Episode Details

One hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, a Virginia planter named Nathaniel Bacon led an armed revolt against the colonial government — and the grievances he carried read like a first draft of 1776. Taxation without consent. Corrupt officials. A governing class that protected its own wealth and left the common man to fend for himself on a burning frontier.

This is the opening of the season: the world that made the rebellion inevitable. A tobacco colony where six men in seven were poor, indebted, and armed — Governor William Berkeley's own words. A closed loop of courts, taxes, and patronage that moved wealth upward and trapped everyone else. A frontier of freed servants pushed onto contested land, carrying the memory of the 1622 massacre and watching New England burn in King Philip's War. And two men on a collision course: an old governor who had built Virginia over thirty years, and his own kinsman, two years off the boat, willing to point at him and say he is the problem.

America's first revolution. The one that made all the others imaginable — and the one whose failure taught the lesson 1776 would need.