The Brethren: A Story of Faith and Conspiracy in Revolutionary America

by Brendan McConville

Overview

The dramatic account of a Revolutionary-era conspiracy in which a band of farmers opposed to military conscription and fearful of religious persecution plotted to kill the governor of North Carolina.

Less than a year into the American Revolution, a group of North Carolina farmers hatched a plot to assassinate the colony’s leading patriots, including the governor. The scheme became known as the Gourd Patch or Lewellen Conspiracy. The men called themselves the Brethren.

The Brethren opposed patriot leaders’ demand for militia volunteers and worried that “enlightened” deist principles would be enshrined in the state constitution, displacing their Protestant faith. The patriots’ attempts to ally with Catholic France only exacerbated the Brethren’s fears of looming heresy. Brendan McConville follows the Brethren as they draw up plans for violent action. After patriot militiamen threatened to arrest the Brethren as British sympathizers in the summer of 1777, the group tried to spread false rumors of a slave insurrection in hopes of winning loyalist support. But a disaffected insider denounced the movement to the authorities, and many members were put on trial. Drawing on contemporary depositions and legal petitions, McConville gives voice to the conspirators’ motivations, which make clear that the Brethren did not back the Crown but saw the patriots as a grave threat to their religion.

Part of a broader Southern movement of conscription resistance, the conspiracy compels us to appreciate the full complexity of public opinion surrounding the Revolution. Many colonists were neither loyalists nor patriots and came to see the Revolutionary government as coercive. The Brethren tells the dramatic story of ordinary people who came to fear that their Revolutionary leaders were trying to undermine religious freedom and individual liberty—the very causes now ascribed to the Founding generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674249165
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/28/2021
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,072,401
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Brendan McConville has written several books on early American history, including The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1766. Professor of History at Boston University, he is co-chair of the David Center for the Study of the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society and cohost of the Boston-area radio program The Historians.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Brethren 1

1 Along the Sound 11

2 Protestants 26

3 Revolution 43

4 July Fifth 66

5 Conventions of the People 82

6 The House of Fear 101

7 Becoming Known, Becoming Loyalists 127

8 The Sword and the Scale 150

9 The Return of the Father 174

10 Aftermaths 190

Conclusion: A Great Change of Seasons 210

Notes 217

Note on Sources 273

Acknowledgments 279

Index 281

Editorial Reviews

06/21/2021

Boston University history professor McConville (These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace) explores an obscure chapter of America’s founding in this intriguing if somewhat overwrought account. Highlighting confusion over the Revolution’s “origins, character, and goals,” McConville delves into a plot hatched by a group of Protestant yeomen known as “the Brethren” in the Albemarle region of North Carolina in 1777. Relying on “a system of secret signs, symbols, and code words,” they conspired to instigate a slave uprising in order to overthrow the state’s revolutionary government and assassinate the governor. McConville details the group’s anger over the use of bounties and forced drafts to meet military recruitment quotas, revolutionary leaders’ seeking of an alliance with Catholic France (“a deal with the devil”), and the secularism of some delegates to North Carolina’s constitutional convention, who “wanted mention of Christ removed from political and legal oaths.” Unable to muster widespread support for their “bloody coup,” Brethren leaders were arrested and found guilty of high treason, though governor Richard Caswell’s leniency toward his would-be assassins “restor patriarchal authority” in the new state. McConville unearths fascinating details about the Brethren’s beliefs, but stretches his argument that “enlightened ideas played a limited or no causal role in rupturing the empire” too thin. This thought-provoking history overstates its case. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

In this innovative and vivid history, McConville deploys deft and deep research to recover a long-hidden struggle within the American Revolution for the soul of a new nation. The Brethren reveals a contradictory, divisive, violent, and volatile revolution that pivoted on the allegiance of rural Christians alienated from the more secular leaders of their state.

Alan Taylor

[McConville’s] use of archival and printed primary sources to discern thoughts and actions of obscure people [is] a rare feat…Important and well worth reading and discussing.

North Carolina Historical Review - Carole Watterson Troxler

McConville’s study is the first to uncover the history of the Brethren, bringing this fascinating story to light…The Brethren is a great example of how scholars can use sparse sources and some imagination to craft a compelling narrative and argument.

Past Tense Graduate Review of History - Savannah Flanagan

Though the handful of counties surrounding Albemarle Sound in tidewater North Carolina where the Brethren acted was a small theater, McConville manages to tie his microhistory to broader political, ideological, and cultural themes of the Revolution. Readers interested in intellectual and religious history will find that the book repays their efforts and suggests new ways of thinking about the role of religion in Revolutionary America.

Journal of Church and State - Jeffry H. Morrison

McConville gives us an American Revolution we have never really seen. The Brethren demonstrates the hidden power of anti-Catholicism, loyalism, slave revolts, and a crucial conflict among patriots. It turns out that many ordinary Americans were determined to save their religion equally from King George III and from America’s own rationalist elite.

Woody Holton

McConville provides a compact and elegant account of conspiratorial resistance to Revolutionary authority by alienated Anglicans in North Carolina, revealing important new perspectives on shifting religious and political orientations in the Revolution. Recovering a world unfamiliar, transient, and disconcerting, The Brethren amply repays readers interested in exploring the confused conflicts and abrupt dislocations of ordinary Americans during the Revolutionary crisis.

Stephen A. Marini

An engaging read. In addition to enlightening readers on issues affecting the yeoman population in the Revolution, this book will appeal particularly to those who are interested in religious history as well as aficionados of the Carolinas’ history.

Journal of the American Revolution - Kelly Mielke

In reconstructing the Lewellen conspiracy, McConville recovers the complexity and nuance of the American Revolution on the ground. This isn’t a story of idealistic Founding Fathers making the Enlightenment real, but of common people making sense of momentous changes. Written with great verve and flair, this book challenges our assumptions about the nature of the Revolution itself.

Francis D. Cogliano