get land by marrying widows who inherited or held a lifetime estate from their first husbands. That Bruen may have remained unmarried, as did John’s probable cousin Roger and many other men, was not particularly unusual, given the shortage of women.⁴⁰ Or perhaps there was a marriage, but the wife died in childbirth almost immediately, thereby having little time to leave traces in the historical record.

Alternatively, perhaps George’s mother was one of the many other Radfords, unrelated to John or Bruen (in which case they are not related to me). Her last name would have gone to him if George were one of the many babies described as a “bastard” because an appropriate man had not made the appropriate claim—marriage—on his mother’s body and reproductive capacity. Most frequently such children were born to indentured servants, who needed their master’s permission to marry, were sometimes abused by their masters, or sometimes simply fell in love with someone they were unable to marry.⁴¹ However, if George had an unmarried mother who was English, free or not, there would most likely have been some record. English women were brought to court and punished for bearing a child outside of marriage, or even for having a child too soon after marriage, since the child was conceived without the appropriate legal claim on the mother’s reproductive capacity.⁴² They were whipped or fined, depending on the woman’s “quality,” and called into church wrapped in a white sheet to beg for forgiveness and reentry into the church community. On top of that, servant women had two and a half years added to their indenture. Men were sometimes sued, sometimes forced to marry the mother. Without a marriage and therefore without support for mother or child, the child was taken to be raised by a family, often indentured or apprenticed and thus free labor, with early expenses paid by the court. Hence, the insistence on marriage—it saved the county tax money. So, either the records are missing or George’s mother wasn’t English.

Perhaps George was the result of a loving—or a forced—relationship with a Native American or African woman who was perhaps enslaved, perhaps free, perhaps herself the product of one of the early not-so-uncommon cross-race alliances. If so, Bruen must have acknowledged George as his son and given him the Radford name. If George’s mother were a member of one of the matrilineal native nations, George would also have been an acknowledged member of his mother’s matrilineage.⁴³ There is no indication that George was not considered white, regardless of his actual ancestry. Bruen, who at least later was reasonably well established, and was the son of someone designated as “gent,” would have had the power to ensure that the English part of George’s ancestry determined his identity.

Although there is no record of his owning either land or people, Bruen must have been reasonably well respected in that nest of Radford connections on the Rappahannock. After all, he signed John Burnham’s will. He served on juries, did appraisals of estates, and acted as an agent in the sale of Tappahannock Mill.⁴⁴ These are low-level positions, but were rarely given to men without property.⁴⁵

Assuming Bruen was already living in what was then Rappahannock and later became Essex County before he first shows up in the records in 1680, he would have been in the thick of the bloody upheaval of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Which side he would have been on is a question. John Burnham, apparently his patron, sided with Berkeley and the old established elite who ran the colony; rebels eventually burned him out. So Bruen might have followed his patron’s lead. But not many among the ordinary people in Rappahannock, or elsewhere, sided with Berkeley. Tappahannock itself was a center of opposition to Berkeley.⁴⁶ So, statistically, Bruen is more likely to have been at least nominally one of the rebels, although probably not one of those who joined Bacon’s army, since that army was composed mainly of laborers, free and unfree, and the poor. He may well have been one of the relatively well-off who backed away when, as Webb describes, the revolt shifted from merely challenging Berkeley’s rule and his failure to undertake what many saw as the obviously necessary genocide of the surrounding Indians.⁴⁷ Instead it became a real revolt of slaves, servants, and the poor but free, challenging the entire established social hierarchy, including disobeying the king’s representatives and fighting the king’s military.

THE CAUSES OF THE SIMMERING discontent that underlay Bacon’s Rebellion are linked to the strategies that are often used to get people to agree to work for next to nothing, as was happening to indentured workers in Virginia. Until 1675 over half the population was unfree and English.⁴⁸ Life-term servitude, slavery as opposed to indenture, was growing only slowly during this time. The death rate was so high that it did not make sense to buy people for a lifelong stint of forced labor until toward the end of the century. Buying a lifetime of servitude was expensive, and it was an investment you might well lose through death long before the initial expense was paid off. Buying people for a shorter term through indenture meant you stood a better chance of making back your investment, as the Rutmans and Edmund Morgan both explain.⁴⁹ In some areas, the unfree English labor force was supplemented by Indians, who could have been enslaved “legally” according to English standards, often by other Indian nations, in “just wars” fomented by the English, with other tribes.⁵⁰ Although that unfree labor force was largely English, there were many whose status was ambiguous. After all, several generations had passed since the English and Africans began contributing to the Native gene pool of the Chesapeake.

So the English state provided dispossessed workers, but how was the state to maintain that dispossession in Virginia, so that people would work even though the state was weak, too weak to dispossess completely either Native people or ordinary English colonists? As we have seen, land was available and granted through headright. Nor could the state prevent people from squatting on the outer edges of English settlement, although Native polities did maintain limits to that process. It takes a strong state to keep land monopolized in the hands of the few in the face of demands to the contrary, and the Crown’s government in Virginia was unable to do so during the first decades of English settlement in the early 1600s. Nevertheless, Jamestown tobacco planters needed a labor supply—dispossessed people.⁵¹

So to keep them dispossessed, the state stepped in again. Indenture was a legally enforced contract—you were technically in debt to whoever paid your passage until you had served your time. With state oversight weak and distant, local state actors, the elites who ran the local governments in the name of the Crown and nominally under its jurisdiction, enforced the system. It was local elites who saw that runaways were legally caught and whipped and who oversaw the contracts by which indentured servants were forced to work and were sold or transferred through inheritance from one owner to another.⁵² Those same local elites adjudicated disputes between owner and servant. Servants could not take up land by purchase or headright, even though it was available. They were kept dispossessed until the indenture was completed.

However, given a state too weak to force people into lifelong servitude and given also that more tobacco growers clearing more land was profitable for the Crown, land was at first often provided after indenture. But by the 1630s, land was becoming a commodity to be bought and sold, rather than held from the Crown with an annual quitrent to maintain an individual’s right to a particular piece of land. And by the 1650s, servants ending their indentures could no longer count on getting the fifty acres their contracts specified.⁵³ Land was either too expensive for newly freed servants to buy, or it was simply unavailable except on the dangerous frontiers. Many either continued as laborers or became tenants required to grow tobacco, making barely enough after taxes and rent to keep themselves alive.⁵⁴ Dispossession thus functioned more permanently by privatizing land through state policies that made it possible for a few wealthy landholders, as well as London merchant/investors, to own enormous tracts and to pass them on legally to their heirs.⁵⁵ As land became less available, and owners could sell for whatever price they could get, another string was added to the dispossession bow: it was okay to refuse people land to feed themselves if they couldn’t pay the required amount.⁵⁶

In other words, during the 1650s and 1660s, the foundation for a capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production, permanent dispossession, and wage or tenant labor for most men had been laid and was gradually solidifying. The expected progression to landownership for servants surviving indenture was no longer secure. Instead of the prospect of moving up the colonial hierarchy as independent planters, workers saw lifelong dependence as wage laborers, or worse. But honorable manhood required independence, land, and wife—property and patriarchy—and attaining either independence or wife was nearly impossible without land.⁵⁷ In other words, the class structure was not sufficiently developed to cause English laborers—still the majority of the workforce—to accept landlessness as normal and permanent wage labor as an honorable way to head a household. This left the relatively few Africans and the many English, who existed on a wide continuum of statuses ranging from more or less enslaved to more or less free, deeply angry—landless, desperate, and often armed. It was they, Africans and English, indentured, enslaved, or poor, who eventually became the backbone of the army of Bacon’s Rebellion.⁵⁸ But it was not they who actually orchestrated the rebellion.

Discontent had been heating up for a number of years, sometimes breaking out into organized resistance.⁵⁹ There were a number of sore points, the most intense of which was rampant poverty for the many in an increasingly rigid class structure. In addition, there were issues angering people across the class spectrum, not just African and English unfree workers or the newly freed and frustrated. There was the declining price of tobacco. Then Berkeley’s Assembly restricted the vote in 1670, so that only property owners and householders, not all free men, determined who would be assemblymen.⁶⁰ In 1673, the elites were exempted from payment of taxes, while for average planters taxes took between one-quarter and one-half of their annual income, leaving them close to starvation in bad years and their laborers likely even closer.⁶¹ There was additional taxation for forts that appeared to be placed to protect elite estates from Indian attack but left smaller outlying planters vulnerable.

All this came close to a boil when Indian attacks increased (in response to considerable provocation), just before the start of Bacon’s Rebellion. Most of the deaths from these attacks occurred in Rappahannock and other frontier areas. In Rappahannock there was a dramatic increase in the number of wills proved in court during and right after this period, presumably reflecting the heightened death rate.⁶² It is easy to see why a later formal complaint to the king’s commissioners stated, “Poore Rappahannock lies a bleeding.”⁶³ The pot actually boiled over in 1676. Susquehanna Indians from over the border in Maryland, in a revenge attack, killed thirty-six English in Rappahannock, not too far from Tappahannock, where Bruen might have been living. Indians also attacked at the head of the James River, in Henrico. Webb argues that this invasion, when combined with all the other discontents, was instrumental in making the colony so unstable that Bacon was able to pull off his rebellion.⁶⁴ The state could neither force people into obedience nor defend them, clearly failing in the use of force both externally and internally, thus leaving its sovereignty subject to question.⁶⁵

Whether Bruen, maybe with fifteen-year-old George, was still in Henrico or already at Tappahannock, he must have felt vulnerable. That vulnerability might have inclined him to side with Nathaniel Bacon, a recently arrived landholder and member of the minor British aristocracy, who resented his geographic marginalization on the dangerous colonial frontier and perhaps also the power of low-born, newly rich planters under Governor Berkeley’s rule. With Berkeley denying the right to take up arms independently against the Indians, and failing to send adequate militia defense, Nathaniel Bacon apparently saw his chance to claim status for himself. Lacking power to oppose the elite land monopoly, colonists had largely taken out their anger at lack of land on Native people, who, in effect, were enforcing the elite’s monopoly on land by keeping new colonists from spreading west. Bacon used that anger and then redirected it against Berkeley, who governed with very little reference to the authority of the Crown, and with very little reference to the desires of the frontier elites who rose to lead the rebellion.⁶⁶ Bacon’s plan included a genocidal attack on Native people, which he would parlay into regime change in Jamestown. Frontier elites like Bacon would replace the old established elites like royal governor Berkeley and his allies, as the Crown’s government.⁶⁷

Bacon organized an army, went with the army to Jamestown, and intimidated Berkeley into giving him a legalizing military commission. He led his army against all Indians, including English allies. He terrorized Berkeley’s administration into permitting new elections in which all free men voted, and was elected to the Assembly along with a lot of other men from the colony’s periphery—not the entrenched Tidewater elites who were Berkeley’s cronies. Together they passed laws that at least paid lip service to dismantling elite institutionalized power and proposed that defense of the periphery be paid for by the sale of Indian captives as slaves. But feeling that the essential power structure was unchanged, the rebels then turned on Berkeley’s militia and Berkeley in turn declared Bacon a traitor. Bacon and his army attacked and burned Jamestown in response and advocated a changed relationship to the Crown that might have amounted to independence from England. Bacon eventually died of fever; British ships and then the navy finally put down the rebellion. By the end, six hundred to a thousand English and an even larger number of Indians were dead in the Indian-English conflict. An uncounted number more died from the direct and indirect results of the English-English Rebellion.⁶⁸

The fascinating part of all this to me is not Bacon or Berkeley, despite all the attention they have received. What interests me is the way in which the exploited laborers latched on to Bacon’s power grab and attempted to turn it to their own purposes. Together the people Berkeley quite accurately described as “poor, armed and desperate,” both free and unfree, English and African (and probably some Native), demanded and fought for freedom, land, a voice, and even talked “openly of sharing men’s estates among themselves”—land redistribution, that perennial bugbear of the elite.⁶⁹ Those who were most committed to the armed struggle—the poor and the unfree, Virginia’s labor force—did indeed have a vision of a different kind of Virginia, not a Virginia in which one set of ruling elites was exchanged for another. Four hundred of them held out to the very end against what had become improbable odds, and ultimately the final one hundred fighters, all unfree, eighty of them African, succumbed to trickery and the false offer of freedom.⁷⁰ In essence, that motley army of poor, dispossessed, and desperate English and Africans had hijacked the rebellion and repurposed it, pushing Bacon, in order to keep their support, into demanding land reform or redistribution and a voice in government.⁷¹

It might make sense to think of the whole rebellion as two overlapping revolts. One was a revolt of middling planters fed up with Indian attacks and Berkeley’s “Indian-lover” policies and corrupt taxation, led by newly arrived wannabes who believed their aristocratic heritage gave them both the ability and the birthright to rule, as opposed to the nouveaux riches who surrounded Berkeley.⁷² The other was a revolt of the unfree and the poor that took advantage of the chaos of the first rebellion and the structure provided by the rebels’ army to rise against the whole system of exploitation. That they rose up together would have been no surprise—African and English laborers worked together and often resisted masters together. To a significant extent they identified with one another as exploited laborers. In fact, one-tenth of Virginia’s unfree Africans joined the rebellion, and English and African unfree workers made up two-thirds of Bacon’s field army—they were the rebellion in a very real sense.⁷³ This is what made the rebellion particularly threatening. It was no mere shift of power among elites, the substitution of one set of elites for another—although that certainly seems to be what Bacon and the planters who followed him had in mind.

From the point of view of the English Crown, both sides were problematic challenges to its increasingly imperial ambitions. Berkeley needed to be removed for two reasons. First, because he intended a more or less autonomous Virginia ruled as a private fiefdom for himself and his cronies, not an imperially governed province within an empire. And second, because his policies were so inept that the resistance they aroused made Virginia practically ungovernable by anybody—and an “orderly” society is required for wealth creation.⁷⁴ Bacon, on the other hand, depending on how you read him, might have intended to undo the social hierarchy that made for the unimpeded flow of wealth toward the elite. Or he might have intended to substitute himself and his wannabes at the top of that lucrative hierarchy, at the head of a still more or less autonomous Virginia only nominally under Crown control. But in either case, from the Crown’s perspective, both Berkeley and those who had rebelled against him needed to be brought to heel.

CONTROL OF PUNISHMENT QUICKLY became the critical issue at stake in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. It even raised its head during the rebellion, as Bacon attempted to take away from Berkeley the control of punishing friendly Indians by advocating they be outlawed and thus removed from Berkeley’s “protection.”⁷⁵ After the rebellion, Berkeley, in the months after the last unfree laborer had been returned to captivity and before he himself was recalled to England and removed from power, went on a punishing rampage, executing, whipping, and extracting huge fines. Bruen doesn’t appear on the lists of those punished, and neither do any of the other people from the Radford connections on the Rappahannock. John Burnham, of course, was a Berkeley supporter, his property “much worsted” and himself imprisoned by Baconians.⁷⁶ Berkeley supporters like Burnham were not subject to punishment. And many low-level rebels also went unpunished and simply returned to life as normal—even Berkeley couldn’t punish nearly the whole population of Virginians.⁷⁷ But it seemed like he was trying. According to some accounts, King Charles commented: “The old fool has taken more lives in that naked country than I did for the murder of my father.”⁷⁸

Just as the English and Powhatan had fought earlier over the right to punish, Berkeley and the king’s commissioners, sent to Virginia to establish the Crown’s sovereignty and return Virginia to governability, eventually fought over who was going to control the punishing of the rebels. Turning back to the Introduction a moment to explain the importance of this struggle, theorist Achille Mbembe said, “The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”⁷⁹ If the Crown was to establish itself as the legitimate ruler, forming Virginia as a province under the sovereignty of the English state, then gaining control of punishing was critical. The Crown, not Berkeley, must determine “who may live and who must die,” who must be a prisoner and who may be free.

Because Berkeley was on a punishing rampage, the Crown simply taking over the punishing wasn’t much of an option: Virginians wouldn’t be able to distinguish between Berkeley and the Crown. Since deciding which people may live and be free is just as much an expression of sovereignty as is killing them, the Crown pardoned just about everyone involved in the revolt who had survived Berkeley’s punishment (although it reneged on the promise of freedom that had been used to trick the last of the rebels into surrendering) and hauled Berkeley back to England. That pardon proclamation was posted all over the colony, “announcing the advent of royal government.”⁸⁰ The king was now sovereign; it was evident that he, not Berkeley, determined who would live and who would die. The force required to back that sovereignty was evident in the presence of well over a thousand British military personnel garrisoned in Jamestown. Virginians did indeed notice the difference, especially when the commissioners followed the Crown’s instructions and held hearings to investigate and right the policies that had led to the revolt. The colonists largely preferred sovereignty held by a distant king to a sovereignty held by Berkeley’s exploitative cohorts. That is, most planters, including the elites who had supported Bacon, preferred the king’s sovereignty.⁸¹

What the poor and unfree thought is another matter. All free men, regardless of property ownership, had briefly had the right to vote as part of the laws passed by Nathaniel Bacon and the other new assemblymen elected during the rebellion. Once the rebellion was quashed and Berkeley was temporarily back in power, that law and others that leaned toward a leveling of inequality were all repealed. Those property requirements remained in place until well into the 1800s. In the mid-1700s, only about fifteen percent of the Virginia white population could vote, and in 1723, all Indians and all people with identified African ancestry, regardless of property, were disenfranchised.⁸²

So the Crown succeeded in ending Berkeley’s relatively independent government of the colony, put down the rebellion, and denied most of the demands of the dispossessed. At the same time, it met some of the rebel leaders’ demands by making entrance into the governing elite more accessible to a wider range of white, property-owning men.⁸³ Though the better-off had backed down, and even poorer planters—property owners and thus voters—were pacified, the threat of a workers’ revolt remained, as the frightened planters well knew. The Crown, having removed Berkeley, had instructed the Virginia elites that their system of labor control was inadequate—it would take an army to keep such desperate workers under control, and the Crown was not about to pay for even the troops still in Virginia.⁸⁴ Even though the elite had been brought to heel and made to pay taxes like everyone else, supporting an army would require taxing even more heavily. Considering that planters, large and small, were already up in arms, this was hardly a viable option.

Since the state was not strong enough to turn the mass of laborers permanently into the extremely exploitable people the planters wanted without maintaining an army to prevent revolt, planters needed a different strategy to control their entire English, African, and Native workforce. Poor English must never again join with African workers in revolt, for that had been the true backbone of the most threatening aspect of Bacon’s Rebellion. Their solution was what makes Bacon’s Rebellion a watershed in American history, leaving a legacy that haunts the country today.⁸⁵

THAT SOLUTION, THE STRATEGIES ADOPTED to prevent another rebellion, shifted Virginia from being a society with slaves, one in which only a few people were actually enslaved, to a slave society, one in which slavery was the central organizing principle of the social structure.⁸⁶ The principal labor force, those most seriously exploited, would no longer be English—the state couldn’t compel their labor on a permanent basis without provoking revolt. The timing of this shift coincided with a changing attitude among England’s elites. For the colony’s first half-century its system of dependence on English labor worked. But by the 1660s or so the calculus was shifting. London elites now wanted to keep the poor as wageworkers in England. They began to claim that “only the poor can make wealth.” And “fewness of people is real poverty.”⁸⁷ Sending the poor off to indenture in the colonies no longer made economic sense to England’s elites.

And an English workforce had a huge disadvantage as far as planters were concerned. Over the previous centuries, England’s working class, members of the polity, had won some rights, and they took those rights with them to the colonies. Meager though they were, they did limit the planters’ ability to exploit. English could be indentured, but not enslaved. Servants had the right to take planters to court for excessive cruelty or violation of contract, and occasionally the courts actually upheld their rights. Whatever rights Africans had gained in their polities of origin, however, did not apply in the colonies, so they were more exploitable.⁸⁸ Armed and angry English colonists couldn’t be kept from appropriating land and attempting to keep them landless clearly was dangerous. The gradual invention of racialized chattel slavery of non-English Others became the answer to supplying labor in the context of a relatively weak state, a context we will come back to in several more of these ancestor tales.

To make this solution work, English workers had to learn to see themselves as totally, irreconcilably, different from other workers, a difference that could not be made to disappear by conversion to Christianity or by learning the English language and English ways, a permanent difference that would make joint cooperative action practically impossible. That difference was the contrived concept of race. Divide and rule requires a wedge with which to divide, and whiteness was invented to provide that wedge. That process created white privilege and whiteness itself as a separate identifiable category—though who was white, given several generations of mixture, was often dependent on having sufficient power to claim that English was the ancestry that counted. The shift meant that your most basic identity, along with gender, was that you were white, not English, not Christian. That new identity carried the advantage that it could exclude Christian Africans and also be expanded to include a wider range of Europeans, not just the English.

Divide and rule may well have been cheaper than maintaining a permanent army to control the labor force, but the punishment a weak elite needed to use when moving further toward state formation meant it was not cheap in terms of lives lost, as historian Lerone Bennett makes clear in describing the decades after the rebellion in both the South and the North (which, like the South, also depended on unfree black and white labor, though to a lesser degree):

The whole system of separation and subordination rested on official state terror. The exigencies of the situation required men to kill some white people to keep them white and to kill many blacks to keep them black. In the North and South, men and women were maimed, tortured, and murdered in a comprehensive campaign of mass conditioning. The severed heads of black and white rebels were impaled on poles along the road as warnings to black people and white people, and opponents of the status quo were starved to death in chains and roasted slowly over open fires. Some rebels were branded; others were castrated. This exemplary cruelty, which was carried out as a deliberate process of mass education, was an inherent part of the new system.⁸⁹

In the aftermath of the rebellion, legislation enhancing the already existing but often ambiguous legal differences between African and English, between slavery and indenture, accelerated dramatically. In the other North American colonies, laws surrounding slavery and racial differentiation gradually tightened as well. Those laws created the necessary difference between black and white.

In Virginia punishment for whites who ran away was worse if they ran with blacks than with whites, for instance. Interracial alliance and cooperation became dangerous, and whiteness became the wedge for dividing and ruling the entire labor force.⁹⁰ Whiteness became a real material advantage. White privilege gave whites the illusion that they had something to gain from supporting the regime that provided their racial privilege—but at the cost of accepting their own lesser, but real, exploitation and continued class subservience.

The privilege was also real. Whites were free, or had the expectation of freedom after indenture. Since they couldn’t be enslaved, they were far less likely to be blackmailed into submission by threats to enslaved loved ones. They could whip blacks; they could testify against other whites in court. White servants could own possessions such as livestock, whereas slaves could have their possessions appropriated by their owners. White servants could take cases of mistreatment to court, and sometimes actually did. In 1675, land ownership was formally limited to whites. Whites could own guns, and were to receive a gun when they were freed. Gun ownership was thus a symbol of freedom as well as a symbol of racial distinction that denied blacks the possibility of membership in the racial fraternity of military manhood. Even free blacks were excluded from the militia in 1723.⁹¹

Laws like these and those that disenfranchised free people of color were gradually tightened to include anyone identified as being of African descent. New laws made slavery more clearly heritable through the mother, so that children of enslaved women were born enslaved, even when the father was white. Those laws were sharpened with laws that punished with banishment white women who had sex with black men.⁹² Such laws prevented the further development of a free biracial population; you would be either white and free or black and enslaved. Thus, slavery was slowly turned into the inherited racial slavery that became the cornerstone of the colonial, and then US, economy, North as well as South. Toward the end of his life, Bruen Radford might have begun to feel the effects of white privilege in addition to class and male privilege. By the time his son George was an adult, however, whiteness and white privilege would have been as natural to his identity as being male. Lives, mostly black, continue to be lost to maintain that wedge, which continues to enable the system of divide and rule that serves elite interests. The legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion is still with us.

THE LEGACY OF BACON’S REBELLION is still with us also in that it led to the next step in state formation. In the process of both laying to rest the rebellion and undermining the solidarity of the unfree and the poor, control of punishing became further centralized. As we saw earlier, back in X Radford’s day establishment of the court system in 1634 had, to some extent, taken control of punishment from neighbors who policed one another and from the church, and placed it in the hands of local elites who ran the courts and frequently defied the governor and council. There was a running battle between local elites and the regional elites who, with the governor, nominally governed the colony. With the takeover by the Crown in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, both lost power relative to the Crown. It is hardly surprising that war led to another step in state formation, with greater coercive power on the part of the state—we saw this effect after the events of 9/11.⁹³ In Virginia, the governor-general, appointed by the king, would now be answerable only to the king, not to the elected legislature or to a council composed of other colonial elites, as governors had previously been. Virginia’s laws were now subject to royal approval or veto. The wealthy had to pay taxes. The Crown’s court, with Crown-appointed justices, gained greater jurisdiction—thus control of punishment was moved a bit further out of local elite hands.⁹⁴

So long as slavery remained, poor whites and enslaved Africans stood little chance of uniting in revolt. Divide and rule worked, and the elite no longer feared a white uprising. But the enhanced control of the colony by the Crown and of the workforce by the elites came at a price—the shift from indenture to slavery meant an exponential increase in the number of enslaved Africans in Virginia, and with that shift came a new fear: slave revolt. Enslaved Africans were being imported after Bacon’s Rebellion in ever-increasing numbers, and the earlier ambiguities that somewhat mitigated African servitude had been legislated out of existence. As Governor Spotswood warned in 1710, “Freedom Wears a Cap which Can without a Tongue Call Together all Those who Long to Shake off The Fetters of Slavery and Such an Insurrection would surely be attended with Most Dreadfull Consequences.”⁹⁵ And indeed, resistance and revolt among the enslaved was endemic.⁹⁶

This was a new Virginia, one where whites, at least for a while, were no longer to be feared. Instead, the fear of black revolt and the use of black labor shaped all lives, white as well as black. And Indians, with military power and diplomatic skill, continued to limit white expansion and at the same time mediated, and fought in, the imperial struggles of competing European states. This was not the world of X or John Radford. Instead this was a world in which George Radford and Ann Massey, who became his wife, inherited privilege and where Alexander Davidson, marrying Sarah Ellis, eventually adopted it, owning Venis and Adam. So we turn to their story, the story of Venis and Adam and Davidsons, and the continuing struggle over punishment and dispossession.