Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (FireWorks) by Sai Englert

Author:Sai Englert [Englert, Sai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2022-09-19T18:30:00+00:00

INDIGENOUS LAND, ENSLAVED LABOUR

Bacon’s Rebellion was ignited in the aftermath of a war waged against the Susquehannock people. Settlers attempted to take over more land for their tobacco plantations and were defeated by the Indigenous nation and their allies. In the aftermath of defeat, both settler landowners and bonded labourers rose up and ‘took into their own hands the slaughter of Indigenous farmers with the aim of taking their land’.52 As Dunbar-Ortiz points out, while the emergence of racism as a tool of social control in the rebellion’s aftermath is important, it should not obscure the fact that it also marked the emergence of an alliance between landowning and poor settlers in the struggle to dispossess Indigenous nations of their land.53

The uprising’s original goal had been to force the governor of Virginia’s hand in regards to the speed (rather than the fact) of Indigenous dispossession. However, in doing so, the planters who had stoked the uprising, including Nathaniel Bacon, inadvertently created a space for the expression of the political demands of – both European and African – bonded labourers. The latter, already in arms and in direct confrontation with Governor William Berkeley, demanded tax reform, access to land, and an end to their terms of servitude, radicalising the revolt in the process. Allen notes:

English poet and parliament member Andrew Marvell reported on 14 November 1676 that a ship had recently arrived from Virginia with the news that Bacon had ‘proclam’d liberty to Servants and Negro’s’. A letter written from Virginia in October seemed to suggest that a class differentiation had occurred among the rebels: ‘Bacon’s followers having deserted him he had proclaimed liberty to the servants and slaves which chiefly formed his army when he burnt James Town.’54

Although the rebellion survived the death of its eponymous instigator, it was defeated militarily by Berkeley’s ships in January 1677. Its long-term impact would not be the weakening of settler landowners’ power, but the reverse. Under pressure of continued uprisings (and the threat thereof) by both European and African unfree labourers in the decades that followed the uprising, the settler planters would develop – in Virginia and elsewhere – increasingly rigid laws that racialised Europeans and Africans by making freedom synonymous with Whiteness and servitude with Blackness.

In 1691, the Virginia General Assembly moved beyond allowing owners of African bonded labourers to freely ‘use and abuse’ them, when it forbade that they could be set free.55 In 1705, the revised Virginia code limited the levels of violence that could be meted out against ‘Christian White’ bonded labourers, gave them recourse to the law in cases of excessive abuse, and specified in law the ‘freedom dues’ that they were owed at the end of their term.56 At the same time, African bonded-labourers’ livestock was confiscated, while lifetime bonded labourers, increasingly African only, could also not expect freedom dues.57 In 1723, a new Act was passed, with the expressed purpose of ‘directing the trial of Slaves … and for the better government of Negros, Mulattos, and Indians, bond or free’.

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