Hey, everybody. Before we start today's episode, we wanted to let you know that Stuff you Missed in History Class has been nominated for a Webby Award this year. We've been nominated for Best Writing in the Podcast category. You can vote by going to Webby Awards dot com. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. On the surface, Bacon's Rebellion sounds a little similar to the Regulator War that we talked about on the show a couple of months ago. Both of them took place in England's North American colonies before the Revolutionary War. Although Bacon's rebellion was about a century earlier than the other one, they both involved some divisions between the less affluent, more inland people in the colony and the elite ruling class out on the coast, and as was the case with the Regulators, for a long time, Bacon's rebellion was primarily interpreted as a precursor to the Revolutionary War, with patriotic colonists rising up against the tyranny of the British colonial government. If you studied this in school up through about the mid to late twentieth century or maybe even later, that might be the version of it that you heard. But on the other hand, historians writing over the last seventy five years or so have been focusing on all kinds of factors, including labor and race, and colonists relationships to the native tribes and the nations who were already then that part of North America, and the native tribes and nations own relationships to each other. Although some scholars have tried to find like one central explanation for this whole incident, it really seems like the deeper you look into it, the more complicated it gets, and there was really just a lot going on. So we're going to be getting into Bacon's rebellion in two episodes. This was an uprising that involved free farmers and enslaved and indentured people of multiple races and nationalities. So today we're going to talk about how colonial Virginia evolved to look like that in the first place, and then the next episode we will get to the actual fighting. Um Tracy decided later in the game than you might have expected that this was going to be a two parter, but I suspected early when she texted me last week and said, I think this is the most complicated thing I've tried to untangle. Yeah, it was like the more I tried to untangle, the more tangle I found. That's often how it plays out. So to put it plainly, the Colony of Virginia was established to make money. There was also some focus on converting the Native American population to Christianity, but really turning a profit was a much bigger priority. To that end, the Virginia Company of London was granted a series of royal charters to establish and govern the colony, so the Virginia Company, not the Crown, assumed the fine financial risk. Yeah. The sole story is just a lot of people trying to get something with the minimal expense to themselves as possible. The Virginia Company's first charter was granted in sixteen o six, and at first the colony that it established in sixteen o seven really struggled. The colony had a shortage of everything from supplies to just basic skills. The starving time of sixteen o nine to sixteen ten was particularly bad, and we talked about that on the show back in. One of the problems was that at first the colony didn't have a profitable export crop. That started to change in the sixteen teens after John Rolfe introduced strains of tobacco from the Caribbean. Virginia already had its own native tobacco, but British consumers preferred the milder, sweeter Caribbean varieties. Soon after John Ralph started experimenting with these seeds, tobacco became the foundation of the entire colonial economy and virtually it's only export. But this led to a couple of new problems. One, since the colony had all of its eggs in one basket, things like bad weather and fluctuations and tobacco prices and wars could be really catastrophic to the whole economy and to the colony needed a much larger workforce than it had to keep this new industry running. To assemble this workforce, investors and planters in seventeenth century Virginia largely turned to a system of indenture. People signed contracts to work for a specific period of time, essentially losing their freedom for the term of their indenture. In an exchange they were given passage from Europe to North America. In North America, they were supposed to be provided food, shelter, clothing, and usually the tools that they needed to work. Yes, sometimes people contracting with indentured workers were like, you got to provide your own tools. It's buried a little bit. But at the end of this contract, the workers typically received what was called freedom does and this was usually some corn and some clothing. Sometimes the people had contracted them would give them some tools or some other goods as well, but this was really more of a custom than a legal requirement until way after the events that we're talking about today, so some people didn't do it. This system was based on a model that had existed in parts of Europe for centuries, but in general it was implemented far more harshly in North America. In England, an apprenticeship might last for years, since apprentices were meant to be learning a specific trade like blacksmithing or bookbinding. But outside the apprenticeship system and indenture in England could last for as little as a year. In Virginia, though indenture's lasted as long as seven years, and it depended on how old the person was when they started working. Laws adjusted the exact length from time to time over the seventeenth century, but in general, the younger the worker was when they signed the indenture, the longer their indenture was for. Also, in North America, contract terms were much stricter. Indentured people had fewer rights and protections, and there were more laws specifically governing their activities and behavior. Punishment for breaking these laws tended to be harsh, and because contract holders had a financial incentive to keep their laborers working for free for as long as possible, punishments also included adding more time to a person's indenture. People signed these indentures for a lot of different reasons and as examples, a person might genuinely want to immigrate to North America and just have no other way to afford it, or they might be in debt in Europe and signing this indenture would have absolved them of their debt. Or they might have been convicted of a crime and the indenture was part of their punishment. So while there were some people who signed an indenture freely, for a lot of people it was somewhere between being forced and being coerced. Conditions for these workers could be truly appalling. Even though an indenture was supposed to have an end date, a lot of people died of disease, malnourishment, or mistreatment before get anywhere close to the end of their contract. And of course there were people who just refused to let their indentured workers go or who provided them with no sort of freedom dues at all. In spite of that, a lot of people came to North America and Virginia specifically as indentured workers. This was especially true after sixteen eighteen, when the Virginia Company established what was known as the head Rights System. This was part of a series of incentives to try to attract new colonists. The head Right system granted fifty acres of land to each person who had either paid their own way to immigrate to North America or paid someone else's way. So investors and other wealthy people started paying for big groups of people to immigrate as indentured workers, and these investors collected fifty acres of land for each person they brought. This gave the Virginia Company access to a large labor force without having to really pay a lot of money for it, because it was essentially reimbursing the investors who were doing the paying with land instead of money. Between sixteen thirty and sixteen eighty, three quarters of all new arrivals in Virginia and neighboring Maryland were indentured, with as much as half of Virginia's population being indentured at one time. Most of Virginia's indentured workers were from Britain and Ireland, but they were indentured workers from other parts of Europe as well. Especially before the sixteen eighties, there were also Native American and African indentured workers. It would be going way too far to suggest that all of these workers were treated equally, regardless of their race or their nationality. Most European workers probably thought they were superior to the Native and African workers, and there was also something of a hierarchy within the workers from different parts of Europe. But overall, until the mid to late seventeenth century, Virginia's indentured workers tended to have similar working conditions, granted a lot of times they were similarly terrible, and they also had similar oppert communities. At the end of their indenture. The contract terms tended to be less specific and less defined for Native and African workers. So it really wasn't unheard of for a person's indenture never to formally end, even though it was supposed to be temporary. But there were definitely Africans and people of African descent who got to the end of their indenture and regained their freedom and became landowners themselves with indentured workers of their own. That was starting to change during the period that we're discussing, and the events of Bacon's rebellion prompted even more changes, and we're going to talk about that more after we have a sponsor break. In the seventeenth century, indentured workers were not the only unfree labor in Virginia. There were also enslaved Native Americans and enslaved Africans. For the first couple of years after the founding of Jamestown, most of the unfree native labor in the colony was indentured. That started changing after the First Anglo Powhatan War started in sixteen o nine. This was the first of a series of wars between the English Colony and an alliance of about thirty Algonquin speaking native peoples. It's known as the Powhatan Confederacy because its leader, Wahoon Sinacoa, was first introduced to the colonists as Powatin. Also heard that pronounced a couple of different ways, including exactly how the emphasis goes in pot or. I heard someone say at polatan and I was like, I never heard anyone say it that way when I was a child. There was not really a legal framework to do this at first, but the English colonists started treating native prisoners of war from this conflict as slaves. A lot of North America's native tribes were already practicing some form of slavery before Europeans got there. Often this involved enslaving prisoners of war. So the colonists established alliances and trading relationship ships with the tribes in the area, and as they did this, they started trading weapons and supplies with their native allies in exchange for their native allies prisoners of war. The enslavement of native people became a bigger part of the Virginia Colony and more legally formalized in the middle of the seventeenth century. In October of sixteen forty six, a treaty and did the Third Anglo Powhetan War and This treaty made the remaining tribes of the Powhetan Confederacy tributaries and subject to English rule. One of the provisions of the treaty was that Native children under the age of twelve could voluntarily come to live in English households. So the colonists claimed that what they would be doing was providing these children was shelter and an education and converting them to Christianity, but in reality they were more like hostages. This provision had been built into the treaty to try to force the Native people to comply with it. Basically, we're taking your children into our homes, so you better do what we say because we have your kids. In addition to being treated as hostages, many of these Native children were also forced to work as servants. The colony's General Assembly passed a series of laws prohibiting the capture and sale of Native children as slaves starting in sixteen fifty five, but these laws were largely ignored by the colonists, and in some cases colonial administrators encouraged breaking the law. Then, in sixteen sixty the General Assembly passed a law that permitted the enslavement of Native prisoners of war, and there were also mass enslavements and retribution for attacks on colonial settlements. So if a tribe attacked a settlement and retaliation, the colonists would enslave huge numbers of people from that tribe. And, as was the case in Africa with the trans Atlantic slave trade, England's willingness to trade guns for people led to increase warfare among the native tribes, as some of them saw more prisoners of war to sell, and others just tried to keep from becoming enslaved themselves. In sixteen seventy, the General Assembly passed a new law that mandated that native prisoners of war be indentured rather than enslaved, but as had happened with the laws that prohibited enslaving native children, a lot of people just ignored this. The treatment of Africans in Virginia followed a somewhat similar trajectory from indenture to enslavement. The first Africans in Virginia are generally noted as having arrived on a ship called the White Lion in August of sixteen nineteen, although there may have been a small number of other Africans before that point. The White Lion was an English privateer and its crew had taken a group of Africans prisoner after capturing a Portuguese vessel bound for Mexico. So the crew of the White Lion traded these people for food and supplies. But it's not really clear from the historical record whether the colonists treated them as indentured or enslaved. It may have varied among all of them. They were described as twenty and odd, so a couple of dozen people chattel. Slavery was really well established in Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies by this point, but British colonies were a little slower to adopt the practice. So in sixteen nineteen, when the ship arrived in dentures were really encoded in Virginia law, but slavery was not mentioned at all. Regardless of the question of the people sold from the White Lion, there were definitely indentured Africans in Virginia in the early to mid seventeenth century, although over time more Africans started to be held in lifelong bondage and the legal status of slavery in Virginia also started shifting around sixteen forty. That year, three indentured workers who were contracted to a man named Hugh Gwin fled from where they were living into Maryland. They were captured and returned to Virginia, where all three of them were whipped. The two European men of these three were sentenced to in a sational four years of servitude, but the third man, who was an African man known as John Punch, was sentenced to servitude for the rest of his life, and that was the first incidence of the lifelong servitude of an African in Virginia's legal system. Lifetime enslavement of Africans formally became part of Virginia law in sixteen sixty one, and then in sixteen sixty two. The law also specified that quote Negro women's children to serve according to the condition of the mother, so slavery was basically passed down from mothers to their children. So Bacon's rebellion started in sixteen seventy six, at which point chattel slavery was relatively new in Virginia, especially in terms of it's having some kind of legal framework, and it was unlawful to enslave Native prisoners of war for life, but that law was often being ignored, so looking at it a little bit more broadly, in sixteen seventy six, the Colony of Virginia had a population of free people, some of whom had previously been indentured, and these free people were of multiple races and nationalities. Virginia also had a very large number of indentured workers who were also of multiple races and nationalities, and the colony had a much smaller number of enslaved people, which included enslaved Africans and enslaved Native Americans. So regardless, the vast majority of Virginia's labor was not free, and the majority of Virginia's unfree labor at this time was indentured. But all of this was changing. Another thing that was shifting was how the Europeans in this society thought of themselves in relation to everyone else. The idea that European Christians were collectively one group, that group being white people, was fairly new. It was more common for people of European descent to think of their neighbors in terms of their specific nationality or in terms of their religion. So the people living in Virginia at this time, really we're thinking of things in terms of Christians and on Christians, Native Americans and Africans were considered non Christians unless they could prove that they had been baptized. And this was also connected to how people understood slavery, because before the mid sixteen hundreds, it was only considered acceptable to hold non Christians in bondage. This was part of the core definition of slavery, and this meant that in some parts of the colony people were freed after being baptized. In sixteen sixty seven, the Virginia General Assembly passed an act specifying that baptizing an enslaved person did not free them from bondage. We should also note that non Christians didn't really include Jews at this point because there were very few Jewish people in North America aside from a very few individual people. The first known group of Jewish colonists arrived in New York as refugees from Brazil in sixteen fifty four. Yeah, later on there were definitely more specific references to Jewish people, but at this time there were so few that it was just not a big part of the law or people's social understanding to some. All of this up Bacon's rebellion united a lot of parts of the society, including free farmers and indentured workers and enslaved Africans all against a perceived Native American threat. And then they turned their attention against the colonial government. And we will get to why people were so frustrated with the government after a sponsored break. Before the break, we talked about the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans in Virginia from the earliest years of the colony up through the sixteen seventies, and now we need to rewind just a little bit to talk about how the colonial government developed, because that was a big source of frustration leading into Bacon's rebellion. At the top of the show, we talked about how the Virginia Company established the colony at Jamestown in sixteen o seven. In sixteen eighteen, the company drafted a set of instructions for newly appointed governor, Sir George Yeardley. These instructions were called the Great Charter, and they included the head right system that we talked about earlier. The Great Charter also included instructions about the colony's governance. The company decided to establish an elected body of representatives so that the colonists could have some say in the government. While the colony stayed in the company's control. These representatives were known as burgesses, and they were elected to represent each settlement. Together, the Burgesses, the Governor's Council, and the Governor formed a unicameral body that was the General Assembly that has come up a couple of times in this episode. But in spite of ongoing reforms through these decades and all these instructions that were detailed in the Great Charter, the colony still just was not thriving. The Virginia Company never managed to get out of debt, even though it was not paying the vast majority of its labor. By the sixteen twenties, critics were also raising serious questions about the company and how it was running things. So in sixteen twenty four, after a year long investigation, the Crown revoked the company's charter and took direct control of the colony, appointing a royal governor and other officials. This was a massive change for the colonists, especially because for the first several years the General Assembly had no formal recognition. The colonists were frustrated and angry over the situation, since they had gone from being at least somewhat self governing with an elected assembly to being under the control of a governor who was appointed by the monarch. The crown did eventually recognize the assembly, and then in sixteen forty three, Governor Sir William Berkeley split the Burgesses off into their own house of the government, and so this turned the colony's unicameral legislature into a bicameral one. His goal in doing this was part of a plan to try to create a stable central government for the colony. But a side effect of splitting the Burgesses into their own house was that the Burgesses, who had always been mostly it up of the colony's gentry, they became increasingly focused on their own needs and the needs of other rich colonists, so the colonies less affluent people really felt like they didn't have a voice in the government anymore. Throughout all this time, tobacco continued to be the foundation of Virginia's economy. Tobacco prices had started to drop around the sixteen twenties as exports from North America and the Caribbean flooded the British market. The Dutch also bought a lot of tobacco from Virginia, and that revenue was cut off completely during the First Anglo Dutch War, which started in sixteen fifty two. Then in sixteen sixty, Parliament passed the Navigation Acts, which required Virginia's exports to be sent through English ports on English ships. That once again up ended Virginia's tobacco trade with the Dutch Republic, since the colony could no longer sell directly to the Dutch yea. Once the war was over they had resumed that trade, and then the Navigation actiments that they could not do it anymore. And then, of course, because it was a war, we are also all the other wartime effects, including the colony being directly attacked. Also in sixteen sixty, Sir William Berkeley was appointed the Governor of Virginia for a second time. His separation of the Burgesses into their own house and the government had happened during his first term. That first term lasted from sixteen forty one to sixteen fifty two, and it largely took place during the English Civil War. Berkeley himself was a Royalist, so when that side lost the war, he naturally lost his position as governor. Not long afterward, Charles the Second was restored to the throne in sixteen sixty and Berkeley's first term as governor had gone well enough that the king restored him to the position, but the second term did not go nearly as well. In his first term, Berkeley had encouraged Virginia farmers and planters to diversify their crops so the colonial economy wouldn't be so susceptible to everything from whether to wars. Charles the second approved a formal plan to do this during Berkeley's second term, but Berkeley's attempt to carry it out just didn't go well. Taxes were increased to fund the diversification effort, which meant that planters felt like they were being taxed in order to make a change that they didn't even want to make in the first place. The diversification effort fizzled, and tobacco remained as the primary export crop, so when the Second Anglo Dutch War started in sixteen sixty five, planters incomes once again plummeted. Planters were also becoming frustrated because of some of the consequences of the head right system that we talked about earlier. The land that was granted to people under that system was not the most fertile farmable land out in the tide Water area of the colony. It was farther inland, where it was a lot rockier, the soil was not as rich. Some of it was on the other side of the fall line, which made it harder to transport goods out to the coast. And the more people moved into this territory, the more frustrated they were about this disparity between the people out on the tide Water and people in the inner coastal plane. Governor Keley was also really fond of granting some of the best land so people that he liked as rewards, and that meant that that extra good land was not available to sell to anyone else. Those earlier issues with colonists feeling like they weren't represented in the government resurfaced in sixteen seventy when the Assembly adopted legislation that restricted the right to vote only to people who owned taxable land. This disenfranchised a lot of previously eligible voters. On top of that, there hadn't been a new election for the Assembly in eight years, so only the wealthiest and most elite people in the colony felt represented in the government, since they were the ones connected to the burgesses who had been serving all that time. As if that was not enough. On top of all of this, in sixteen seventy two, Charles the Second granted all of Virginia's revenues to the Lords Arlington and Culpepper, and this led the Governor of Virginia to raise taxes again both try to offset that loss of revenue and pay for an appeal to try to get the grant reversed. All of these things that we've talked about today led to the British colonies first violent uprising among its colonists, and we were going to talk about that on our next show. I have a little bit of listener mails to close us out, and this is about our not that long ago episode on Raphael Limpkin and the Genocide Convention. It is from Nate. Nate says, Hello, Tracy and Holly. I just wanted to add a note to your episode on Raphael Limpkin and the Genocide Convention. You mentioned that Limpkins studied law at LVOV, Poland, which is now in Ukraine and called Liviv. While Limpkin was working to define genocide as a crime, the related but distinct legal concept of crimes against humanity was being developed by Hirsch louder Pact, who had studied law at the same university. The parallels between the two continued at the Nuremberg trial, where louder Part was an advisor to the British prosecutors while Limpkin was an advisor to the Americans. Both men lost relatives in the Hall a cost and at Nuremberg they came face to face with a defendant most directly responsible for these deaths, Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland. I learned this and more in a fascinating book called East West Street by Philips Sands, which I highly recommend. Keep up the good work, Nate. Thank you, Nate. I wanted to read this email for two reasons. One to include that tidbit about Loder Pact and the idea of crimes against humanity, because that did come up in my research and was not something that we really got into in the episode as much. Um One of Lincoln's sources of frustration was that it seemed like sometimes there was more focused on this idea of crimes against humanity, and he really felt like there needed to be a legal focus on the idea of genocide and on preventing and prosecuting genocide. And then I also wanted to clarify because I don't think I said that he had studied law in love Poland. I'm not sure what gave that impression. What I did say that was definitely confus using, or what I did right that was definitely confusing. I don't remember which of us said it in the actual episode. Is that um I made it sound like the University of Heidelberg and Levov which is now Lviv, was one place. Those are in fact two different universities, and limpken Uh studied at both of those universities at different times. So if anybody got the impression that there used to be a university that was called the University of Heidelberg and Liviv, that it's two different places and Liviv yes is in Ukraine now. Uh So, thank you Nate for letting me share that. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcasts, we are a history podcast at how stuff works dot com. There we're all over social media at missed in History. We are at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram as missed in History, and then you can come to our website which is missed in history dot com and find a searchable archive of all the episodes you've ever done and the show notes for the episode Holly and I have worked on together, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast i heart Radio app, but anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, everybody. Before we start today's episode, we wanted to let you know that Stuff you Missed in History Class has been nominated for a Webby Award this year. We've been nominated for Best Writing in the Podcast category. You can vote by going to Webby Awards dot com. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. On the surface, Bacon's Rebellion sounds a little similar to the Regulator War that we talked about on the show a couple of months ago. Both of them took place in England's North American colonies before the Revolutionary War. Although Bacon's rebellion was about a century earlier than the other one, they both involved some divisions between the less affluent, more inland people in the colony and the elite ruling class out on the coast, and as was the case with the Regulators, for a long time, Bacon's rebellion was primarily interpreted as a precursor to the Revolutionary War, with patriotic colonists rising up against the tyranny of the British colonial government. If you studied this in school up through about the mid to late twentieth century or maybe even later, that might be the version of it that you heard. But on the other hand, historians writing over the last seventy five years or so have been focusing on all kinds of factors, including labor and race, and colonists relationships to the native tribes and the nations who were already then that part of North America, and the native tribes and nations own relationships to each other. Although some scholars have tried to find like one central explanation for this whole incident, it really seems like the deeper you look into it, the more complicated it gets, and there was really just a lot going on. So we're going to be getting into Bacon's rebellion in two episodes. This was an uprising that involved free farmers and enslaved and indentured people of multiple races and nationalities. So today we're going to talk about how colonial Virginia evolved to look like that in the first place, and then the next episode we will get to the actual fighting. Um Tracy decided later in the game than you might have expected that this was going to be a two parter, but I suspected early when she texted me last week and said, I think this is the most complicated thing I've tried to untangle. Yeah, it was like the more I tried to untangle, the more tangle I found. That's often how it plays out. So to put it plainly, the Colony of Virginia was established to make money. There was also some focus on converting the Native American population to Christianity, but really turning a profit was a much bigger priority. To that end, the Virginia Company of London was granted a series of royal charters to establish and govern the colony, so the Virginia Company, not the Crown, assumed the fine financial risk. Yeah. The sole story is just a lot of people trying to get something with the minimal expense to themselves as possible. The Virginia Company's first charter was granted in sixteen o six, and at first the colony that it established in sixteen o seven really struggled. The colony had a shortage of everything from supplies to just basic skills. The starving time of sixteen o nine to sixteen ten was particularly bad, and we talked about that on the show back in. One of the problems was that at first the colony didn't have a profitable export crop. That started to change in the sixteen teens after John Rolfe introduced strains of tobacco from the Caribbean. Virginia already had its own native tobacco, but British consumers preferred the milder, sweeter Caribbean varieties. Soon after John Ralph started experimenting with these seeds, tobacco became the foundation of the entire colonial economy and virtually it's only export. But this led to a couple of new problems. One, since the colony had all of its eggs in one basket, things like bad weather and fluctuations and tobacco prices and wars could be really catastrophic to the whole economy and to the colony needed a much larger workforce than it had to keep this new industry running. To assemble this workforce, investors and planters in seventeenth century Virginia largely turned to a system of indenture. People signed contracts to work for a specific period of time, essentially losing their freedom for the term of their indenture. In an exchange they were given passage from Europe to North America. In North America, they were supposed to be provided food, shelter, clothing, and usually the tools that they needed to work. Yes, sometimes people contracting with indentured workers were like, you got to provide your own tools. It's buried a little bit. But at the end of this contract, the workers typically received what was called freedom does and this was usually some corn and some clothing. Sometimes the people had contracted them would give them some tools or some other goods as well, but this was really more of a custom than a legal requirement until way after the events that we're talking about today, so some people didn't do it. This system was based on a model that had existed in parts of Europe for centuries, but in general it was implemented far more harshly in North America. In England, an apprenticeship might last for years, since apprentices were meant to be learning a specific trade like blacksmithing or bookbinding. But outside the apprenticeship system and indenture in England could last for as little as a year. In Virginia, though indenture's lasted as long as seven years, and it depended on how old the person was when they started working. Laws adjusted the exact length from time to time over the seventeenth century, but in general, the younger the worker was when they signed the indenture, the longer their indenture was for. Also, in North America, contract terms were much stricter. Indentured people had fewer rights and protections, and there were more laws specifically governing their activities and behavior. Punishment for breaking these laws tended to be harsh, and because contract holders had a financial incentive to keep their laborers working for free for as long as possible, punishments also included adding more time to a person's indenture. People signed these indentures for a lot of different reasons and as examples, a person might genuinely want to immigrate to North America and just have no other way to afford it, or they might be in debt in Europe and signing this indenture would have absolved them of their debt. Or they might have been convicted of a crime and the indenture was part of their punishment. So while there were some people who signed an indenture freely, for a lot of people it was somewhere between being forced and being coerced. Conditions for these workers could be truly appalling. Even though an indenture was supposed to have an end date, a lot of people died of disease, malnourishment, or mistreatment before get anywhere close to the end of their contract. And of course there were people who just refused to let their indentured workers go or who provided them with no sort of freedom dues at all. In spite of that, a lot of people came to North America and Virginia specifically as indentured workers. This was especially true after sixteen eighteen, when the Virginia Company established what was known as the head Rights System. This was part of a series of incentives to try to attract new colonists. The head Right system granted fifty acres of land to each person who had either paid their own way to immigrate to North America or paid someone else's way. So investors and other wealthy people started paying for big groups of people to immigrate as indentured workers, and these investors collected fifty acres of land for each person they brought. This gave the Virginia Company access to a large labor force without having to really pay a lot of money for it, because it was essentially reimbursing the investors who were doing the paying with land instead of money. Between sixteen thirty and sixteen eighty, three quarters of all new arrivals in Virginia and neighboring Maryland were indentured, with as much as half of Virginia's population being indentured at one time. Most of Virginia's indentured workers were from Britain and Ireland, but they were indentured workers from other parts of Europe as well. Especially before the sixteen eighties, there were also Native American and African indentured workers. It would be going way too far to suggest that all of these workers were treated equally, regardless of their race or their nationality. Most European workers probably thought they were superior to the Native and African workers, and there was also something of a hierarchy within the workers from different parts of Europe. But overall, until the mid to late seventeenth century, Virginia's indentured workers tended to have similar working conditions, granted a lot of times they were similarly terrible, and they also had similar oppert communities. At the end of their indenture. The contract terms tended to be less specific and less defined for Native and African workers. So it really wasn't unheard of for a person's indenture never to formally end, even though it was supposed to be temporary. But there were definitely Africans and people of African descent who got to the end of their indenture and regained their freedom and became landowners themselves with indentured workers of their own. That was starting to change during the period that we're discussing, and the events of Bacon's rebellion prompted even more changes, and we're going to talk about that more after we have a sponsor break. In the seventeenth century, indentured workers were not the only unfree labor in Virginia. There were also enslaved Native Americans and enslaved Africans. For the first couple of years after the founding of Jamestown, most of the unfree native labor in the colony was indentured. That started changing after the First Anglo Powhatan War started in sixteen o nine. This was the first of a series of wars between the English Colony and an alliance of about thirty Algonquin speaking native peoples. It's known as the Powhatan Confederacy because its leader, Wahoon Sinacoa, was first introduced to the colonists as Powatin. Also heard that pronounced a couple of different ways, including exactly how the emphasis goes in pot or. I heard someone say at polatan and I was like, I never heard anyone say it that way when I was a child. There was not really a legal framework to do this at first, but the English colonists started treating native prisoners of war from this conflict as slaves. A lot of North America's native tribes were already practicing some form of slavery before Europeans got there. Often this involved enslaving prisoners of war. So the colonists established alliances and trading relationship ships with the tribes in the area, and as they did this, they started trading weapons and supplies with their native allies in exchange for their native allies prisoners of war. The enslavement of native people became a bigger part of the Virginia Colony and more legally formalized in the middle of the seventeenth century. In October of sixteen forty six, a treaty and did the Third Anglo Powhetan War and This treaty made the remaining tribes of the Powhetan Confederacy tributaries and subject to English rule. One of the provisions of the treaty was that Native children under the age of twelve could voluntarily come to live in English households. So the colonists claimed that what they would be doing was providing these children was shelter and an education and converting them to Christianity, but in reality they were more like hostages. This provision had been built into the treaty to try to force the Native people to comply with it. Basically, we're taking your children into our homes, so you better do what we say because we have your kids. In addition to being treated as hostages, many of these Native children were also forced to work as servants. The colony's General Assembly passed a series of laws prohibiting the capture and sale of Native children as slaves starting in sixteen fifty five, but these laws were largely ignored by the colonists, and in some cases colonial administrators encouraged breaking the law. Then, in sixteen sixty the General Assembly passed a law that permitted the enslavement of Native prisoners of war, and there were also mass enslavements and retribution for attacks on colonial settlements. So if a tribe attacked a settlement and retaliation, the colonists would enslave huge numbers of people from that tribe. And, as was the case in Africa with the trans Atlantic slave trade, England's willingness to trade guns for people led to increase warfare among the native tribes, as some of them saw more prisoners of war to sell, and others just tried to keep from becoming enslaved themselves. In sixteen seventy, the General Assembly passed a new law that mandated that native prisoners of war be indentured rather than enslaved, but as had happened with the laws that prohibited enslaving native children, a lot of people just ignored this. The treatment of Africans in Virginia followed a somewhat similar trajectory from indenture to enslavement. The first Africans in Virginia are generally noted as having arrived on a ship called the White Lion in August of sixteen nineteen, although there may have been a small number of other Africans before that point. The White Lion was an English privateer and its crew had taken a group of Africans prisoner after capturing a Portuguese vessel bound for Mexico. So the crew of the White Lion traded these people for food and supplies. But it's not really clear from the historical record whether the colonists treated them as indentured or enslaved. It may have varied among all of them. They were described as twenty and odd, so a couple of dozen people chattel. Slavery was really well established in Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies by this point, but British colonies were a little slower to adopt the practice. So in sixteen nineteen, when the ship arrived in dentures were really encoded in Virginia law, but slavery was not mentioned at all. Regardless of the question of the people sold from the White Lion, there were definitely indentured Africans in Virginia in the early to mid seventeenth century, although over time more Africans started to be held in lifelong bondage and the legal status of slavery in Virginia also started shifting around sixteen forty. That year, three indentured workers who were contracted to a man named Hugh Gwin fled from where they were living into Maryland. They were captured and returned to Virginia, where all three of them were whipped. The two European men of these three were sentenced to in a sational four years of servitude, but the third man, who was an African man known as John Punch, was sentenced to servitude for the rest of his life, and that was the first incidence of the lifelong servitude of an African in Virginia's legal system. Lifetime enslavement of Africans formally became part of Virginia law in sixteen sixty one, and then in sixteen sixty two. The law also specified that quote Negro women's children to serve according to the condition of the mother, so slavery was basically passed down from mothers to their children. So Bacon's rebellion started in sixteen seventy six, at which point chattel slavery was relatively new in Virginia, especially in terms of it's having some kind of legal framework, and it was unlawful to enslave Native prisoners of war for life, but that law was often being ignored, so looking at it a little bit more broadly, in sixteen seventy six, the Colony of Virginia had a population of free people, some of whom had previously been indentured, and these free people were of multiple races and nationalities. Virginia also had a very large number of indentured workers who were also of multiple races and nationalities, and the colony had a much smaller number of enslaved people, which included enslaved Africans and enslaved Native Americans. So regardless, the vast majority of Virginia's labor was not free, and the majority of Virginia's unfree labor at this time was indentured. But all of this was changing. Another thing that was shifting was how the Europeans in this society thought of themselves in relation to everyone else. The idea that European Christians were collectively one group, that group being white people, was fairly new. It was more common for people of European descent to think of their neighbors in terms of their specific nationality or in terms of their religion. So the people living in Virginia at this time, really we're thinking of things in terms of Christians and on Christians, Native Americans and Africans were considered non Christians unless they could prove that they had been baptized. And this was also connected to how people understood slavery, because before the mid sixteen hundreds, it was only considered acceptable to hold non Christians in bondage. This was part of the core definition of slavery, and this meant that in some parts of the colony people were freed after being baptized. In sixteen sixty seven, the Virginia General Assembly passed an act specifying that baptizing an enslaved person did not free them from bondage. We should also note that non Christians didn't really include Jews at this point because there were very few Jewish people in North America aside from a very few individual people. The first known group of Jewish colonists arrived in New York as refugees from Brazil in sixteen fifty four. Yeah, later on there were definitely more specific references to Jewish people, but at this time there were so few that it was just not a big part of the law or people's social understanding to some. All of this up Bacon's rebellion united a lot of parts of the society, including free farmers and indentured workers and enslaved Africans all against a perceived Native American threat. And then they turned their attention against the colonial government. And we will get to why people were so frustrated with the government after a sponsored break. Before the break, we talked about the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans in Virginia from the earliest years of the colony up through the sixteen seventies, and now we need to rewind just a little bit to talk about how the colonial government developed, because that was a big source of frustration leading into Bacon's rebellion. At the top of the show, we talked about how the Virginia Company established the colony at Jamestown in sixteen o seven. In sixteen eighteen, the company drafted a set of instructions for newly appointed governor, Sir George Yeardley. These instructions were called the Great Charter, and they included the head right system that we talked about earlier. The Great Charter also included instructions about the colony's governance. The company decided to establish an elected body of representatives so that the colonists could have some say in the government. While the colony stayed in the company's control. These representatives were known as burgesses, and they were elected to represent each settlement. Together, the Burgesses, the Governor's Council, and the Governor formed a unicameral body that was the General Assembly that has come up a couple of times in this episode. But in spite of ongoing reforms through these decades and all these instructions that were detailed in the Great Charter, the colony still just was not thriving. The Virginia Company never managed to get out of debt, even though it was not paying the vast majority of its labor. By the sixteen twenties, critics were also raising serious questions about the company and how it was running things. So in sixteen twenty four, after a year long investigation, the Crown revoked the company's charter and took direct control of the colony, appointing a royal governor and other officials. This was a massive change for the colonists, especially because for the first several years the General Assembly had no formal recognition. The colonists were frustrated and angry over the situation, since they had gone from being at least somewhat self governing with an elected assembly to being under the control of a governor who was appointed by the monarch. The crown did eventually recognize the assembly, and then in sixteen forty three, Governor Sir William Berkeley split the Burgesses off into their own house of the government, and so this turned the colony's unicameral legislature into a bicameral one. His goal in doing this was part of a plan to try to create a stable central government for the colony. But a side effect of splitting the Burgesses into their own house was that the Burgesses, who had always been mostly it up of the colony's gentry, they became increasingly focused on their own needs and the needs of other rich colonists, so the colonies less affluent people really felt like they didn't have a voice in the government anymore. Throughout all this time, tobacco continued to be the foundation of Virginia's economy. Tobacco prices had started to drop around the sixteen twenties as exports from North America and the Caribbean flooded the British market. The Dutch also bought a lot of tobacco from Virginia, and that revenue was cut off completely during the First Anglo Dutch War, which started in sixteen fifty two. Then in sixteen sixty, Parliament passed the Navigation Acts, which required Virginia's exports to be sent through English ports on English ships. That once again up ended Virginia's tobacco trade with the Dutch Republic, since the colony could no longer sell directly to the Dutch yea. Once the war was over they had resumed that trade, and then the Navigation actiments that they could not do it anymore. And then, of course, because it was a war, we are also all the other wartime effects, including the colony being directly attacked. Also in sixteen sixty, Sir William Berkeley was appointed the Governor of Virginia for a second time. His separation of the Burgesses into their own house and the government had happened during his first term. That first term lasted from sixteen forty one to sixteen fifty two, and it largely took place during the English Civil War. Berkeley himself was a Royalist, so when that side lost the war, he naturally lost his position as governor. Not long afterward, Charles the Second was restored to the throne in sixteen sixty and Berkeley's first term as governor had gone well enough that the king restored him to the position, but the second term did not go nearly as well. In his first term, Berkeley had encouraged Virginia farmers and planters to diversify their crops so the colonial economy wouldn't be so susceptible to everything from whether to wars. Charles the second approved a formal plan to do this during Berkeley's second term, but Berkeley's attempt to carry it out just didn't go well. Taxes were increased to fund the diversification effort, which meant that planters felt like they were being taxed in order to make a change that they didn't even want to make in the first place. The diversification effort fizzled, and tobacco remained as the primary export crop, so when the Second Anglo Dutch War started in sixteen sixty five, planters incomes once again plummeted. Planters were also becoming frustrated because of some of the consequences of the head right system that we talked about earlier. The land that was granted to people under that system was not the most fertile farmable land out in the tide Water area of the colony. It was farther inland, where it was a lot rockier, the soil was not as rich. Some of it was on the other side of the fall line, which made it harder to transport goods out to the coast. And the more people moved into this territory, the more frustrated they were about this disparity between the people out on the tide Water and people in the inner coastal plane. Governor Keley was also really fond of granting some of the best land so people that he liked as rewards, and that meant that that extra good land was not available to sell to anyone else. Those earlier issues with colonists feeling like they weren't represented in the government resurfaced in sixteen seventy when the Assembly adopted legislation that restricted the right to vote only to people who owned taxable land. This disenfranchised a lot of previously eligible voters. On top of that, there hadn't been a new election for the Assembly in eight years, so only the wealthiest and most elite people in the colony felt represented in the government, since they were the ones connected to the burgesses who had been serving all that time. As if that was not enough. On top of all of this, in sixteen seventy two, Charles the Second granted all of Virginia's revenues to the Lords Arlington and Culpepper, and this led the Governor of Virginia to raise taxes again both try to offset that loss of revenue and pay for an appeal to try to get the grant reversed. All of these things that we've talked about today led to the British colonies first violent uprising among its colonists, and we were going to talk about that on our next show. I have a little bit of listener mails to close us out, and this is about our not that long ago episode on Raphael Limpkin and the Genocide Convention. It is from Nate. Nate says, Hello, Tracy and Holly. I just wanted to add a note to your episode on Raphael Limpkin and the Genocide Convention. You mentioned that Limpkins studied law at LVOV, Poland, which is now in Ukraine and called Liviv. While Limpkin was working to define genocide as a crime, the related but distinct legal concept of crimes against humanity was being developed by Hirsch louder Pact, who had studied law at the same university. The parallels between the two continued at the Nuremberg trial, where louder Part was an advisor to the British prosecutors while Limpkin was an advisor to the Americans. Both men lost relatives in the Hall a cost and at Nuremberg they came face to face with a defendant most directly responsible for these deaths, Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland. I learned this and more in a fascinating book called East West Street by Philips Sands, which I highly recommend. Keep up the good work, Nate. Thank you, Nate. I wanted to read this email for two reasons. One to include that tidbit about Loder Pact and the idea of crimes against humanity, because that did come up in my research and was not something that we really got into in the episode as much. Um One of Lincoln's sources of frustration was that it seemed like sometimes there was more focused on this idea of crimes against humanity, and he really felt like there needed to be a legal focus on the idea of genocide and on preventing and prosecuting genocide. And then I also wanted to clarify because I don't think I said that he had studied law in love Poland. I'm not sure what gave that impression. What I did say that was definitely confus using, or what I did right that was definitely confusing. I don't remember which of us said it in the actual episode. Is that um I made it sound like the University of Heidelberg and Levov which is now Lviv, was one place. Those are in fact two different universities, and limpken Uh studied at both of those universities at different times. So if anybody got the impression that there used to be a university that was called the University of Heidelberg and Liviv, that it's two different places and Liviv yes is in Ukraine now. Uh So, thank you Nate for letting me share that. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcasts, we are a history podcast at how stuff works dot com. There we're all over social media at missed in History. We are at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram as missed in History, and then you can come to our website which is missed in history dot com and find a searchable archive of all the episodes you've ever done and the show notes for the episode Holly and I have worked on together, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast i heart Radio app, but anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.