Private interest led many planters to side with him, and there was a fair amount of passionate conviction matching his own, that his Majesty the King and the forces of law and order were being withstood, and without just cause.

But the mass of the people cried out to his speeches, "Bacon! Bacon!" As the popular leader had been warned from Jamestown by news of personal danger, so in his turn Berkeley seems to have believed that his own liberty was threatened.

With suddenness he departed the place, boarded a sloop, and was "wafted over Chesapeake Bay thirty miles to Accomac." The news of the Governor's flight, producing both alarm in one party and enthusiasm in the other, tended to precipitate the crisis.

Though the Indian trouble might by now be called adjusted, Bacon, far up the York, did not disband his men.

He turned and with them marched down country, not to Jamestown, but to a hamlet called Middle Plantation, where later was to grow the town of Williamsburg.
Here he camped, and here took counsel with Lawrence and Drummond and others, and here addressed, with a curious, lofty eloquence, the throng that began to gather.