The Story of Bacon's Rebellion

The year 1676 dawned upon troublous scenes in Virginia. Being a time when men were wont to see in every unusual manifestation of Nature the warning shadow cast ahead by some coming event, the colonists darkly reminded each other how the year past had been marked by three "Prodigies." The first of these was "a large comet every evening for a week or more, at southwest, thirty-five degrees high, streaming like a horse's tail westwards, until it reached (almost) the horizon, and setting towards the northwest." The second consisted of "flights of pigeons, in breadth nigh a quarter of the mid-hemisphere, and of their length was no visible end, whose weight break down the limbs of large trees whereon they rested at nights, of which the fowlers shot abundance and ate 'em," and the third, of "swarms of flies about an inch long, and big as the top of a man's little finger, rising out of spigot holes in the earth, which ate the new sprouted leaves from the tops of the trees, without other harm, and in a month left us."

Looking backward from the practical point of view of our day, and beholding that memorable year under the cold light of fact, it does not seem that any evil omen should have been needed to make clear that a veritable witch's caldron of dangers was brewing in Colonial Virginia, and that some radical change in the administration of the government alone could have prevented it from reaching boiling point.