Reviews of Books

An Uprising of Faith

Reviewed by Alan D. Watson, University of North Carolina, Wilmington

No subject in the history of North Carolina commands a more extensive and exciting body of scholarship than the Regulation, the large-scale protests among small farmers that rocked the western region of the royal province from 1766 to 1771. Fueled by popular anger over heavy taxes and extortionate fees imposed by corrupt public officials, the Regulator movement arguably posed the most serious challenge to the integrity of colonial government in British North America before the Revolution. It certainly led to the bloodiest confrontation among white provincials, culminating in a violent struggle between backcountry residents and eastern militia forces led by Governor William Tryon, the so-called Battle of Alamance on May 16, 1771, in which the protesters were crushed. The magnitude of the dissent as well as the sanguinary nature of the final contest render the Regulation intensely interesting to historians. Was it a popular reaction to British tyranny, a first blow in the gathering struggle for American independence? Was it a sectional confrontation between seaboard and interior, similar to the clashes involving Shays's Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Paxton Boys and Whiskey Rebels in Pennsylvania? Should it be considered a proto-Marxist class struggle pitting oppressed working people against a wealthy elite, in a quest for democracy and economic justice? Or does it make more sense to see in the uprising a manifestation of western farmers' resentment at the bid by merchants, lawyers, and speculators to control the region? Such questions have driven debate over the movement from the very start.

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More recently, religion has gained attention as a key to the Regulation. Marjoleine Kars, assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, seizes on that theme to make a striking contribution to the history of the movement, from its origins through the Battle of Alamance. Breaking Loose Together gathers up strands of older approaches—class struggle, exploitation, status anxiety, Whiggish opposition—and weaves them into a pattern set by religion. As Kars see it, the evangelical, pietistic faiths of the immigrants to the North Carolina backcountry, the majority of whom were sectarians and dissenters, infused and actuated the Regulator rebellion. Backcountry Protestantism, whether Presbyterian, Separate Baptist, Quaker, or German Pietist, including Moravian, was inspired by Great Awakening notions of personal salvation, equality, and the primacy of personal conscience. Potentially radical and antiauthoritarian, such religious views offered western farmers a powerful critique of elitist government rule and, in combination with the example provided by easterners in their forceful protest of the Stamp Act in 1765–1766, established the basis for the rural uprising.

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