Episode Details

This is the scene the season has been building toward. Nathaniel Bacon comes down the James River with five hundred armed men; Governor William Berkeley, able to raise barely forty, throws open the gates of Jamestown and meets him on the steps of the statehouse — where the old governor tears open his shirt, bares his chest, and dares the rebel to shoot. Bacon wants one thing: a commission, in writing, and an assembly that will not rise until he has it.

What follows is the most dramatic confrontation in colonial American history, and the most revealing. A governor's masterstroke of a pardon. A legislature locked in its own hall with muskets leveled at the windows. A chant for the commission, and an assembly that breaks. And then — under those same guns — the freest, most democratic assembly Virginia would see for a century, tearing apart the machine of patronage and privilege one law at a time. Every man in the room is watching for the ghost of Oliver Cromwell. And in London, the king is about to learn that a man with an army has bent a colonial legislature to his will — and decide, at last, that Virginia is worth his attention.

The revolution gets everything it asked for. Then the colony splits in two, and the war begins.