Redemption from Tyranny: Herman Husband's American Revolution by Bruce E. Stewart (review)

Scholars of eighteenth-century America have known Herman Husband's name for more than a generation. Because he found himself at the center of some of the more studied events of the late 1700s, his name—or his clever alias, Toscape Death—can be found in the indexes of several books on the North Carolina Regulators, the Great Awakening, the American Revolution, and the Whiskey Rebellion. ¹But other than an unpublished dissertation from nearly forty years ago, we have not yet enjoyed a full biographical survey of the fascinating, challenging, and thoughtful political and economic reformer. ²

In Redemption from Tyranny, Bruce E. Stewart provides that biography, and he begins it with the origins of Husband's name. His paternal grandfather, William Husband, came to Maryland in 1670 and would be, as Stewart notes, one of the "last of his kind, a former indentured servant who [was able] to escape the cycle of debt and tenancy" (12). When he died a free planter in 1717, William had established the patterns that later generations of Husbands would inherit: enslaving, tobacco cultivating, and attending the local Anglican parish church. But the future rebel had another grandfather, from whom his given name was derived and whose influence lay in tension with the Husbands: Herman Kinkey. This grandfather, a devout German pietist, helped raise Herman Husband and instilled in him doubts and unease about the lifestyle of "self-indulgence and luxury" (16) that was his patrimony.

Then George Whitefield came to town. The teenaged Herman Husband "was thrilled" (21). The Great Awakening initiated what would be a passionate but difficult religious journey for Husband. He often found himself disappointed with his fellow worshippers and left them, first abandoning the Anglicans for the Presbyterians, then leaving them for the Quakers, before eventually "abandon[ing] his faith in organized religion altogether" (27). Husband did not have the same qualms about his occupation, becoming a prosperous enough merchant that he was able to buy ten thousand acres of land in the North Carolina backcountry in the late 1750s.

Then the Stamp Act came to town. Stewart argues that the Stamp Act controversy transformed Husband's politics and sense of economic justice, and he subsequently "took up the banner of civil government as the agent of reform" (42). Husband did not have to look far to find places to wave that banner, for his neighborhood in the North Carolina backcountry was in the middle of its own political dispute. Husband became a leader of the Sandy Creek Association, which would become the core of a burgeoning Regulator movement. The Regulators' late 1760s conflict with Governor William Tryon over representation, taxation, and good government culminated in bloodshed at Alamance in 1771—and in Husband being condemned as a rebel leader, even though, Stewart points out, he nearly always counseled moderation. Fleeing to the mountains of Pennsylvania, Husband adopted the tongue-incheek name "Toscape Death" and "once again rebuilt his fortune" (82).

Husband's American Revolution merged his religious, economic, and political critique of American society. Husband embraced the revolution's millenarian impulse: in his mind, it was "divinely inspired" (88), and the patriots were a chosen people bound to create a New Jerusalem. Because they had the power to arrange affairs as they wished, Husband expected the revolutionaries would transform political power and create new systems that fostered economic equality. Thus, he greeted the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 with his typical rapturous enthusiasm.

Husband was elected to represent Bedford County in the Pennsylvania assembly in 1777, just as the British occupied Philadelphia and the economy began to fall apart. He lobbied for economic reform, calling for the state to move toward full paper money that was not backed by specie in the hopes that this would discourage speculators and prevent the wealthy elite "from hoarding cash and force them to finally pay their fair share in taxes" (93). He pushed for...