Once more, as in 1672, European quarrels in the New World were temporarily suspended, and once more the Indians reflected the lull by relaxing their own disputes. As the Susquehannock's settled in their new home where Piscataway Creek flows into the Potomac, an Indian mediator started from New York to initiate peace between the Iroquois and the Susquehannock's; and the Lenape subsided on the Delaware.⁷⁹   Again the imminent prospect of peace went aglimmering. In September, 1675, a militia of backwoodsmen from Maryland and Virginia laid siege to the new Potomac fort of the Susquehannock's. Their reasons have been disputed; scholars agree fairly well that a chain of violent events in Virginia's back country, for which the Susquehannock's were not responsible, had led the militia to seek revenge on Indians regardless of the guilt or innocence of particular persons or groups. Authorities also agree on the main points of what happened at the fort. The Indian chiefs were twice called out to parley. On their second appearance, five were seized in violation of their safe conduct; they were murdered on the orders of Maryland's Captain Truman, urged or abetted by Virginia's Colonel John Washington.⁸⁰   The atrocity has not been condoned in either Virginia or Maryland, but considerable energy has been expended in each place to prove that primary responsibility lay in the other. It is only fair to add that Maryland's Assembly tried and convicted Captain Truman for his part in the affair, though he seems never to have suffered any actual penalty except a security bond; Washington was not inconvenienced in any such way.⁸¹

The besieged Susquehannock's, despite inferiority in numbers and the loss of their chiefs, held out for six more weeks. Then, one dark night, they all walked quietly through the English camp, taking toll of ten sleepers on the way, after which they launched a fury of revenge on the isolated cabins of the Virginia backwoods. Governor Berkeley's rule was overthrown by militant back settlers led by a demagogue named Nathaniel Bacon. After the fashion of demagogues, Bacon promised to do the impossible. He took a troop of volunteers on a campaign to exterminate the Susquehannock's. They did not find the Susquehannock's, but they relieved their frustrations by massacring nearby allied Indians unfortunate enough to be resident on attractive real estate. Bacon solved the awkward legal problems raised by his insurrection by dying of natural causes in 1676.⁸²   The historical problems had just begun. On the one side the sordid story of treachery, avarice, and slaughter was converted through the mystique of the frontier into a heroic saga of primitive democracy aborning, and Bacon — a criminal aristocrat living in enforced exile — was apotheosized into a sort of Siegfried of the settlers. On the other side the Iroquois got the blame for defeating and dispersing the Susquehannock's.