Burwell Papers

Burwell Papers, manuscript account of Bacon's Rebellion, apparently written by a contemporary of Bacon, was given its present name at the end of the Revolutionary War, when it was found among the papers of Captain Nathaniel Burwell. In 1812 Josiah Quincy sent what is evidently an 18th‐century copy of the lost original manuscript to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which printed it in its Collections (1814) and again, more accurately, in 1866, under the title The History of Bacon's and Ingram's Rebellion. The manuscript was then placed in the keeping of the Virginia Historical Society. Besides the prose account, the manuscript contains a stately epitaph for Bacon written by “his man,” and the reply Upon the death of G.B. These poems, long attributed to one “Cotton of Acquia Creek,” are now considered, like the body of the manuscript, to be the work of John Cotton, a contemporary of Bacon, who lived near Williamsburg, or of his wife, Ann Cotton. The Burwell Papers are believed to be the chief source of the first part of The Maryland Muse by Ebenezer Cook.