Episode Details

It did not begin with a manifesto or a meeting. It began with an unpaid debt and some stolen pigs — and from that squalid little quarrel on the Virginia frontier, a chain of killings unwound that no one could stop. A debt, a beating, a dead herdsman. A militia that emptied its muskets into the wrong cabin in the dark and killed fourteen of the colony's own allies. A siege, a flag of truce, and the murder of the men who came out to talk under it.

This is the episode where the pressure becomes a war. Governor William Berkeley, thirty years on the job, reads the danger better than anyone alive — and makes decision after sound decision without ever once explaining himself, until the frontier is convinced he has sold them out, taxing them for useless forts and arming the very enemy killing them. And into that silence rides Nathaniel Bacon, declaring war on "all Indians in general," burning through two allied nations, and coming home a hero. By the end he is marching on the capital with five hundred men — and the old governor, unable to raise forty, throws open the gates and waits for him inside.