Bacon's Rebellion: My Pitch

A drama about an interracial uprising in colonial Virginia

A new, occasional feature of HOGELAND’S BAD HISTORY: “My Pitch.”

Here I literally pitch little-known events from the American past—to be adapted as plotted dramas.

Not docudramas. Also not biopics. I want to reimagine rich ensemble events as fiction and narrative-nonfiction books, as feature films, as standalone or limited TV series, and as any or all of the above, and I hope you’ll get something out of imagining them that way too. While you may learn certain historical facts from “My Pitch,” if you didn’t know them already, the real idea is to get at some ways of bringing overlooked characters—and types of characters—out of the shadows, bring difficult truths to exciting life, and consider the uses and abuses of fictionalizing. To envision some degree of tough realism. Yet to keep things fun and gripping and avoid resorting to lame narrative tricks that readers and viewers really should be totally sick of by now.

And not to get too deep in the weeds—not here, anyway. Because this isn’t the thing itself. This is My Pitch!

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Pitch #1: Bacon’s Rebellion

Too good to be true, but true. A group of enslaved African men, women, and children, brought to tidewater Virginia to labor in the tobacco fields, work side by side with a group of white men, women, and children, some indentured, some transported convicts. Despite their differing levels of bondage and mutual mistrust, the black and white workers find common cause and plot a joint uprising for freedom.

Having stockpiled weapons and made tactical plans, the interracial rebels take advantage of conflicts among the colony’s elites and make their move. They attack the necrotic colonial government; burn the capital at Jamestown; and shock royal bureaucrats in London into sending a man o’ war across the ocean to suppress this first American revolution. Personal, political, racial, gender, and class tensions develop on every side, as idiosyncratic characters, of all classes, take actions mounting to a violent climax in a very strange American world.

Too good to be true? Here’s a twist. These allied unfree laborers are led in rebellion by a mercurial, narcissistic Virginia planter (Bacon). He is not to be our main character—he’s the one with power to fund the uprising. And he’s a big problem. Behind Bacon, the rebels attack not only the colonial governor but also the Susquehannocks and Occaneechee  and other indigenous people whom planters like Bacon want to get rid of.

Your heart may already have sunk. Black and white laborers attacking indigenous towns? Even taking part in a massacre of the Occaneechee? But this twist is part of what would make the story a drama, as revealed in the brief character sketches, arcs, and plot elements very roughly sketched below.

Selected Characters:

Suah. West African, enslaved, recently sold into Virginia straight from the Caribbean killing fields. Having already suffered physical and mental horrors, including losing his family, and possessed of serious leadership skills, he’s eager to carry out an uprising of the enslaved, and so he could be the main character, but this is an ensemble piece.

Martha. English—London slums, specifically—transported to Virginia for hard labor, with her small child, having been convicted of prostitution. She’s faced down the many brutal abuses and total absence of justice for poor women in her world, and if this weren’t an ensemble piece, she too could be the main character .

Morgan. Welsh, a former soldier of the army of Oliver Cromwell. Once he believed Cromwell’s revolution would bring a democratic utopia to Britain. Now he’s an embittered indentured laborer in the Restoration of the crown—and he’s the white dude, so with all of that going for him, he’d normally be the main character, but normal is not what we’re doing here.

(Those three characters, oppressed at differing levels and in differing ways, despise each other. While it’s true that ultimately they’ll have no choice but to join forces in rebellion, along with the others who are like them—because that’s the story, that’s what happened in Virginia, and that’s the uplift!—the “no choice” thing is the dramatic driver. And that will take plot.)

More Characters:

[Not-yet-named leaders and families of the Occaneechee TK.]  

Wait, what’s going on here? Who are these people?

Most of you don’t know. And neither do I.

What’s a good Occaneechee character name, even? I bet I could quick-fake an answer to that question, via the Internet, and paper over this hole in the pitch, but part of this project is to restore liveliness, in an imaginative dramatic form, to a whole erased past, and that can’t be done by pretending to know what we don’t know. No choice here but to start from scratch—just as with the first three characters—by consulting scholarship and reading a lot, but lest we kid ourselves, we’re starting far deeper into the scratch here than with the others. And this confrontation should affect how the whole story is explored.

Some things to begin working with: women played a strong role in political decisions, sometimes pushing male fighters toward greater aggression; the Occaneechee were in tense, shifting political, business, and military relationships with the more powerful Susquehannock; relationships between various white and indigenous peoples had in no way yet been set in stone; some of the indigenous had already adopted many European ways, even while some fought Europeans and others aided them, and sides kept changing. Also: the interracial rebels will ally with the Occaneechee before turning on them.

So if the goal is to truly triangulate this story —Africans, Europeans, North Americans—while upending stereotypes, and if those stereotypes, especially regarding the original inhabitants of Virginia, are all that most of us have stuck in our waterlogged culture brains, we need knowledge, of course, but we also need imagination and risk. And the imagination and risk taken with these characters has to flow back to how African and European characters are handled too.

That’s a big creative opportunity. I worked with it a bit in Autumn of the Black Snake, and there's more to do. Not all of it can be done by me, however (more on that in the notes below).

As to the personalities—the character relationships, where the story is really told—it’s easy to assume that these as yet unnamed indigenous characters must despise all of the named characters above, and despise the groups they represent, but maybe the negotiated relationships are more complicated than that. Maybe attitudes will, again, have to shift and change, as a result of actions that leave few choices. That's called, again, plot.

Bacon. The rebellion’s named for him, so he’s a secondary character to us (our main characters, with “agency,” as they say, are the black and white laborers and the indigenous), and though he leads the rebellion—hey, he’s got the money, the organization, the laborers—he’s something of an antagonist to our protagonists: terminally unreliable, self-promoting, more interested in attacking the colonial governor, killing local tribes, and causing general turmoil than in freeing the enslaved and indentured. Kind of a too-handsome, proto-Romantic type, far from home, maybe going a bit Kurtz-y? That’s why he’s a secondary character, and an antagonist: he’s too on-the-nose antihero for these post-Tony times. Also, he’s real, while everyone sketched above is fictional. So he’ll need to be fictionalized too, for balance (which I’m already beginning to do in this sketch).

Pepys. Also real, so also in need of appropriate fictionalizing. He’s famous to literary types today as a vivid social diarist of the period, but he was really Secretary of the Royal Navy. He has to organize the military response to a rebellion an ocean away, in what seemed to him the howling wilderness of Virginia. And he’s funny.

Others. In building a “no choice” plot and sub-plot(s), a range of related characters will pursue compelling relationships with our three main characters, and with one another:

— There are kids, for one thing, in the black, white, and indigenous worlds of Virginia: some at hard labor, others learning to be adults in rapidly changing Occaneechee ways, still others plantation brats in what was a pretty rough, unsophisticated, yet showy scene.

— In Bacon’s world are his wife Elizabeth, whose father, a peer of England, disinherited her when she married Bacon. Also the power couple of second-generation Virginia plantation enslavers: Governor Barkley, formerly a playwright and courtier and now in a deep decline; and his much richer, much younger, and much more politically astute wife, Frances, who will become a major tactician in trying to fend off the rebels (a lot of this is true!).

— In Pepys’s world—around Whitehall and the palaces and the coffee houses—are the poet Dryden and the recently and shakily restored Charles II. In the Occaneechee world, there are Susquehannock diplomats, among others. On board the man o’ war are soldiers and sailors, some of them impressed and all of them under brutal Btitish military discipline.

Notes on Plot, etc.:

-- Let’s face it. To be exciting, this story ultimately has to bring together, via the plots and sub-plots, Suah, Martha, Morgan, and one or more of the as-yet unnamed indigenous characters, in a counterintuitive alliance that puts them at dangerous odds with the colonial elites, with the British military, and even with their own various peoples as the rebellion degenerates into slaughter and the British sail up the James River and start throwing shells. (Spoiler: Bacon's Rebellion fails, as such.) Deals of convenience, tough negotiations, unexpected connections, new chances. It’s drama, after all.

-- But if that’s the climax we have to get to, the whole tenor of the characters’ relationships must lie in resistance to that climax. This is one of those stories where, as a viewer, you’re OK that it’s going where it inevitably has to go, and you’re enjoying the unusual ways in which it has to get there.

-- Trenchant, sometimes nasty dialogue among all characters and the types they represent. Cool challenges involved in finding a vocabulary that will embrace all types.

-- Why is Morgan’s background, above, so (comparatively) specific? Because I’ve done a bunch of reading about that background, and far less reading about West African people, the slave trade, poor women in Cromwellian/Restoration London, etc. Also, crucially, because I’m a white man like him. So one reason this idea now feels more like a show than a novel is that novels ideally have a single author, and I don’t have the knowledge, imagination, chops, to get some of these characters on my own. The project wants a more diversely experienced team.

-- In that context, I’ve considered the idea that Morgan is gay. Not to check a diversity/sensitivity box: there were of course gay men in colonial Virginia—not out—and why don’t we ever see them, and their struggles, even at this long range? It does get kind of twee to recoil from having a straight white man be a major character: most of the unfree white laboring class colonial Virginia were of course straight white men (though I’d like to obstruct expectations of romance between Morgan and Martha).

But maybe there’s a different gay character instead—maybe it’s Martha, or maybe another woman, or maybe it’s a man, or maybe there are more than one—who got transported (instead of getting hanged) for the crime of homosexuality—and whom Morgan (straight, in this version) just can’t deal with at all. More expertise than I have is required here, too.

-- Historians reading this may be thinking: “Man, a lot of this is not accurate.” That’s right. I even already know some of the inaccurate parts. Historians will have to be brought in as consultants, and they will have to be willing to be deeply, deeply disappointed in the results.

-- That gets, finally, to models for mood, detail, world-building, pace, etc. Of TV set in the past, I liked many aspects of “The Crown,” “Deadwood,” “Rome,” “Judas and the Black Messiah,” and “Berlin Babylon.” Also a fan of ways in which the features “Ride with the Devil” and “Dolemite Is My Name,” just for two widely varying examples, re-create period and period speech. On stage, I have recently-ish enjoyed “Shuffle Along,” “An Octoroon,” and “Kings of War.” Make what you will of that highly selective list.

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Got a bunch of plot and sub-plot ideas and characters further developed for this story—and so far it has no title—but for now, that’s My Pitch!

(copyright 2021 William Hogeland)