press, wore English clothing, affected English manners, worshipped in the
Anglican church, exchanged visits with English friends, and sent their sons
to study in English institutions. The popular royal governor, Sir William
Berkeley, was an appointee of Charles I; not surprisingly, even after the exe-
cution of the king, Governor Berkeley and his Virginia Anglicans remained
loyal to the house of Stuart.
When Berkeley finally had to step down, Virginia functioned essen-
tially as a self-governing republic under its House of Burgesses. Not until
1652 did a parliamentary mission arrive to accept Virginia’s “surrender” to
Cromwell’s government. Surrender came easily. Form rather than substance
was its hallmark: the House of Burgesses did elect a Puritan governor, but
his appointment scarcely affected the colony’s life. Scattered widely in their
plantations—rather than being grouped together in a city as the Puritans
were in Boston—Virginians went about their daily lives more or less oblivi-
ous of the great events in London. Then, having suffered not at all, the
burgesses received news of the death of Cromwell with mild relief, and
news of the Restoration with joy. The transition was easy: they simply
reelected the former royalist governor, Sir William Berkeley, and in short
order the new king confirmed their choice. Berkeley was to enjoy sixteen
more years of watching his colony grow and prosper.
Then, in 1676, he faced another challenge, a revolt led by his young
cousin by marriage, Nathaniel Bacon. The issue on which Bacon based his
movement was the hostility felt by frontiersmen to the crown’s and the
coastal Virginians’ relationships with the Indians. The more settled peoples
along the coast were profiting from trade with the Indians and were supply-
ing them with arms that, although intended for hunting, were occasionally
used against whites trespassing on Indian lands. This relatively simple
issue was complicated by the fact that “the” Indians known to Virginians
were not a single group but several mutually hostile societies. Those with
whom the Virginians had earlier been in contact had all but disappeared.
Their numbers had declined from about 10,000 to only 3,000 or 4,000
men, women, and children. They had lost most of their lands, and the little
land on which they still lived was theirs only at the sufferance of the colony.
As Governor Berkeley wrote in 1671, “The Indians, our neighbours, are
absolutely subjected.”
136 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA