n motion to
confront them wherever they shall attack us," he wrote in a report to
the English government late in March.

Berkeley stated that the forts served their purpose well. "In April
and May we lost not one man," he stated. But this Bacon and his men
denied. Even when a garrison received word that Indians were near,
they were not permitted to pursue them until they had notified the
governor, who might be fifty or sixty miles away, and received his
permission. The forts proved useless, they said, for the Indians
sneaked in between them and fell upon the outlying plantations,
burning, plundering, and killing. This it was easy to do in a country
full of "thick woods, swamps, and other covert." So, as houses went up
in flames, as men, women, and children were murdered, as miserable
captives were led off to await torture, a cry arose for relief. What
is needed, people said, is some considerable force in motion to seek
out the enemy and destroy them.

So petition after petition came to Berkeley begging him to send them a
leader. We have the arms, they said, all we ask is permission to
defend ourselves. But they met with peremptory refusal. As one group
stood before him, hat in hand, one of them spoke of themselves as his
honor's subjects. "Why you are a set of fools and loggerheads. You are
the King's subjects, and so am I," Berkeley blurted out. "A pox take
you."

The frontier planters were in despair. Many deserted their homes and
fled to the more settled parts of the country. Some declared they
would plant no more tobacco, since it would be taken from them to pay
for the useless forts. And they were deeply angered when it was
reported to them that Berkeley had said that if they had no tobacco,
"they had cows and feather beds sufficient to discharge their levies."
At last, "the cries of their women and children growing grievous and
intolerable to them," and hearing that large bodies of Indians were
encamped on the upper James ready to descend on them, the people of
Charles City County assembled in arms near Merchants Hope.

They found their leader in Nathaniel Bacon. Bacon, despite his youth,
was looked up to as one of the Council, and a member of the English
gentry. Not only did he sympathize with the people in their fear and
hatred of the Indians, but he had a personal grievance, since they
had plundered his outer plantation and killed his overseer. So when
several of his neighbors urged him to cross the James