No Stupid Questions

Learn about early American history, specifically the Revolutionary War and the period shortly before it.

The Regulator Movement in North Carolina, also known as the Regulator Insurrection, War of Regulation, and War of the Regulation, was an uprising in Provincial North Carolina from 1766 to 1771 in which citizens took up arms against colonial officials who they viewed as corrupt. Historians such as John Spencer Bassett argue that the Regulators did not wish to change the form or principle of their government, but simply wanted to make the colony's political process more equal. They wanted better economic conditions for everyone, instead of a system that heavily benefited the colonial officials and their network of plantation owners mainly near the coast

During the American Revolution, many prominent Regulators became Loyalists, like James Hunter who fought at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge. ... The Regulators notably were never against the monarchy - their issue was with local corruption and elites abusing them.

Dunmore's Proclamation was formally proclaimed on November 15. Its publication prompted between 800 and 2,000 slaves (from both Patriot and Loyalist owners) to run away and enlist with Dunmore. It also raised a furor among Virginia's slave-owning elites (including those who had been sympathetic to Britain), to whom the possibility of a slave rebellion was a major fear.

Later British commanders over the course of the American Revolutionary War followed Dunmore's model in enticing slaves to defect—the 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation, which applied across all the colonies, was more successful. By the end of the war, at least 20,000 slaves had escaped from plantations into British service

Shays's Rebellion was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts and Worcester in response to a debt crisis among the citizenry and in opposition to the state government's increased efforts to collect taxes on both individuals and their trades.

When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, Massachusetts merchants' European business partners refused to extend lines of credit to them and insisted that they pay for goods with hard currency, despite the country-wide shortage of such currency. Merchants began to demand the same from their local business partners, including those operating in the market towns in the state's interior. Many of these merchants passed on this demand to their customers, although Governor John Hancock did not impose hard currency demands on poorer borrowers and refused to actively prosecute the collection of delinquent taxes. The rural farming population was generally unable to meet the demands of merchants and the civil authorities, and some began to lose their land and other possessions when they were unable to fulfill their debt and tax obligations. This led to strong resentments against tax collectors and the courts, where creditors obtained judgments against debtors, and where tax collectors obtained judgments authorizing property seizures.

Just remember that the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that failed to address many of the underlying economic conditions plaguing the colonies from the outset. Yes, the American merchant class beat back the British Monarchists. But no, that wasn't a happily-ever-after for the proletariat of the nascent nation.