About This Book

A Reexamination of the Stamp Act riots in Rhode Island and the Regulator Rebellion in North Carolina

“Our personal rights, comprehending those of life, liberty, and estate is every subject’s birthright, whether born in Great Britain or in the colonies” wrote Rhode Island lawyer and politician Martin Howard in a pamphlet defending the Stamp Act. Howard’s opponents drew on a similar fusion of Anglo-American common law and political tradition to voice their own arguments against Parliamentary taxation. Still, such commonalities were not enough to save Howard during Newport’s Stamp Act riots when a mob destroyed his home and forced him to flee to London. Martin was later appointed North Carolina’s Chief Justice, where he played an important role in another crisis, the Regulator Rebellion. The complexities and seeming contradictions that informed the writings of Martin Howard and his colonial counterparts during both the Stamp Act crisis and the Regulator Rebellion bring these understudied movements to vivid life, while also telling a broader story about the evolution of American political thought in the decades surrounding the American Revolution.
In Seized with the Temper of the Times Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary America, historian Abby Chandler explores, as never before, the complex local and transatlantic tensions which infused the early imperial crisis. She argues that colonial responses to the Stamp Act were rooted in local tensions and that the Regulator Rebellion was fueled by trans-Atlantic tensions. These two paradoxes, a local crisis cast as imperial affair and an imperial affair cast as local crisis, tell a very different story than the one to which we are accustomed. Without pre-existing local tensions, the fury of the Stamp Act crisis might not have spilled over during the summer of 1765, and, without the added strains of the imperial crisis, the Regulator Rebellion might not have lasted for five years. The questions about the intersecting roles of local and imperial/federal interests and identities raised during both the Stamp Act crisis and the Regulator Rebellion would also continue to inform political thought in Rhode Island and North Carolina in the coming decades. Both colonies had long histories of challenges to their autonomy and their residents embraced the coming revolution before many of their counterparts, but they would also be reluctant participants in the rising union envisioned by the framers of the Constitution.

Abby Chandler is Associate Professor of Early American History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She has published articles on political movements in eighteenth-century British North America in Early American Studies, Protest in the Long Eighteenth Century, and the North Carolina Historical Review. She is also serves on the 250th American Revolution Anniversary Commission in Massachusetts.

Praise for Seized with the Temper of the Times:

“Abby Chandler takes us on a journey from Rhode Island to North Carolina, two fascinating “outcast” colonies that deserve our attention. With careful research and sparking prose, she illuminates the local conflicts and wider repercussions of the Stamp Act Crisis and the Regulator Rebellion, providing fresh insights about the tumultuous years that preceded the American Revolution. This is a unique and valuable book.”—Benjamin L. Carp, author of The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution