Bacon's Rebellion: Jamestown Burned, a Casket of Stones and Jimson Weed

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Nathaniel Bacon led the 1676 uprising in Virginia known as Bacon's Rebellion, and the episode weighs whether he was a proto-patriot, as Thomas Jefferson later saw him, or an indebted opportunist. Trade laws had collapsed tobacco prices, eastern land was exhausted, and freed indentured servants were pushed to the frontier. Governor William Berkeley, in power for over three decades, avoided elections, taxed heavily and held a personal monopoly on the beaver trade. Bacon, a Cambridge-educated relation of Berkeley's wife sent to America after a fraudulent scheme in England, was kept out of the inner circle. When a dispute with the Doeg spiraled into militia killings of Susquehannock chiefs at a parley and retaliatory raids, Berkeley built frontier forts that settlers saw as costly and useless.

Bacon took command of angry frontiersmen after supplying brandy, recruited the Occaneechi to attack the Susquehannock, then turned on them and seized their beaver pelts. Elected to the House of Burgesses, he was captured, pardoned, and returned with 500 armed men; Berkeley bared his chest and dared him to shoot, and Bacon instead aimed muskets at the State House, winning a commission and Bacon's Laws restoring votes to landless freemen. After his Declaration of the People, he used the wives of Berkeley supporters as human shields on his earthworks and burned Jamestown, then died of dysentery in October 1676. Berkeley hanged more than 20 rebels and was recalled. The hosts link the alliance of poor whites and enslaved Africans in his ranks to the Virginia slave codes of 1705.

• Bacon's followers left a casket filled with stones as a decoy, and his real burial place remains unknown.
• Anna Ballard and Elizabeth Page were among the women forced onto the ramparts.
• King Charles II reportedly said Berkeley had executed more people in that naked country than the king had for his father's murder.
• The 1705 codes defined enslaved Africans as real estate and gave poor white colonists privileges such as policing the enslaved and bearing arms.
• British soldiers who ate Datura stramonium near Jamestown behaved bizarrely for 11 days, giving the plant the name Jimson weed.