Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina The Culture of Violence in Riot and War

Wayne Lee examines how a society shapes, directs, restrains, understands, & reacts to violence, with particular attention to riot & war in 18th-century North Carolina. He links several riots, the backcountry rebellion known as the Regulation, & the War for Independence by examining each as an act of public violence, rooted in cultural practice & shaped by collective notions of legitimacy. Beginning with public riot, Lee describes the "rules of violence" shared by rioters, authority, & the public at large & shows how those rules were observed or violated & what the consequences were for rioters & society. Moving to the larger-scale War of the Regulation, 1768-71, he examines the competing use of violence by settlers & authorities, each playing to a politicized public whose expectations of violence shaped the course of the movement from public protest to organized battlefield. He then shows how military action, like its civil counterpart, struggled for legitimacy in the Revolutionary War, the Tuscarora & Cherokee Wars, & the "militias' war" of 1780-82. For students of collective protest, Lee provides new case studies of violence in the colonial South & a more complete explanation for the course of the Regulation. He shows that such an event cannot be understood without addressing the forces shaping choices about violence. Similarly, he establishes a new paradigm for examining behavior in war, demanding careful consideration of individual incidents & the overlapping relationship between organized fighting bodies & the civilian population. He especially insists on a subtler understanding of "military necessity," demonstrating that, in the wide landscape of violence that is war, people's choices are regulated by a broad set of cultural pressures, of which necessity is only one.Lee, Wayne E. is the author of 'Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina The Culture of Violence in Riot and War' with ISBN 9780813020952 and ISBN 0813020956.