Bacon's Rebelion and Court Reform

Program Information
Transcript
Virginia Standards

Program Information

Program: Judicial Independence in the New World
Segment Number: 6 (Watch entire program)
Duration: 00:05:04
Year Produced: 2009
Description:

There was a mini-revolution in Virginia in called Bacon’s Rebellion. The short-lived rebellion collapsed when Bacon died by the end of 1676.

The court system is an ever-changing and evolving entity, and there are key moments of history when Virginia's people and its judicial system made everlasting impressions on the country. JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE IN THE NEW WORLD tells the story of the development of the court system in the early years of our nation's history. Historians take us back to the Court Days and Pre-Revolution and Post-Revolution periods to explain the rule of law and the basics of the court system we know today.

For more information visit: http://www.ideastations.org

Transcript

Pagan:
There was a mini-revolution in Virginia in 1676 called Bacon’s Rebellion. A young man recently arrived in the colony named Nathanial Bacon, he had a large following. And the reason he had a large following was there were many landless young men who felt frustrated by a government that was dominated by self-interested leaders. And so the people who ran the government were lining their own pockets at the expense of the poor and there was this uprising.

Narration:
Bacon first led his army against the Native Americans. Then, in search of Governor Berkeley, Bacon and his army marched to Jamestown and burned down the capital. The short-lived rebellion collapsed when Bacon died by the end of 1676.

Pagan:
The last thing the crown wanted was a civil war in its revenue-producing colony of Virginia.

By this point, the 1670s, Virginia is producing more revenue for the crown than any other possession of the crown. And so, it was very important to calm the situation down and put people back to work.

Billings:
One of the consequences of Bacon’s Rebellion, for the judiciary as for other parts of Virginia’s governance is that the crown took a more activist approach to managing Virginia than at any time since it had intervened with the dissolution of the Virginia Company. And it sent over people like the royal commission who went over to investigate the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion. And they came to realize that there were numerous practices at the general assembly that were not consonant with Parliament.

Let’s say that you were a planter. And I owed you a sum of money which I for one reason or another I didn’t pay you. You took me to court at the county court. And you got a judgment in your behalf but I still didn’t pay you, or you didn’t think it was enough. You could appeal that case to the General Court—the governor and the council. And let’s say that as a result of taking the case to the General Court the result still wasn’t to your liking. You had one last avenue of appeal in Virginia, which was to take it to the General Assembly. It was counter to practice in England. It resulted in the General Assembly losing the right to act as a court of last resort in civil matters, a power that it had arrogated to itself probably as early as the 1620s or 30s.

Pagan:
In England you have a whole series of courts. You have a separate system of church courts to deal with wills and to deal with moral offenses: adultery, fornication, blasphemy, swearing and so forth. You have a separate admiralty court to deal with maritime matters. You have three common law courts to deal with what we would call today torts and contracts and property disputes. The king’s chancellor has a court. You have a set of prerogative courts. And then, at the local level, the justices of the peace had an administrative jurisdiction and they had a criminal jurisdiction, and they held a court called “Quarter Sessions.” In Virginia, all of those were rolled into one.

MOS:
We have to have someone who is new to it. Someone who’s going to hopefully not represent himself, not his ideas, but what he hears the ideas from others and make a decision based on the people. And I think that we do have a good judicial system that do base it on the people. We had to, we had to go through a lot of major changes, as you know, but it, in time, things changes and so do our judicial system.

MOS3:
It allows us to have a jury by trial or you can have a jury by, by bench. Take it to the box, you know. So, a person has that opportunity to be able to be cross-examined, to be able to prove if somebody padded the paper upon them. To be able to speak their rights.

MOS2:
I don’t, I guess, laugh at all the lawyer jokes that people tell because I have people close to me that are lawyers. You know, I think they have a difficult job. I think it’s, would behoove them to, you know, you know, I guess have the integrity that the public expects them to have. And when there’s a breech in integrity of one individual it affects the whole, exponentially.

Virginia Standards