Clapped in irons

What happened

Thomas Miller came to Albemarle in 1677 as the proprietors' collector and acting governor and set about enforcing the tobacco tax the settlers hated, raising quitrents and putting prices on the heads of the province's leaders. On 1 December he arrested the New England trader Zachariah Gillam and the old settler George Durant, and charged Durant with treason. That was the spark. John Culpeper, a surveyor who had already been jailed for sedition in South Carolina, and the planter Valentine Byrd raised about forty armed men, and within days they took Miller and the councillor John Nixon and clapped Miller in irons. Rothbard's account is short: "Culpeper, Valentine Byrd, and their men arrested the governor and his Council" (CiL, p. 119). The rebels then called free elections for a new Assembly, and Rothbard says the vote showed "the overwhelming popular support for the rebellion." The Assembly made Culpeper governor and collector, indicted Miller, and warned off the governor the proprietors sent next. Culpeper's men ran Albemarle for two years. Tried for treason in England, Culpeper was acquitted, though the proprietors never let him govern again. A year after Bacon marched on Jamestown, the small planters of Carolina had thrown out a proprietary officer over taxes and an arbitrary arrest.