The Story of Bacon's Rebellion Part 5

"The Indians we bear along with us shall be as so many motives to cause relief from every hand to be brought to you. The ignominy of their actions cannot but so reflect upon their spirits as they will have no courage left to fight you. I know you have the prayers and well wishes of all the people of Virginia, while the others are loaded with their curses."

As if "animated with new courage," the bit of an army marched onward toward Jamestown, with speed "out-stripping the swift wings of fame,"

for love and faith lightened their steps. The only stop was in New Kent County, where, halting long enough to gain some new troops, their number was increased to three hundred. Weak and weary, ragged and soiled as was the little army, the home-coming was a veritable triumphal progress. The dwellers along the way came out of their houses praying aloud for the happiness of the people's champion, and railing against the Governor and his party. Seeing the Indian captives whom Bacon's men led along, they shouted their thanks for his care and his pains for their preservation, and brought forth fruits and bread for the refreshment of himself and his soldiers. Women cried out that if need be they would come and serve under him. His young wife proudly wrote a friend in England: "You never knew any better beloved than he is. I do verily believe that rather than he should come to any hurt by the Governor or anybody else, they would most of them lose their lives."

Rumors of the Governor's warlike preparations for his coming were received by Bacon with a coolness bound to inspire those under him with confidence in his and their own strength. Hearing that Sir William had with him in Jamestown a thousand men, "well armed and resolute," he nonchalantly made answer that he would soon see how resolute they were, for he was going to try them. When told that the Governor had sent out a party of sixty mounted scouts to watch his movements, he said, with a smile, that they were welcome to come near enough to say "How d'ye," for he feared them not.

Toward evening upon September 13, after a march of between thirty and forty miles since daybreak, the army reached "Green Spring," Sir William Berkeley's own fair estate near Jamestown--the home which had been the centre of so much that was distinguished and charming in the social life of the colony during the Cavalier days. In a green field here Bacon again gathered his men around him for a final word to them before marching upon the capital. In a ringing appeal he told them that if they would ever fight they would do so now, against all the odds that confronted them--the enemy having every advantage of position, places of retreat, and men fresh and unwearied, while they were "so few, weak, and tired."

"But I speak not this to discourage you," he added, "but to acquaint you with what advantages they will neglect and lose." He a.s.sured them that their enemies had not the courage to maintain the charges so boldly made that they were rebels and traitors.

"Come on, my hearts of gold!" he cried. "He that dies in the field, lies in the bed of honor!"

With these words the Rebel once more moved onward, and drew up his "small tired body of men" in an old Indian field just outside of Jamestown. He promptly announced his presence there in the dramatic and picturesque fas.h.i.+on that belonged to the time. Riding forward upon the "Sandy Beach"--a narrow neck of land which then connected the town with the mainland, but has since been washed away, making Jamestown an island--he commanded a trumpet-blast to be sounded, and fired off his carbine. From out the stillness of the night the salute was heard, and immediately, and with all due ceremony, answered by a trumpeter within the town. These martial greetings exchanged, Bacon dismounted from his horse, surveyed the situation and ordered an earthwork to be cast up across the neck of land, thus cutting off all communication between the capital and the rest of the colony except by water. Two axes and two spades were all the tools at the Rebel's command, but all night long his faithful men worked like beavers beneath the bright September moon.

Trees came cras.h.i.+ng down, bushes were cut and earth heaped up, and before daybreak the fortification was complete and the besiegers were ready for battle.

When Sir William Berkeley looked abroad next morning and found the gateway between town and country so hostilely barred he did not suffer his complacency to forsake him for a moment, for he at once resolved to try his old trick, in which he had perfect confidence, of seeking to disarm the enemy by an affectation of friends.h.i.+p. He could not believe that Bacon would have the hardihood to open war with such a pitiful force against his Majesty's representative, and pretending to desire a reconciliation with the Rebel on account of his service against the Indians, he ordered his men not to make attack.

XII.

JAMESTOWN BESIEGED AND BURNED.

But Sir William Berkeley had played his favorite trick at least twice too often. Moreover, he little knew of what stern stuff Bacon and his handful of ragam.u.f.fins were made, though they were far too well acquainted with the silver-haired old Cavalier's ways and wiles to pin any faith to the fair words that could so glibly slip off of his tongue and out of his memory.

Early that morning the beginning of the siege was formally announced by six of Bacon's soldiers, who ran up to the palisades of the town fort, "fired briskly upon the guard," and retreated safely within their own earthwork. The fight now began in earnest. Upon a signal from within the town the Governor's fleet in the river shot off their "great guns,"

while at the same time the guard in the palisades let fly their small shot. Though thus a.s.sailed from two sides at once, the rebels lying under their earthwork were entirely protected from both, and safe in their little fortress, returned the fire as fast as it was given. Even under fire, Bacon, the resourceful, strengthened and enlarged his fort by having a party of his soldiers to bind f.a.gots into bundles, which they held before themselves for protection while they made them fast along the top and at the ends of the earthwork.

A sentinel from the top of a chimney upon Colonel Moryson's plantation, hard by Jamestown, watched Berkeley's maneuvers all day, and constantly reported to Bacon how the men in town "posted and reposted, drew on and off, what number they were and how they moved."

For three days the cross-firing continued, during which the besiegers were so well s.h.i.+elded that they do not seem to have lost a single man.

Upon the third day the Governor decided to make a sally upon the rebels.

It is written that when he gave the order for the attack some of his officers made such "crabbed faces" that the "gunner of York Fort," who, it seems, was humorously inclined, offered too buy a colonel's or a captain's commission for whomsoever would have one for "a chunk of a pipe."

It is also written that the Governor's Accomac soldiers "went out with heavy hearts, but returned with light heels," for the Baconians received them so warmly that they retired in great disorder, throwing down their arms and leaving them and their drum on the field behind them, with the dead bodies of two of their comrades, which the rebels took into their trenches and buried with their arms.

This taste of success made the besiegers so bold and daring that Bacon could hardly keep them from attempting to storm and capture Jamestown forthwith; but he warned them against being over rash, saying that he expected to take the town without loss of a man, in due season, and that one of their lives was worth more to him than the whole world.

Upon the day after the sally some of Bacon's Indian captives were exhibited on top of the earthworks, and this primitive bit of bravado served as an object-lesson to quicken the enthusiasm of the neighborhood folk, who were coming over to the Rebel in great numbers.

News was brought that "great mult.i.tudes" were also declaring for the popular cause in Nansemond and Isle of Wight Counties, "as also all the south side of the river."

Bacon sent a letter from camp to two of his sea-faring friends, Captain William Cookson and Captain Edward Skewon, describing the progress of the siege and urging them to protect the "Upper parts of the country"

against pirates, and to bid his friends in those parts "be courageous, for that all the country is bravely resolute."

In the midst of the siege Bacon resorted to one measure which for pure originality has not been surpa.s.sed in the history of military tactics, and which, though up to the present writing no other general sufficiently picturesque in his methods to imitate it has arisen, has furnished much "copy" for writers of historical romances.

The Rebel had the good fortune to capture two pieces of artillery, but a dilemma arose as to how he should mount them without endangering the lives of some of his men. His ingenious brain was quick to solve the riddle. Dispatching some of his officers to the plantations near Jamestown, he had them to bring into his camp Madam Bacon (the wife of his cousin Nathaniel Bacon, Sr., President of the Council), Madam Bray, Madam Page, Madam Ballard, and other ladies of the households of members of his Majesty's Council who had remained loyal to the Governor. He then sent one of these fair ones, under escort, into Jamestown, to let her husband and the husbands of her companions know with what delicate and precious material their audacious foe was strengthening his fort, and to give them fair warning not to shoot. The remaining ladies (alas for the age of chivalry!) he stationed in front of his breastworks and kept them there until the captured "great guns" had been duly mounted; after which he sent them all safely home.

Most truly was it said that Bacon "knit more knots by his own head in one day than all the hands in town were able to untie in a whole week!"

So effectual a fortification did the glimmer of a few fluttering white ap.r.o.ns upon his breastworks prove to be, that, as though confronted by a line of warriors from Ghostland, the Governor's soldiers stood aghast, and powerless to level a gun, while to add still further to their discomfiture they had to bear with what grace they could command having their ladies dubbed the "guardian angels" of the rebel camp.

The cannon mounted under such gentle protection were never given a chance to prove their service.

Jamestown stood upon low ground, full of marshes and swamps. The climate, at all times malarious and unhealthy, was at this season made more so than usual by the hot September suns. There were no fresh water springs, and the water from the wells was brackish and unwholesome, making the place especially "improper for the commencement of a siege."

While the Governor had the advantage of numbers, and his men were fresh and unwearied, Bacon had the greater advantage of motive. Sir William Berkeley's soldiers were bent upon plunder, and when they found that the Rebel's determined "hearts of gold" meant to keep them blocked up in such comfortless quarters, and that the prospects were that there was nothing to be gained in Sir William's service, they began to fall away from him in such numbers that, upon the day after the placing of Bacon's great guns, the old man found that there was nothing left for him but a second flight. That night he, with the gentlemen who remained true to him--about twenty in all--stole out of their stronghold in great secrecy, and taking to the s.h.i.+ps, "fell silently down the river." The fleet came to anchor a few miles away, perhaps that those on board might reoccupy the town again as soon as the siege should be raised, perhaps that they might, in turn, block up the rebels in it if they should quarter there.

Bacon found a way to thwart either design.

The first rays of morning light brought knowledge to the rebels that the Governor had fled, and that they were free to take possession of the deserted capital. That night, as Berkeley and his friends rocked on the river below, doubtless straining eyes and ears toward Jamestown, and eagerly awaiting news of Bacon's doings there, the sickening sight of jets of flame leaping skyward through the darkness told them in signals all too plain that the hospitable little city would shelter them nevermore.

Filled with horror, they weighed anchor and sailed with as great speed as the winds would vouchsafe to bear them out of James River and across the Chesapeake's broad waters, where Governor Berkeley found, for a second time, a haven of refuge upon the sh.o.r.es of Accomac County.

This great city of Jamestown, which though insignificant in number of inhabitants and in the area it covered, was a truly great city, for its achievements had been great, was thus laid low at the very height of its modest magnificence and power. Though but little more than a half century old, it was already historic Jamestown, for with its foundations had been laid, in the virgin soil of a new world, the foundations of the Anglo-Saxon home, the Anglo-Saxon religion, and Anglo-Saxon law. This town, so small in size, so great in import, could proudly boast of a brick church, "faire and large," twelve new brick houses and half a dozen frame ones, with brick chimneys. There was also a brick state house the foundations of which have lately been discovered.

The inhabitants are facetiously described by a writer of the time as for the most part "getting their livings by keeping ordinaries at _extra_-ordinary rates."

"Thoughtful Mr. Lawrence"--devoted Mr. Lawrence (whose silver plate the Governor had not forgotten to carry off with him, for all his leave-taking was so abrupt)--and Mr. Drummond heroically began the work of ruin by setting the torch to their own substantial dwellings. The soldiers were quick to follow this example, and soon all that remained of Jamestown was a memory, a heap of ashes, and a smoke-stained church tower, which still reaches heavenward and tells the wayfarer how the most enduring pile the builders of that first little capital of Virginia had heaped up was a Christian temple.

Mr. Drummond (to his honor be it said) rushed into the burning State House and rescued the official records of the colony.

In a letter written the following February Sir William Berkeley said that Bacon entered Jamestown and "burned five houses of mine and twenty of other gentlemen's, and a very commodious church. They say he set to with his own sacrilegious hand."

XIII.

"THE PROSPEROUS REBEL."

The firebrand's uncanny work complete, Bacon marched his men back to "Green Spring" and quartered them there. That commodious plantation, noted among other things for its variety of fruits and its delightful spring water, must have been a welcome change from the trenches before Jamestown, haunted by malaria and mosquitoes.

Comfortably established in Sir William Berkeley's own house, the Rebel's next step was to draw up an oath of fidelity to the people's cause, denouncing Sir William as a traitor and an enemy to the public good, and again binding his followers to resist any forces that might be sent from England until such time as his Majesty should "fully understand the miserable case of the country, and the justice of our proceedings," and if they should find themselves no longer strong enough to defend their "lives and liberties," to quit the colony rather than submit to "any such miserable a slavery" as they had been undergoing.

Though the "prosperous rebel," as the Royal Commissioners call Bacon, had now everything his own way, his hour of triumph was marked by dignity and moderation. Even those who opposed him bore witness that he "was not bloodily inclined in the whole progress of this rebellion." He had only one man--a deserter--executed, and even in that case he declared that he would spare the victim if any single one of his soldiers would speak a word to save him. The Royal Commissioners, who had made a careful study of Bacon's character, expressed the belief that he at last had the poor fellow's life taken, not from cruelty, but as a wholesome object-lesson for his army.

He suggested an exchange of prisoners of war to Berkeley--offering the Reverend John Clough (minister at Jamestown), Captain Thomas Hawkins, and Major John West, in return for Captain Carver (of whose execution, it seems, he had not heard), Bland, and Farloe. Governor Berkeley scorned to consider the proposition, and instead of releasing the gentlemen asked for, afterward sent the remaining two after the luckless Captain Carver, although Bacon spared the lives of all those he had offered in exchange, and though Mr. Bland's friends in England had procured the King's pardon for him, which he pleaded at his trial was even then in the Governor's pocket.

Though Bacon himself was never accused of putting any one to death in cold blood, or of plundering any house, he found that the people began to complain bitterly of the depredations, rudeness, and disorder of his men. He therefore set a strict discipline over his army and became more moderate than ever himself.

After a few days' rest at "Green Spring" the Rebel marched on to Tindall's Point, Gloucester County, where he made the home of Colonel Augustine Warner, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, his headquarters.

From there he sent out a notice to all the people of the county to meet him at the court-house for the purpose of taking his oath.