University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE REBELLION COLLAPSES

General Ingram succeeded Bacon as commander-in-chief
of the insurgent forces. He was a man of obscure birth, and
possessed few of the resolute qualities of his predecessor. A
bold, resourceful, and alert leader was now needed to cope
with the advantage which Berkeley possessed in sea power.
From the Eastern Shore, the latter was able by means of his
vessels to strike at three vulnerable points,—the York, the
Rappahannock, and the James rivers, the gateways to the
mainland. As it was not known which of these would be first
attacked, Ingram unwisely divided his army into detachments,—one
was stationed at the home of Nathaniel Bacon,
Senior, on the upper reach of the York; another at Colonel
Reade's lower down; and the third at Green Spring, near
Jamestown. Ingram lay encamped with the main body at
West Point, which he thought would be near enough to the outlying
detachments to enable him to send reinforcements to
any one of the three whenever they should be needed.

But in this impression he was mistaken. Robert Beverley,
with a considerable force, crossed from Accomac, and landing
at Colonel Reade's captured Colonel Hansford and all his
men and quickly returned to the Eastern Shore. Hansford
was tried by court martial, sentenced, and although he earnestly
requested that he should be shot, was sent to the gallows.
"I die," exclaimed this first martyr in the cause of
popular freedom on the American continent, "I die a loyal
subject and a lover of my country." Captain Cheesman was
the next officer to be captured by the same manoeuvre from over
the water. He too was tried by court martial, and, of course,

convicted. When his wife threw herself on her knees before
Berkeley to plead for her husband's life, he brutally thrust her
away with a foul epithet that has consigned his memory to
eternal infamy.

The governor's thirst for blood had now got its first
whetting, and it was not to be satiated so long as he had
the power to gratify it. He concluded from the success of

these two small expeditions that a large one would be still
more triumphant. There was no evidence that the people at
large were heartily supporting Ingram, or that his soldiers
had much stomach for a fight—indeed, many persons who had
followed Bacon with fidelity now let it be known that they
were worn out with the bloody strife, and would welcome a
permanent peace. Encouraged by this combination of favorable
signs, Berkeley crossed the Bay to the York River with
numerous ships and sloops and a very considerable force of
men, and established his camp on the plantation where Bacon
had died. Here he issued a proclamation calling on the people
to rally around his standard; and so great was the crowd
which obeyed that he exultantly declared that the war was
ended. But this announcement was premature—Colonel
Walkelett,[1] of Ingram's army, fell upon a body of Middlesex
militia who had sworn to support Berkeley and dispersed
them to the winds; and turning in his track, set out to lock
horns with Major Lawrence Smith, who was approaching
from Gloucester with six hundred men to attack the army
at West Point. Ingram, getting in behind Smith, compelled
him to surrender his entire force.

An attempt by Captain Furrell, one of Berkeley's lieutenants,
to rush the detachment stationed in President
Bacon's house on the York River resulted in such failure that
the attackers had to retreat in haste to their boats for safety,
after witnessing the death of their commanding officer.

Discouraged by the upshot of his military operations on
the north side of the James River, Berkeley decided to send
an expedition to the south of this stream, in the hope of
winning success in that quarter at least. This part of the
Colony had not been so deeply mixed up in the insurrection,
and now that Bacon was dead had grown indifferent to the
cause which he represented—a condition due, in some measure,
also, to the fact that Ingram had not thought it to be of
urgent importance to defend this group of counties from
attack. Its people appear to have submitted to Berkeley
without any serious show of resistance. The same feeling
of weakness and weariness, now that Bacon's strong arm
was withdrawn, spread to the population on the north side
of the river, where it was swelled by the arbitrary action
of Ingram's soldiers in carrying off food from the plantation
larders, and driving off the cattle for slaughter—in reality,
the only way open to them to obtain the provisions which they

needed. Some gratuitous damage, however, was inflicted, such
as the burning of houses and the destruction of fences.

Just at this hour when the members of all classes were
revolted by these acts of lawlessness, overtures were made
to Ingram to surrender, with immunity to his person and
estate. Berkeley was anxious to be able to report before the
arrival of the English troops and commissioners that the
rebellion had been completely crushed; and this feeling led
him to offer the same conciliatory terms to every veteran in
Ingram's army. To those who were indentured servants, the
promise was given that they should at once go free; and to
all, a large wage was to be paid for their military services;
and they were also to be permitted to enlist for the Indian
wars, should they desire to continue in the field. Walkelett
was not only pardoned in his turn, but received a share of
the booty carried off in the previous campaigns against the
savages; and in return for this bounty, persuaded his soldiers
to throw down their arms in a body.

About three hundred men rallied under the leadership of
Drummond and Lawrence, who had been specially excepted
from pardon by Berkeley; but this force, after marching into
New Kent County, soon melted away. Drummond, who had
served as governor of Carolina, and was a man of birth, education,
and fortune, was captured in a swamp, and quickly
brought before Berkeley, with whom he had had a difference
previous to the insurrection. The vindictive old man bowed
profoundly, with sarcastic courtesy, before the prisoner.
"You are more welcome," he exclaimed, "than any other man
in Virginia." Drummond bore these cynical and heartless
insults with silent dignity. He was made to walk all the
way to Colonel Bray's house in order to stand trial by court
martial. When he complained that the irons on his limbs
hurt him, his guards, more human than Berkeley, permitted
him to rest, for which kindness he gratefully thanked them.
As he stood up before the court for the judgment already
foreordained, his coat was stripped from his back and his

ring from his finger. The judicial farce ended in thirty
minutes, and he was hurried away to the gallows. When
the circumstances of his trial and the confiscation of his estate
were reported to the Privy Council in England by his inconsolable
widow, that body condemned the outrage of his summary
treatment, and ordered that his property should be
restored to his family.

Prominent men, like Thomas Hill, Henry Pope, and
Thomas Young, had already been strung up like so many highwaymen,
without any show of an honest trial.

In the meanwhile, three commissioners, Colonel Herbert
Jeffreys, Sir John Berry, and Colonel Francis Moryson, who
had been appointed by the King to probe the causes of the
commotions in Virginia, were on their way across the ocean.
But the knowledge that they would soon arrive seemed only
to spur on the savage governor to recoup himself and the
councillors for their losses by confiscating the estates of all
who had taken a prominent part on the opposite side in the
recent struggle. No formal charge of treason was considered
to be necessary. Many of the unfortunate followers of Bacon
and Ingram were arrested and thrust into the county jails;
and those of them who escaped execution by court martial,
obtained their release only by delivering up to the insane
Berkeley all the property in their possession. The pangs of
hunger and the pinch of cold were brought to bear to constrain
the backward to yield.

Amid all this orgy of cruelty and greediness, the case of
one individual aroused a peculiar horror. Edward Lloyd
was thrown into prison and kept there long enough for his
plantation to be rifled of everything of value belonging to it;
and so violent and so ruthless was the conduct of the robbers
that the terrified Mrs. Lloyd was prematurely delivered of
child and died before her husband could reach her. The
wives, widows, and children of men who had assisted Bacon
were treated as relentlessly as if their innocent hands were
dyed the deepest red in treason.

Berkeley was engaged in this campaign of plunder and
judicial murder—the only parallel of which in English history
is to be found in the Bloody Assizes of the infamous Judge
Jeffreys—when news came from Old Point that two of the
commissioners, Berry and Moryson, had arrived in the Bay
with a part of the military force that had been sent over.
Hurrying to receive them, Berkeley gave them a profuse and
plausible description of the insurrection—of its supposed
causes and his own conduct; but the two Englishmen were
not satisfied to hear only one side of the controversy. They
informed him that they had been ordered to collect testimony
from persons of both parties; and the fact that their impression
of his share in the dark episode was soon unfavorable
to him grew to be so clear to him, even before Colonel Jeffreys
had joined them, that, in his resentment, he restricted his
intercourse with them to writing. They sent him word that,
thereafter, all confiscations were to be carried out in strict
accord with common law. Jeffreys, on his arrival, confirmed
this order; but Berkeley defying them, continued his illegal
seizures.

The three commissioners, visiting him at Green Spring,
informed him that he was commanded by the King to return
to England to make a personal report. In a rage, Berkeley
called for the proof of this statement. Jeffreys, who was
to serve as lieutenant-governor in his absence, read his commission,
which contained this instruction. Unfortunately, a
clause in the document permitted the governor to leave the
Colony at his convenience, and he, shrewdly seizing on it,
claimed that he could not be superseded so long as he was
present in Virginia; and while there were more rebels to be
hung and more estates to be confiscated—so he cried out
defiantly—he was determined to remain. Jeffreys was unequal
to the emergency. Instead of sending the desperate old man
on board the first ship sailing for England, he allowed himself
to be brow-beaten and thwarted, as if he had neither commission
nor soldiers at his back. The only explanation that can,

apart from weakness of character, be offered for this supineness
was the fear that Sir John Berkeley of the Privy
Council, the governor's brother, would, on the latter's return
to England, join with him in intriguing for Jeffreys' recall
and disgrace.

Berkeley had been ordered by the King to issue a proclamation
that should exclude Bacon alone from a general pardon.
The governor had the audacity to modify this document
by a proclamation of his own, in which he named additional
persons to whom the royal clemency would not be allowed by
himself to extend. Among these was Colonel Thomas Swann,
who had given the shelter of his house to the commissioners
when it was found that no lodging had been provided for
them by the angry Berkeley. The latter, cynically indifferent
to the commissioners' protest, tried Giles Bland, William
Scarborrough, and four other of Bacon's partisans of equal
prominence, by summary court martial, and at once gave
them over to the common hangman. Anthony Arnold was
strung up in chains, although he had shown by his utterances
that he was insane. Robert Jones, an old soldier in the civil
wars, only escaped death by the imperious intercession of
Lady Berkeley.

So insatiable for blood and plunder became the monstrous
old man that the General Assembly, a body of his own creatures,
grew impatient and requested him to desist; but not
listening to their remonstrance, he continued, without a shadow
of law, to levy fines and compositions for treason. He
seems finally to have let up in his violent course only from
fear that the common people, who had begun to murmur, would
rise in desperation against him. Indeed, the presence of one
thousand regulars at Jamestown alone seems to have prevented
a recrudescence of the former commotions. A rumor
spread that all the settled plantations were to be abandoned
by their owners and new homes sought far beyond the mountains.
The remoteness of that wild region and the ferocity
of the Indians were preferable in their eyes to the sanguinary

tyranny of the man who then occupied the seat of power
at Jamestown.

The General Assembly—which had been elected just after
the close of the rebellion—refused to permit anyone to hold
civil or military office who had been in Bacon's service. They
passed an act that prescribed a whipping for every one who
should speak disparagingly of Berkeley; they defined as
mutiny the assemblage of even six men under arms; and
they sternly refused to receive any petition setting forth the
popular grievances. "Not until Governor Berkeley has left
Virginia," the commissioners correctly reported to the Privy
Council, "can we hope to overcome the public fear of his
resentment so far as to find out the real sentiments of the
people and their impressions of their wrongs."

The puerility to which Berkeley could descend, in the
midst of his ruthless violence, was illustrated in the insult
which he offered these dignified English officials in sending
them away from his house, after a polite call, in his coach
driven by the common hangman.

Jeffreys now took the step which he should have taken
earlier—he announced by proclamation that he would assume
the powers of the governorship; but he had put this off so
long that the people doubted whether he was not a usurper;
and when Berkeley did afterwards sail, they thought that he
would certainly return to resume his former despotic functions.
Jeffreys tried to soften the effect of his dilatoriness
by saying that he had been only waiting for the new Assembly
to come together. Berkeley denied the legitimacy of the new
administration to the last. "You have ejected me from my
share in the government while I am yet in the country," he
wrote his successor, "and there is no justification for your
conduct in my commission or in yours." This letter was
addressed in language characteristic of its writer, "To the
Right Honorable Colonel Herbert Jeffreys, his Majesty's
Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia;" and it was signed, "William

Berkeley, Governor of Virginia until his most Sacred
Majesty shall please to determine otherwise."

There was little to gratify him in his reception on arriving
in England. It was now known there, through the commissioners'
report, that he had refused to yield his seat to Jeffreys;
and that he had also deliberately ignored the King's
order in modifying the royal proclamation of pardon. "How
can the people of Virginia," wrote Secretary Coventry to
him in a letter that passed him on the ocean, "be brought to
a right sense of their duty to obey their governors when the
governors themselves will not obey the King?" Berkeley
had been sick when he left Virginia, and he grew worse as he
drew near England. In spite of his extreme weakness after
landing, he implored Charles to grant him an audience, which
was done out of commiseration for his condition, but he died
before he could feebly kiss the royal hand. His end may
have been hastened by hearing the words which the monarch
in a moment of indignation had spoken of him, "That old
fool has taken more lives in that naked country than I have
done for the murder of my father."

Col. Philip Ludwell