This Nathaniel Bacon was a newcomer in Virginia--young man who had been entered in Gray's Inn, who had traveled, who was rumored to have run through much of his own estate.
He had a cousin, also named Nathaniel Bacon, who had come fifteen years earlier to Virginia "a very rich, politic man and childless," and whose representations had perhaps drawn the younger Bacon to Virginia.

At any rate he was here, and at the age of twenty-eight the owner of much land and the possessor of a seat in the Council.

But, though he sat in the Council, he was hardly of the mind of the Governor and those who supported him.
It was in the spring of 1676 that there began a series of Indian attacks directed against the plantations and the outlying cabins of the region above the Falls of the Far West.

Among the victims were men of Bacon's plantation, for his overseer and several of his servants were slain.

The news of this massacre of his men set their young master afire.