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

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[ed] 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.)