Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677) was an uprising in the Virginia colony that its participants experienced as both a civil breakdown and a period of intense cosmic disorder. Although Thomas Hobbes had introduced his theory of state sovereignty a quarter century earlier, the secularizing connotations of his highly naturalized conceptualization of power had yet to make major inroads on a post-Reformation culture that was only gradually shifting from Renaissance providentialism to Enlightenment rationalism. Instead, the period witnessed a complicated interplay of providential beliefs and Hobbist doctrines. In the aftermath of the English civil war (1642–1651), this mingling of ideologies had prompted the Puritans’ own experimentation with Hobbes’s ideas, often in tandem with a Platonic spiritualism that was quite at odds with Hobbes’s own philosophical skepticism. The Restoration of 1660 had given an additional boost to Hobbism as his ideas won a number of prominent adherents in Charles II’s government.
The intermingling of providentialism and Hobbism gave Bacon’s Rebellion its particular aura of heightened drama and frightening uncertainty. In the months before the uprising, the outbreak of a war on the colony’s frontier with the Doeg and Susquehannock peoples elicited fears in the frontier counties of a momentous showdown between faithful planters and God’s enemies. In contrast, Governor Sir William Berkeley’s establishmentarian Protestantism encouraged him to see the frontiersmen’s vigilantism as impious, and the government’s more measured response to the conflict as inherently godlier because tied to time-tested hierarchies and institutions. Greatly complicating this already confusing scene, the colony also confronted a further destabilizing force in the form of the new Hobbist politics emerging from the other side of the ocean. In addition to a number of alarming policies emanating from Charles II’s court in the 1670s that sought to enhance the English state’s supremacy over the colonies, Hobbes’s doctrines also informed the young Nathaniel Bacon Jr.’s stated rationale for leading frontiersmen against local Indian communities without Berkeley’s authorization. Drawing on the Hobbes-influenced civil war-era writings of his relation the Presbyterian lawyer Nathaniel Bacon, the younger Bacon made the protection of the colony’s Christian brotherhood a moral priority that outweighed even the preservation of existing civil relations and public institutions.
While Berkeley’s antagonism toward this Hobbesian argument led him to lash out forcibly against Bacon as a singularly great threat to Virginia’s commonwealth, it was ordinary Virginians who most consequentially resisted Bacon’s strange doctrines. Yet a division persisted. Whereas the interior counties firmly rejected Bacon’s Hobbism in favor of the colony’s more traditional bonds to God and king, the frontier counties remained more open to a Hobbesian politics that promised their protection.
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Perla M. Guerrero
Latinas/os were present in the American South long before the founding of the United States of America, yet knowledge about their southern communities in different places and time periods is deeply uneven. In fact, regional themes important throughout the South clarify the dynamics that shaped Latinas/os’ lives, especially race, ethnicity, and the colorline; work and labor; and migration and immigration. Ideas about racial difference, in particular, reflected specifics of place, and intersections of local, regional, and international endeavors and movements of people and resources. Accordingly, Latinas/os’ position and treatment varied across the South. They first worked in agricultural fields picking cotton, oranges, and harvesting tobacco, then in a variety of industries, especially poultry and swine processing and packing. The late 20th century saw the rapid growth of Latinas/os in southern states due to changing migration and immigration patterns that moved from traditional states of reception to new destinations in rural, suburban, and urban locales with limited histories with Latinas/os or with substantial numbers of immigrants in general.
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Charles Postel
American Populism of the 1880s and 1890s marked the political high-water mark of the social movements of farmers, wage earners, women, and other sectors of society in the years after the Civil War. These movements forged the People’s Party, also known as the Populist Party, which campaigned against corporate power and economic inequality and was one of the most successful third parties in US history. Populist candidates won gubernatorial elections in nine states and gained some forty-five seats in the US Congress, including six seats in the Senate, and in 1892 the Populist presidential candidate, James B. Weaver of Iowa, received over a million votes, more than 8 percent of the total. The Populist Party was not a conventional political party but a coalition of organizations, including the Farmers’ Alliances, the Knights of Labor, and other reform movements, in what the Populists described as a “congress of industrial orders.” These organizations gave the People’s Party its strength and shaped its character as a party of working people with a vision of egalitarian cooperation and solidarity comparable to the labor, farmer-labor, and social-democratic parties in Europe and elsewhere that took shape in the same decades. Despite their egalitarian claims, however, the Populists had at best a mixed attitude towards the struggles for racial equality, and at worst accommodated Indian dispossession, Chinese exclusion, and Jim Crow segregation. In terms of its legacy, veterans of the Populist movement and many of its policy proposals would shape progressive and labor-farmer politics deep into the 20th century, partly by way of the Socialist Party, but mainly by way of the progressive or liberal wings of the Democratic and Republican Parties. At the same time, the adjective “populist” has come to describe a wide variety of political phenomena, including right-wing and nationalist movements, that have no particular connection to the late 19th-century Populism.
