Culpeper's Rebellion

Culpeper's Rebellion was a popular uprising in 1677 provoked by the British Navigation Acts. It was led by John Culpeper against the ruling Lords Proprietor in Albemarle County, Province of Carolina, near what is now Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The uprising met with temporary success before being suppressed by English authorities.

The Lords Proprietor, despite their careful plans and long documents, didn’t do enough to put a functioning government into place in Carolina — especially in what is now North Carolina. In Albemarle, settlers were scattered. Swamps and rivers made travel by land difficult, and the inlets and sounds were too shallow to allow big ships. The people who already lived there in the 1660s had no desire to be governed by the Lords Proprietors. Partly as a result of these conditions and partly from a lack of interest, the Proprietors appointed governors who were weak and ineffective. Some of them took advantage of the general chaos to make themselves wealthy. None of them ensured order or protected colonists from Amerindians and pirates.

In that environment, some kind of conflict between the colonists and their government was almost inevitable. The conflict that broke out would be known as Culpeper’s Rebellion, and like a lot of rebellions, it started with a dispute over taxes.

The British government wanted its American colonies to generate some income — that was, after all, the main point of establishing those colonies. The economic theory of the time, called mercantilism, was that a country should export as much as possible and import as little as possible, and therefore store up as much money (gold and silver) as possible. Under that principle, the colonies should export only raw materials to Britain, while Britain should turn those raw materials into more expensive finished goods which it, in turn, could export to other countries or back to its colonies. For example, the American colonies were expected to export wood but not furniture, naval stores but not ships, and crops such as tobacco and rice but not the tools needed to produce them. Producing the manufactured goods was Britain’s job. And at every step of this trade, taxes should be collected.

To put these ideas into practice, Parliament passed a series of laws called Navigation Acts that controlled trade within the British Empire. Under the Navigation Acts, colonial goods could be carried only on English and colonial ships, and all European goods bound for British colonies had to go through England first. Of course, whenever colonial goods passed through English ports, they were taxed. In addition, certain colonial goods such as tobacco, rice, and sugar could be shipped only to England — not even to other British colonies unless they paid a tax first.

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