They found their leader in Nathaniel Bacon. Bacon, despite his youth, was looked up to as one of the Council, and a member of the English gentry. Not only did he sympathize with the people in their fear and hatred of the Indians, but he had a personal grievance, since they had plundered his outer plantation and killed his overseer. So when several of his neighbors urged him to cross the James to visit the men in arms, he readily consented.
When they saw the slender, black-haired youth, they set up a great cry: "A Bacon! A Bacon! A Bacon!" This was too much for him to resist. It is stated by one of the old chroniclers that he had "a most imperious and dangerous hidden pride of heart." The leadership thus thrust upon him must have pleased him. He was now no longer the erratic youth who had been withdrawn from Cambridge, had caused his father great trouble and anxiety, and had been duped by sharpers. He was the leader of men. But there can be no doubt that he yielded to the pleas of his friends and neighbors in part at least because of his loathing of the Indians and his horror at their cruelty. He yielded also because his spirit revolted at Berkeley's system of government by corruption, because he sympathized with the people in their outcry against the killing burdens placed on them, and because he hoped to redress their grievances. His rough followers listened with approval as he denounced the government as "negligent and wicked, treacherous and incapable, the laws unjust and oppressive," and declared that reform was absolutely necessary. So he listed their names on a huge round-robin, and "enjoined them by an oath to stick fast together and to him." As word spread throughout the colony that at last the people had a champion, almost overnight he became the popular hero, and "the only patron of the country and the preserver of their lives and fortunes."
He first wrote Berkeley asking for a commission to go out to attack the Indians, and then, without waiting for a reply, crossed the Chickahominy into New Kent to overawe or perhaps attack the Pamunkeys. He found the people of this county "ripe for rebellion" and eager to wipe out their treacherous neighbors. But when he heard that the Pamunkeys had fled from their villages to the inaccessible Dragon's Swamp, he turned back to pursue a body of Susquehannocks who had moved south to the Roanoke river.