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Farming Dissenters: The Regulator Movement in Piedmont North Carolina. By Carole Watterson Troxler. (Raleigh: Office of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 2011). Pp. xiii, 221; $15, paperback.)
Scholars have long been fascinated with the social eruptions emanating from the backcountry of North Carolina in the late colonial period. Calling themselves "Regulators," disgruntled Euro-American colonists resisted control by the eastern-dominated legislature and corrupt, exploitative local officials, whom they viewed as agents of the powerful planters, merchants, and lawyers on the coast. The Regulator movement came to a head at the Battle of Alamance on May 6,1771, when Governor William Tryon's militia soundly defeated the rebellious western settlers.
Historians of the colonial and revolutionary South have tended to interpret the North Carolina Regulation as a precursor to the American Revolution, and Carole Watterson Troxler, emerita professor of history at Elon University, does little to upend this historiographical trend in Farming Dissenters: The Regulator Movement in Piedmont North Carolina. But by arguing that the Regulation came from the cultural heritage of theologians such as John Calvin and George Fox, Troxler deepens our understanding of the movement and its cultural origins, especially in a chapter...