The History of the Americans #204 Albemarle Arises: Culpeper’s Rebellion
In 1677, the longtime residents of the old and remote county of Albemarle in northern Carolina, a collection of cranks and dissidents who had fled from Maryland and Virginia and were used to living free of interference from the Carolina proprietors and the Crown’s tax collectors, revolted against new attempts to collect duties on tobacco. Quite astonishingly, they succeeded! And not without some history comedy along the way.
In the long history of the Americans, it is easy to ignore Culpeper’s Rebellion. Virtually all surveys of American history do. Albemarle was small, a literal backwater, and not even the most important part of Carolina. Historians of North Carolina, however, see it as a truer reflection of the American Revolution, a century later, than the other colonial upheavals of the 1670s. The Albemarle rebels were an early example, in their democratic tax-avoiding free-trading don’t-tread-on-me resistance, of ideas that would later be taken up throughout English North America.
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#158 The Free County of Albemarle
#160 The Official Founding of North Carolina
Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)
Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729
Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713
Hugh F. Rankin, Upheaval in Albemarle: the Story of Culpeper’s Rebellion, 1675-1689