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The spark that set off the great rebellion of 1676 came from the tinderbox of Indian relations. To explain them we must first go back to chart the history of Indian-white relations in 17th-century Virginia. First, we may ask, how did the colonists go about the task urged upon them by King James, of bringing “the infidels and savages living in

[ Man, Economy, and State (1962)] All action involves the employment of scarce means to attain the most valued ends. Man has the choice of using the scarce means for various alternative ends, and the ends that he chooses are the ones he values most highly. The less urgent wants are those that remain unsatisfied. Actors can be interpreted as

C onceived in Liberty (1975). In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon began a mutiny against the governor of Virginia, William Berkeley, because Bacon (and many other Virginians) wanted to pursue a more vigorous war against the Indians than Berkeley would allow. This mutiny was the spark that lit the flame of Bacon’s Rebellion. Why? Why revolution? This question

[This article is based on the talk given at the Mises Institute’s Costs of War conference in Atlanta, May 1994. It was published in the book of the same name , edited by John V. Denson.]   Much of “classical international law” theory, developed by the Catholic Scholastics, notably the 16th-century Spanish Scholastics such as Vitoria and Suarez,

[ Conceived in Liberty (1975)] Religion was one of the principal traits distinguishing the Northern from the Southern colonies. In the South the state-established Church of England tended to be dominant, but the Northern colonies were largely settled by members of churches dissenting from the established church. These Dissenters came to America

[ Conceived in Liberty (1975)] The Pilgrims formed a partnership in a joint-stock company with a group of London merchants, including Thomas Weston, an ironmonger, and John Peirce, a cloth maker. The company, John Peirce and Associates, received in 1620 a grant from the Virginia Company for a particular plantation in Virginia territory. In this

Religious exclusiveness in a colony necessarily hampers its growth; we have seen that Lord Baltimore soon abandoned the idea of Maryland as an exclusively Catholic colony in order to encourage its rapid development. Thus, persecution of non-Separatists for playing ball on Sunday and for daring to observe Christmas as a holiday was hardly

[ Conceived in Liberty (1975)]   At the beginning of the 17th century, virtually all of England’s export trade consisted of unfinished woolen cloths, which were sent to the Netherlands for finishing and dyeing and to be reexported to the north for grain. In the decade following the conclusion of peace with Spain in 1604, the woolen trade, and

[ Conceived in Liberty (1975)] Perhaps the bluntest expression of the Puritan ideal of theocracy was the Rev. Nathaniel Ward’s The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America (1647). Returning to England to take part in the Puritan ferment there, this Massachusetts divine was horrified to find the English Puritans too soft and tolerant, too willing to

[ Conceived in Liberty (1975), chapter 21, “Suppressing Heresy: The Flight of Roger Williams.” An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Floy Lilley, is available for download .]   “The Puritans in leaving England,” the historian Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker wrote, “fled not so much from persecution as from error.” It was to build a rigorous