In her novel, Breaking Loose Together, Marjoleine Kars argues that the agrarian upheaval known as the Regulator Rebellion of North Carolina reflected "the slow separation of morality from economics that characterized (and enabled) the development of the emerging capitalist order" (6). The North Carolina Regulation cultivated from the confusion and conflict that was obvious to anyone inside the interior of North Carolina. As rapid immigration from the northern colonies around 1750 fled into the state, the land system turned into a system of chaos Overlapping royal land grants, weak partisan governmental institutions, religious tensions, and a host of land-hungry colonists led to decades of violence. Political corruption and the lack of shared …show more content…
They came from the north seeking upward social mobility, free markets for their crops, freehold property, inflated money supplies, decentralized credit markets, good or at least limited government whose local branches would be under their control, and the right to worship in their Protestant churches without interference. Slavery was beginning to be questioned during this period. Agrarian capitalists sought advantage and land for families in North Carolina. "Their desire," she writes, "to create communities based on strict moral values led evangelicals and radical Protestants to attempt to regulate the behavior of their fellow Christians." These groups "supervised family conduct in such areas as childrearing, courtship, and marriage, as well as deportment in politics and business" (113). This is a clear description of middle-class, Protestant American culture. Throughout the nineteenth century, white Protestant Americans, and indeed many free Protestant African Americans, would try with great success to make the entire country to keep their image. Such moral crusading, emphasis on good government, and material restraint was the very soil in which nineteenth-century American capitalist culture grew. The reality, for certain, was often quite different from the ideal, but the ideal continued to exist into the twentieth