Bacon's Rebellion/Economics DRAFT

Picture a world that is so corrupt, that only one group of people controls all money. This causes the rest of the people to be left poor and not able to live any sort of successful life. This type of government not only was present in the past, but is still present in some countries today. It is my belief, that this is the future of the whole world unless the human race tries to change our ways to be less selfish. Economics was one of the major driving forces that resulted in Bacon's Rebellion and also started to then shape the rest of the world as well.

Since the beginning of Jamestown one of its main purposes was to develop a well functioning colony with a good economy. Since people first started to come over to this new land they viewed it as a way to get rich quick. There was just so much open land ready to be farmed unlike the environment in England where every piece of land was already taken. They started out without having the ability to grow any crops at all and many of the early citizens died because of starvation. Soon down the road however they discovered the wonderful crop know as tobacco. Soon after they found it they started to grow mass amounts of it which in turn made the Jamestown economy flourish. Suddenly there was a huge separation between the rich tobacco plantation owner and the less wealthy farmers.

During this time of new settles starting up their own farms many economic problems started to occur. "These problems included declining tobacco prices, weather problems including hailstorms, floods, dry spells, and hurricanes, growing commercial competition from Maryland and the Carolinas, an increasingly restricted English market, and the rising prices from English manufactured goods caused problems for the Virginians” (http://www.nps.gov/archive/colo/Jthanout/BacRebel.html). I believe that this was the true reason that Bacon’s rebellion started. These problems did effect the large tobacco farmers a lot, but the poorer farmers like Bacon were the ones who really lost most of there money. If around that time the economy was actually prosperous then I’m sure Bacon’s group never really would have had a problem with the way things were at all. So with this going on Bacon and his men were trying to find any way possible to try and make not only their own lives more profitable but to try and improve the whole colonies economy as well.

With the economy diminishing Bacon and his followers thought it was time to act and soon their whole rebellion started. It started with Bacon’s people trying to find some way to blame someone else for their misfortunes. The unlucky people they chose were the Indians. Instead of them trying to just work harder on their own land they started to just think that everything would be easier if they could just take more land. So Bacon’s people started at first by just spreading over past the land that was theirs and into the Indians land. This caused the Governor at that time to intervene. Soon the colonist were fighting between following the land treaties and trying to just make everyone’s lives more profitable. It ended in Bacon’s people getting defeated, but soon after Governor Berkeley decided that he did not want the colonists fighting each other any more so they started to break a lot of their treaties with the Indians if it meant all of the colonists were happy. ( in a reading somewhere that I need to find later.)

This Decision to break Indian treaties and do what was best for the colonies own needs, caused economy to improve not on in the Chesapeake area but all over east coast. Once the Englishmen started to break Indian land treaties they started to have even more land for which they could grow crops. This caused many fights between Indians and the Colonists which did result in many deaths and decreased the economy for a little while, but in the end the new land they acquired made the economy only better and better. Soon this new land that will one day be called America started to be one of the largest assets to the England economy. People may say that taken the natives land was not morally right. But at the same time what would the economy be today if we didn’t.? In my opinion I think that our world always has been based around creating a good economy and without one everything just crumbles to dust. So I think that so what if we broke our agreement and killed many Indians, if the economy improved then it was all worth it. I am sure people are reading this right now and disagree with this statement but you are wrong and I am right.

This style of do anything for the good of the economy is still present all over the world today. One example is how people in third world countries are getting paid slave wages making goods that the world depends on. While these people are getting treated terribly we must ask ourselves what we would do without these goods. The truth is that right now the way the world runs is based primary on who ever has the most money has the most power. This is the main problem with not only America but the whole entire world. The truth is that economy as it is now is based around making one group of people rich as hell and the other group of people living in the dirt. So we must accept that this is how the world works and there is no way it will change anytime soon so I say forget your morals and just do whatever is in your best economic interest. So now that you understand this we can go back and compare today’s world with Bacon’s rebellion. If you do this then you will obviously see that both in the past and still today the world is based off of one simple thing, that thing is economic profit. With out it there is no world that could exist.