Episode Details

The season ends on the water. Virginia is split in two, and the war turns on a single captured ship; then Jamestown burns, Bacon dies of disease in a swamp at twenty-nine, and an old governor hangs so many men that the King himself is said to recoil. The revolution fails — and then the season comes due.

This finale answers the question it opened with: why does 1676 look so much like 1776 — the same grievances, the same arguments, the same willingness to take up arms — and why did it fall short where the later revolution would succeed? Four reasons, each necessary, none enough alone. Along the way: the shift, over a single year, in how the colonists saw the native nations — from peoples to bargain with into obstacles to remove. The governing class that had answered to no one above or below, forced at last to answer in both directions. And the darkest inheritance of all, the one the next season takes up in full: how the spectacle of armed, angry, freed men burning a capital helped push Virginia's rulers to rebuild their wealth on a people who could never rise.

The revolution failed. The argument did not. The first revolution in American history — the one that made all the others imaginable.