New York
RUSSELL & RUSSELL
1959
COPYRIGHT 1914 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
COPYRIGHT 1958, 1959 BY THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 39-11229
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
It was in May, 1910, that the author came to Princeton for an interviewwith President Woodrow Wilson concerning an appointment as Instructor inthe Department of History, Politics, and Economics. He was elated whenPresident Wilson engaged him, though not happy over the $1,000 salary.Yet with this sum to fall back on he borrowed $200, and took a trip toEngland.
In London he went treasure hunting, the treasure of old documentsrelating to the history of colonial Virginia. He sought out the BritishPublic Record Office, off Chauncery Lane, and was soon immersed in themass of letters, official reports, journal of the Assembly, and otherpapers.
The author was prepared to find valuable historical materials in London,for he had spent the summer of 1908 studying the William Noel Sainsburyand the McDonald abstracts and transcripts of the documents in theRecord Office deposited in the Virginia State Library. But he wasstaggered at the extent of the manuscript collection on Virginia historyalone. Among the scores of volumes are thirty-two devoted to thecorrespondence of the Board of Trade, seventeen to the correspondence ofthe Secretary of State, twenty-two to entry books, letters, commissions,warrants, etc.
When the summer waned he left for America taking with him many pages ofclosely written notes. But what he had learned served to whet hisappetite for more, so that in 1912 and again in 1914 he was back, goingover volume after volume, searching eagerly for fear some importantpoint would escape him. The mass of abstracts and notes which heaccumulated formed the basis of this volume.
In fact, any political history of Virginia in the colonial period mustbe based on the documents in the Public Record[Pg ii] Office, since most ofthe copies left in Virginia have been lost or destroyed. Today, however,colonial historians no longer have to visit London to consult them,since transcripts have been made and deposited in the Library ofCongress.
In recent years the American Council of Learned Societies has madeavailable other collections of manuscripts which have thrown new lighton early Virginia history. The most important of these are the CoventryPapers at Longleat, the residence of the Marquess of Bath. Many of theletters deal with Bacon's Rebellion, and include the correspondencebetween Berkeley and Bacon, accounts of the Indian war, complaints ofthe misgovernment of Berkeley, the account of the evacuation ofJamestown written by Berkeley, accounts of Bacon's death and thecollapse of the rebellion.
This new material adds new weight to the conclusions reached in thisbook—that the causes of Bacon's Rebellion were deep-seated, that itgrew out of the discontent caused by the Navigation Acts, the heavytaxes, the corrupting of the Assembly by Berkeley, and the misuse of thecourts. It in no way shakes the conviction expressed by Thomas Mathews,who himself was involved in the rebellion, that the Indian war was theexcuse for it rather than the cause.
Yet certain recent historians have contended that this violent uprisingwas not a protest against injustice and misgovernment. One has gone sofar as to call it merel