Book review: The Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia

Click on the DOI link to access the article (may not be free).In The Divided Dominion, Ethan A. Schmidt seeks to illustrate a common thread in the first century of English colonization in Virginia, namely the popular appeal and impact of violence toward Indians. The brutal race war against Virginia's Indians in what came to be known as Bacon's Rebellion was not a sudden anomaly, he argues. It was the result of decades of Virginia elites unwittingly giving sanction to the killing of Indians for immediate gains. Though the rebellion is often thought of as equal parts taxpayer revolt, uprising by upper-class men frozen out of the patronage system, and Indian war, Schmidt concludes that the murder of Indians was not simply "an unimportant symptom of Bacon's Rebellion ... [but] the rebellion's primary cause and its ultimate goal or program.