notes. But what he had learned served to whet his
appetite for more, so that in 1912 and again in 1914 he was back, going
over volume after volume, searching eagerly for fear some important
point would escape him. The mass of abstracts and notes which he
accumulated formed the basis of this volume.

In fact, any political history of Virginia in the colonial period must
be based on the documents in the Public Record Office, since most of
the copies left in Virginia have been lost or destroyed. Today, however,
colonial historians no longer have to visit London to consult them,
since transcripts have been made and deposited in the Library of
Congress.

In recent years the American Council of Learned Societies has made
available other collections of manuscripts which have thrown new light
on early Virginia history. The most important of these are the Coventry
Papers at Longleat, the residence of the Marquess of Bath. Many of the
letters deal with Bacon's Rebellion, and include the correspondence
between Berkeley and Bacon, accounts of the Indian war, complaints of
the misgovernment of Berkeley, the account of the evacuation of
Jamestown written by Berkeley, accounts of Bacon's death and the
collapse of the rebellion.

This new material adds new weight to the conclusions reached in this
book--that the causes of Bacon's Rebellion were deep-seated, that it
grew out of the discontent caused by the Navigation Acts, the heavy
taxes, the corrupting of the Assembly by Berkeley, and the misuse of the
courts. It in no way shakes the conviction expressed by Thomas Mathews,
who himself was involved in the rebellion, that the Indian war was the
excuse for it rather than the cause.

Yet certain recent historians have contended that this violent uprising
was not a protest against injustice and misgovernment. One has gone so
far as to call it merely a quarrel between a rash young man and an old
fool. We could with equal justice call the American Revolution just a
quarrel between George Washington and George III. Mathews tells us that
it was the general opinion in Virginia at the time that it was not Bacon
who was chiefly responsible for the uprising, but Thomas Lawrence. Bacon
"was too young, too much a stranger there, and of a disposition too
precipitate to manage things to that length they were carried," he
pointed out, "had not thoughtful Mr. Lawrence been at the bottom."

But neither Lawrence's hatred of Berkeley, nor Bacon's rash