The test of an honest living

What happened

The back country of South Carolina had no courts, no sheriffs and no police in the 1760s, and outlaw gangs plundered it at will. In October 1767 the settlers chose a thousand men to execute the laws themselves and called them the Regulators. They burned outlaw villages, whipped criminals, and by March 1768 had cleansed the country, which Rothbard counts as a notable success. Then, he says, they enjoyed the taste of power. The back country held a lot of poor people who worked for themselves: hunters who sold furs and skins, squatters, vagabonds living by their wits, a few petty thieves. The respectable planters disliked them and could not make them work, since South Carolina had no vagrancy laws. In June 1768 a congress of Regulators adopted the Plan of Regulation to purge the country of all idle persons, all who had no visible way of getting an honest living. The poor were flogged and banished, or made to work acres for the planters. Rothbard calls vagrancy laws class exploitation, and he sees the Regulators turning self-defense into aggression. The poor and many planters organized against them as the Moderators, who faced them down in March 1769, and in July the Assembly passed the Circuit Court Act that gave the back country the courts it had wanted all along.