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Regulating Babylon: Religion And Rebellion In Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina, Sarah E. King '03

Honors Projects, History

Past historians have situated the Regulator conflict in largely economic or social terms. James Whittenburg and others claim that at the time of the Regulation, a new and vast social division was present in backcountry society. The established backcountry settlers-the agrarian, yeoman farmers of Hermon Husbands' ilk-resented their recent displacement by mercantile and political interests. The Regulation, then, simply "crystallized widespread anxiety over the swift economic and political changes taking place in the piedmont." The Regulators used fleeting issues of the moment to rectify their lessening influence in North Carolina. Rachel Klein similarly argues in Unification of a Slave State …