The Regulators is told through the eyes of Warren Hascott, who returns to America after the Revolutionary War, having spent years as a slave to the Moors. He finds the Boston he had known in his youth completely changed. The country is undergoing a depression. City merchants are engaged in an economic war with the countryside.

Torn between the love of two women—Judith Burdock of Tory background, and Beulah Crane, who uses her strong will and beauty to defend the rights of the farmers—Warren finds himself gradually caught in the web of Shays’ Rebellion, which seeks to create a new kind of social order based on class equality. But it is Salderman, the Boston merchant, whose cold, ruthless business tactics finally launch Warren on his career as a rebel—a career which climaxes by the famous march on the United States arsenal at Worcester.