"... a combustible mix of genius and insanity..." Kirkus Discoveries
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New World Burning
Daniel Watkins
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Price: $13.95
Perfect Bound | 452 pages
ISBN: 0-9768065-0-9
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Summary
Nathaniel Bacon’s War
Virginia 1676
By the year 1676 the English dominated the Virginian landscape. A lucrative fur trade was taking the place
of tobacco, and the Indians lived in peace on their protected reservations. Then came the aristocratic rebel,
Nathaniel Bacon.
An important and overlooked national story needs to be told. It involves the plight of the indentured
servants whose labor was the foundation of this country. This is an account of their demise and its role in
establishing the industry of African-American slavery.
New World Burning
Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion against the all-powerful governor of Virginia a hundred years before American
independence was surely the most dynamic little known turning point in the country’s early history. A
cast of colorful and eccentric characters participated in a conflict that embroiled the privileged plantation
society in a reign of terror. When it was over, full scores of Virginia’s aristocracy were strung from trees on
their own property representing a ‘who’s who’ among the colony’s leading families.
In the mid-1600’s, the agricultural riches of Virginia’s colony were exploding on the world market. Tobacco
was as good as money, but the fuel required to produce it required an endless supply of backbreaking labor.
The granting of land in exchange for indenture was spiraling beyond the colony’s boundaries, provoking
marauding bands of Indians who raided the encroaching farms, killing whole families of whites. The
settler’s subsequent rebellion against their self-interested government marked the actual stirrings of the
American Revolution, which was to take place a hundred years later. Excess taxes and systematic corruption
were as much on the minds of these frontier men as they were under Washington, Franklin and Jefferson,
but the rebellion’s most important feature was in providing a finishing blow to the troublesome system of
indenture. The problem of securing sufficient labor for the ever-expanding colony then fell into the hands
of The Royal African Trading Company.
Onto this rich background strides Nathaniel Bacon, a ne’er do well ruling class brat whose own father had
kicked off of their English estate. Having been caught trying to cheat a Cambridge classmate out of his
inheritance, he was banished alongside his beautiful wife, who herself was disowned for marrying Bacon
in the first place. What better place to start anew than in the wild and heathen world of Virginia? Part
philosopher, part politician, part prophet and clown, Bacon’s only constant passion was his hatred for the
governor and all things Indian. The very same qualities that endeared him to the dirt-poor frontier farmers
whose cultivation of Indian land was destroying the governor’s fur trade.
The story is told in the fictional voice of Philip Corstair, but the remarkable events and the characters that
peopled them are all true. The novel begins with Corstair recalling himself as a wide-eyed Portsmouth
youth ready for adventure in the New World. The year is 1650, and in order to save him from the English
civil wars his father signs him up for a term of indenture to the fortress at Jamestown.
Be transported while you accompany him on his harrowing passage across the Atlantic, and into the shock
of the wilderness that awaits him. He narrates the tale as a middle-age survivor of Bacon’s war while being
held captive by a tribe of Ohio Valley Indians. His fellow prisoner is the Jamestown scholar, Mr. Richard
Lawrence, one of the factual ringleaders of the revolt, who escaped Governor Berkeley’s revenge when he
disappeared without a trace.
Nathaniel Bacon led his rebel-servant army, an army made of men both black and white, burning
Jamestown to the ground and sending His Majesty’s Royal Governor running. But it was a revolution that
occurred solely because of the complex nature of its namesake. At twenty-nine years of age, and at the
peak of his New World power, Nathaniel Bacon dropped dead of swamp fever. His people’s army, suddenly
without its popular figurehead, disintegrated leaving scores of this country’s most distinguished colonial
leaders hanging in their wake.
New World Burning is a love of the land, gritty tale of colonial life, freshly imagined to its very roots and
stones.
