A dissatisfied young man who owned a plantation on the James River near Richmond gathered hundreds of followers, took up arms against the authorities, and spread his rebellion across Eastern Virginia. Almost 200 years before the Civil War, 100 years before the American Revolution, Nathaniel Bacon was trying to reshape Virginia and its governance. Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 sprang from dissatisfaction with long-serving governor William Berkeley, who catered to his cronies, monopolized the Indian trade, and refused to drive Tidewater’s remaining Native Americans out of Virginia. Frontier settlements had come under attack from the native peoples, but Bacon and his men failed to make a distinction between those natives and the Tidewater tribes who had agreed to be tributaries to the Crown. Gloucester County found itself in the middle of the action, and became a significant part of the unsuccessful coup. Martha McCartney wrote in her Gloucester history “With Reverence for the Past” that this...