The Brethren were a group of North Carolina yeoman farmers during the opening years of the American Revolution in 1776 and 1777 who sought to defend Protestant Anti-Catholicism first against the British and then against American Patriots.
They are important because the idea of separation of church and state as embodied in the establishment clause of the First Amendment and the idea of religious toleration that is recognized in the free exercise clause of the same amendment often get flattened. It is common to portray the Puritans who came to America to secure their own religious freedom as equally tolerant (they were not) of those of other religions who came to exercise their own freedom. It is likewise common to portray an America that equally welcomed Protestants, Roman Catholics, and others (it did not).
Furthering common narratives, scholars often rightfully extoll such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who applied enlightened principles to solve long-standing religious divides (Green 2024). In such circumstances, it is easy to conclude that the rest of the nation was thinking along the same enlightened lines, as Patriots lined up against Tories and Federalists later debated Anti-Federalists to secure American liberties.
The Brethren were anti-Catholic Protestants
Brendan McConville, a well-published historian at Boston University who has written books on early American history, complicates this narrative in his heavily documented and path-breaking narrative of the Brethren, or the Association, whose members took part in the so-called Gourd Patch Conspiracy, also sometimes called the Llewelyn Conspiracy after Brethren leader, John Llewelyn.
McConville demonstrates that the Brethren, who at one point planned to assassinate the North Carolina governor and others during a diversionary slave revolt that would aid the British, actually held much in common with fellow North Carolina Patriots.
Drawn largely from yeoman farmers in the Albemarle Sound region (northeast corner) of the state, those who came to be identified as the Brethren initially supported the Revolution against Britain. They did so largely in reaction to the British adoption of the Quebec Act of 1774. They feared that allowing religious freedom in Canada, specifically the protection of the Roman Catholic faith, would in time establish popery in America. They also initially favored the Patriot cause because of the kind of dictatorial (popish) behavior that they believed King George III exhibited with the adoption of the Intolerable Acts to punish Boston after the Boston Tea Party.
Leaders of Brethren movement were lay readers in Anglican church
Although the Anglican Church of England was the established church in colonial North Carolina, the form of worship in the colony was more akin to that of later Methodists and Baptists than to the high church of England. There were far too few Anglican ministers (many of dubious character) to exert close control over the churches. Most of its regular services were led by lay readers and leaders, often in private homes.
Some key lay readers, in turn, became leaders of the Brethren movement. This occurred at a time when many Anglican ministers (who had taken ordination oaths to support the king and whose congregations now objected to their prayers for King George III) were returning to England.
Whereas most scholarship on the origins of the American Revolution and American values ground early American views in Lockean liberalism, Whig ideology, classical Greek and Roman ideals incorporated into civic republicanism, and enlightenment values, McConville points to a less sophisticated but no less powerful Protestant and anti-Catholic identity.
Brethren became disaffected with Patriots
Although this Protestant identity provided an impetus to join fellow patriots, the Brethren became disaffected with the Patriots when news came back that a group of 14 men, including Wylie Jones and Whitmell Hill, who attended the state’s constitutional convention of 1776 had (much like Deists in other colonists) expressed heretical religious views. They had questioned the Trinity, the inspiration of the Bible, and other key orthodox tenets and were seeking to eliminate religious test oaths for public office that the Brethren believed had held the state together as a Protestant bulwark. Such fears were fanned as the Patriots sought and eventually secured an alliance with Roman Catholic France against Protestant Britain.
Brethren leaders included John Lewellen, James Rawlings, James Sherrard and Daniel Legale. They became concerned about high-handed measures of the Patriots against Tories, including violence against those who openly spoke, wrote, or preached in favor of the British, the imposition of boycotts of British goods, and military conscription. Like later Anti-Federalists who were particularly concerned about the dangers of standing armies, the Brethren feared that the Patriot armies that were being mustered would further threaten their liberties, and they resisted efforts to conscript individuals whose families, especially on small farms with few slaves, needed them at home to sow and reap the crops.
The Brethren engaged in personal recruiting and the administering of secret oaths and signs —sometimes quite comical (pp. 124-125) — to gather fellow yeoman farmers who pledged to uphold and defend the Protestant faith as they understood it. Despite later characterizations, few were solidly in either the Patriot or Tory camps. They tended to side with those who most closely identified with and furthered their own Protestant world views and, perhaps, left them largely alone. As McConville views the situation, North Carolina was not particularly fertile ground for either Patriot or Tory military recruiters.
The Brethren attempt to assassinate N.C. governor
In time, key leaders of the Brethren, who seem to have gotten far out of step with many of their followers, took the fateful step of attempting to incite a diversionary slave revolt in order to assassinate the governor and other leaders that they associated with heretical religious views. The threat of a slave rebellion triggered one of the colonists’ greatest fears and doomed the Brethren to failure. The ringleaders of the movement were discovered and arrested, as long-established yeoman families and neighbors sought to protect themselves against charges of treason by turning on one another and informing authorities about what they knew.
Ironically, institutional structures were so weak and informal that although some Brethren were exiled, almost all escaped serious punishment. This occurred both because the state did not yet have an established system of courts and because, at a time during the Articles of Confederation when state legislative sovereignty was the dominant ideology, Governor Richard Caswell wanted to establish his executive prerogatives and demonstrate his mercy and benevolence by issuing pardons.
Lessons for First Amendment values
In his classic book "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," historian Bernard Bailyn demonstrated how enlightened ideology often combined with popular conspiracy theories to fuel the American Revolution. In similar fashion, McConville notes the difficulty of accepting the idea “that the Revolution began with the belief that a beloved Protestant empire’s core had been corrupted by popery and infiltrated by Rome’s tyrannical minions. Such views express neither the sophistication nor the enlightened promise nor the purity of purpose that our society would like to find at its moment of origin” (pp. 210).
McConville further explains that although the U.S. Revolution and the period of state constitution-making that followed “is usually considered the beginning of the full and legal separation of church and state... It was not separation as we like to discuss it. Rather, it was institutional disestablishment and a reorganization of spiritual-political language and rites toward a more generic but still potent Protestant Christian character. Formal establishments began to disappear ... but rhetorical establishment that linked the new political order to Protestant Christianity generally came into being and were soon deeply entrenched.” (98-99).
In sobering reflections that move beyond the history of the revolutionary period that he documents, McConville, perhaps overly pessimistically, observes that “The implosion of the early nineteenth century’s rhetorical church-state settlement in the late twentieth century has gradually crippled the society’s ability to express any shared value and morals in the political culture or in policy. The efforts to turn democracy itself into a moral as well as a political system to compensate has, ironically, helped concentrate rather than spread power in a rapidly changing society. As a result, a shared understanding of democracy itself has eroded to an alarming extent.”
McConville’s narrative demonstrates how religious identity can be a force both for unification and division, often in protean forms. It cautions scholars that, however important they are, words in state laws and constitutions and even the First Amendment and other provisions in the federal Bill of Rights are often translated into actual practice differently than their authors may have originally understood or intended.
John R. Vile is a political science professor and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.