Rednap Howell (ca. 1748 – December 1787)

Schoolmaster, Poet, and Bard of the Regulators

“I knew a very wise man that believed that if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.” , Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun

Rednap Howell was a schoolmaster and poet who became one of the most effective voices of the North Carolina Regulator Movement, a grassroots uprising of frontier farmers against corrupt colonial officials that preceded the American Revolution by nearly a decade. He wrote ballads, petitions, and pamphlets that gave ordinary people words for their anger and made the powerful look ridiculous. The colonial governor called him an outlaw. History remembers him as a man who understood that a well-aimed verse can be as dangerous as a musket ball.