ABSTRACT
The author explores the practice of Populist politics within the larger American system, to the post-bellum Southern Populists and to the Revolution itself, a datum to which they invariably adverted as the authority for their conduct. Apart from Bacon’s Rebellion, the North Carolina Regulators enacted the most serious Populist challenge to colonial government to occur in the years preceding the American Revolution. For the scholar who has just examined these materials, it is not too difficult a labor to construct out of them a composite overlay and then to fit it down over the American Revolution as a whole. Precisely how the Populist rebellions in the British colonies of North America fed into the general revolution which they made is a vexed question. For the century following 1865, it was difficult to employ the Populist model in the arena of national politics.
