#204 Albemarle Arises: Culpeper’s Rebellion

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1677, the longtime residents of the old and remote county of Albemarle in northern Carolina, a collection of cranks and dissidents who had fled from Maryland and Virginia and were used to living free of interference from the Carolina proprietors and the Crown’s tax collectors, revolted against new attempts to collect duties on tobacco. Quite astonishingly, they succeeded! And not without some history comedy along the way.

In the long history of the Americans, it is easy to ignore Culpeper’s Rebellion. Virtually all surveys of American history do. Albemarle was small, a literal backwater, and not even the most important part of Carolina. Historians of North Carolina, however, see it as a truer reflection of the American Revolution, a century later, than the other colonial upheavals of the 1670s. The Albemarle rebels were an early example, in their democratic tax-avoiding free-trading don’t-tread-on-me resistance, of ideas that would later be taken up throughout English North America.

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#158 The Free County of Albemarle

#160 The Official Founding of North Carolina

Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729

Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713

Hugh F. Rankin, Upheaval in Albemarle: the Story of Culpeper’s Rebellion, 1675-1689

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 204.
0:11.1	I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and we are recording this episode on March 1, 26, in Austin, Texas.
0:20.3	We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United
0:24.1	States from the beginning without intentional presentism. Longstanding listeners, whether attentive
0:32.4	or not, will notice that on the helpful suggestion of a listener, I've put the official episode numbers in the titles of each podcast episode.
0:43.6	The numbers are aligned with the numerology in my scripts, which corresponds to Apple Podcasts.
0:50.7	These numbers do not correspond to the episode counter on the website, which is annoying,
0:57.9	but beyond my coding skills to correct.
1:01.0	Someday I'll pay a dude to straighten that out.
1:04.2	We are back in North Carolina after a long hiatus, again, in the free county of Albemarle. You will supercharge your enjoyment of this
1:14.9	episode if you review Episode 158, the Free County of Albemar, which dropped on July 30th,
1:22.1	2024, and Episode 160, the official founding of North Carolina, August 23rd, 2024,
1:31.3	but we'll do a quick recap here for those who don't like prerequisites.
1:37.0	Old Albemarle County was a jurisdiction in Northeastern North Carolina that roughly comprised
1:43.7	the modern counties of Chowin, Curritac, Camden,
1:47.8	Pasquitank, and Perquemans. Probably blew that pronunciation. Sorry. Considering that it was both
1:55.5	geographically close to Virginia, indeed it was originally considered part of Virginia, and was the site of the famed a lost colony of Roanoke in the 1580s, it's perhaps surprising that the first Englishman to settle there, an Indian trader who spoke fluent Algonquin named Nathaniel Bats, did not build his house until the mid-1650s.
2:20.4	It's especially surprising insofar as early explorers from Virginia had recorded the fertility
2:25.6	of the region, its mild climate, the surprisingly friendly Indians, and the excellent rivers
2:33.0	flowing into Albemarle Sound.
2:36.2	The answer lies in geography.
2:39.5	The great dismal swamp made overland travel from Virginia uncomfortable and even treacherous,
	...

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