PART VI The Regulator Uprisings 50 The South Carolina Regulation

While the quarrel with Great Britain was by far the main conflict in the American colonies from the mid-1760s on, internal conflict occasionally took center stage, as we have seen with the New York tenants’ uprising of 1766.

The first of the great Regulator conflicts broke out in the back country of South Carolina in 1767. The dominant group in the back country was the small- and medium-sized planters, who had expanded rapidly into the upcountry after the Cherokee Indians had been driven out in 1761. The expansion of settlement naturally outran sluggishly moving governmental institutions, and this lag created grave social and political problems and grievances in the back country.

One important grievance was inherent in representative government: a tendency for new population centers to be underrepresented and older centers to be overrepresented; in short, a tendency for a formerly equitable structure of representation to cease reflecting social realities. Greatly reinforcing this natural tendency was a decree of the Crown forbidding South Carolina from expanding the membership of the Assembly, or even from creating new parishes—the units of representation. A second grievance stemmed from the peculiar tax system of South Carolina. Property outside Charleston was taxed per acre rather than in proportion to valuation. This was especially burdensome to and discriminatory against the lower valued land of the back country.

But the most urgent grievance of the back country was the rampant crime induced by the lack of organs of law enforcement. There were no courts, county or circuit, and no sheriffs in the back country. Hence the whole burden of law enforcement fell on a few constables and justices of the peace who could make arrests but could not conduct trials, which had to take place in remote Charleston. The virtual absence of police or judicial protection for person and property led numerous outlaw gangs to plunder and ravage the back country at will; some went so far as to settle down in their own frankly outlaw communities. The few existing constables were generally in the pay of the outlaw gangs.

By the summer of 1767, the criminal gangs had so ravaged the country that economic effort in the back country was in danger of withering away. As one settler reported, “The lowest state of poverty [was] to be preferred to riches and affluence,” which would only attract the criminals.*

As crime reached a peak of intensity that summer, the people of the back country, disgusted with a government that had abandoned them, decided to protect themselves. Led by the major settlers and planters of the area, the back-country men “rose in a body” and systematically attacked and razed the outlaw communities. Criminals were apprehended and speedily and effectively punished. Governor Charles Montagu, who had done nothing to protect innocent settlers, had the gall to order these “riots and disturbances” to cease. No one, however, paid any attention to his decree.

The outlaws responded by fighting back, burning houses and abducting justices of the peace. The back-country men now saw that haphazard pursuit and law enforcement against criminals could not work in the long run, that more systematic organization was necessary. And so, in the latter part of October 1767, the people chose a thousand men “to execute the laws against all villains and harborers of villains,” and called them the Regulators. The Regulators also took oaths to support one another in their illegal but vital activities.

The Regulators swung quickly and effectively into action, whipping criminals and burning down outlaw villages. Again, Governor Montagu acted against the Regulators fighting in self-defense, rather than against the criminal gangs. The governor asked the Assembly to suppress the Regulator Movement. In reply, four Regulator leaders presented their case to the Assembly in a statement signed by four thousand men of the back country. The petition explained why “thus distressed; thus situated and unrelieved by government, many among us have been obliged to punish some of these banditti and their accomplices, in a proper manner.” The Regulators were unfortunate, however, in having their petition written for them by their sympathizer, the well-known litterateur and Anglican clergyman, Charles Woodmason. Woodmason was generally unpopular for having supported the Stamp Act, and now angered the Assembly further with barbed remarks and attacks on the class of lawyers. The offended Assembly tabled the petition, but the Regulator leaders quickly apologized for the Woodmason invective, and appraisement of the facts made the government sympathetic to the Regulator cause.

The Assembly solved this dilemma during November, in effect by legalizing the Regulators. Two companies of paid rangers were created for a three-month period to ride against the outlaws, and were led and manned by leading Regulators. The ranger-Regulators did a yeoman job. At the end of the three-month campaign in March 1768, the back country had been cleansed of outlaws, the criminals had been killed, arrested, or driven away, many stolen horses and kidnapped girls had been rescued, and not one ranger-Regulator had lost his life. The Regulator campaign had ended in notable success.

If matters had ended there, all would have been well and Professor Richard M. Brown would have been correct in lauding the Regulators as the “most zealous champions of (‘good order’). They believed in the rule of law.... By taking the law into their own hands the Regulators did defy the government. But they acted in the interests of true justice.”* But power is a two-edged tool; power also corrupts. No sooner had the Regulators successfully wielded power in strict self-defense against predatory outlaws than they found that they enjoyed the taste of power and proposed to wield it for aggression instead of self-defense.

Specifically, there existed in the back country numerous lower-class people, individuals who were self-employed in unrespectable and often low-paying occupations. A few were petty thieves; most were honest but despised. Some were prostitutes, some gamblers, some squatters on unused land; some were vagabonds living by their wits; others were hunters selling furs and skins. All were hated by the respectable and the middling planters of the back country, and for several reasons. One was aesthetic; the lower strata were not pleasing to the eye of the respectable set. More important perhaps was economic dislike; these self-employed poor (a) competed with the respectables—for example, in hunting; and (b) seemed annoyingly “idle” when they could be supplying needed labor for the planters and traders of the region. The respectables were also distressed that the ancient (and modern) device for exploiting the self-employed poor by coercing them into the labor market—vagrancy laws—was peculiarly absent in South Carolina. Vagrancy laws are a method of dragooning people who prefer being outside the labor market into laboring for their supposed betters. The vagrant is supposedly to be punished for being of no use to “society”; but since “society,” as Frank Chodorov has written, is “people,” this really means that the vagrant is of little or no use to potential employers and to those above him on the social scale. One does not have to be a Marxist to conclude that vagrancy laws are class exploitation. The respectable classes in South Carolina could have tolerated the aesthetic qualities of the lower set had they at least been supplying the upper classes with needed labor. The lower classes failing to be laborers, there seemed to the solid citizens of the back country no excuse whatever for their continued existence. Typical of upper-class back-country sentiment toward the “low people” was the complaint of the Reverend Charles Woodmason that “the country swarms with vagrants-idlers-gamblers... [but] if you want to hire a fellow for work, you’ll not raise one for money.”

And so the Regulators moved from self-defense to aggression against the “low people.” In June 1768, a large congress of Regulators adopted the Plan of Regulation, which was frankly designed “to purge... the country of all idle persons, all that have not a visible way of getting an honest living.” Flogging and scourging, or banishment, were to be meted out to the “baser sort of people” who did not work at what the respectables thought an honest occupation. The plan was carried out with enthusiasm throughout the back country. Those not engaged in work regarded as respectable were systematically flogged by the Regulators, and if not banished were forced to work a certain number of acres of land.

From forced labor the Regulators proceeded on their heady course to coercive supervision of everyone’s personal morals. “Immoral” women were publicly shamed and beaten, and two women were given 500 lashes each. Wives began to use the Regulators as a convenient way of flogging husbands who did not support them in the style to which they wanted to become accustomed.

Now that the Regulators had seized complete governmental power in the back country, they moved to exclude any judicial or police service, any execution of writs or warrants emanating from Charleston. In short, they sealed off the back country from any governmental influence from the coast, and seceded de facto from South Carolina. Only writs of debt were allowed to be served. The back country was now a separate land ruled at drumhead by Regulator militia.

One reason that Regulators were anxious to keep South Carolina law out of the back country is that they themselves had become aggressors and criminals, and they knew that they were subject to prosecution in the South Carolina courts. Indeed, victims of the Plan of Regulation soon brought charges in the court at Charleston. When the province tried to arrest leading Regulators, the latter captured and roughed up the law officers and even a troop of militia. Bodies of militia deserted to the Regulators.

Lieutenant Governor William Bull reacted to these armed clashes in early August by decreeing the suppression of the Regulators, combined with an amnesty for almost all existing Regulator lawbreakers. The back country ignored the proclamation, and the South Carolina government simply did nothing. It stopped trying to enforce its authority and its law in the back country, and thus virtually accepted Regulator rule over the entire region.

In the face of a clear challenge to its authority, why did the South Carolina government virtually abdicate its rule over the back regions without a fight? Principally because the low country of South Carolina had the greatest concentration of Negro slaves in the colony, and hence the whites of this region were ever in fear of a slave revolt. Fighting against the Regulators would have stripped the white forces, weakened the strength of armed white rule over the Negroes, and permitted a slave revolt against a weakened low country. When faced with the choice of protecting citizens against Regulator violence, or wreaking continued violence upon the slaves, the South Carolina government unhesitatingly chose the latter course. As Bull put it, a military force against the numerous and respectable Regulators would have to be raised in the low country where “white inhabitants are few and a numerous domestic Enemy”—the slaves—had to be attended to. Besides, the lieutenant governor could hardly fail to be enthusiastic about the Regulator goal of suppressing and coercing the lower orders.

Thus, the governor of South Carolina abandoned the people of the back country to the violence and intimidation of the Regulators, just as the state had previously abandoned that tortured region to the violence and intimidation of the outlaw gangs. And just as private groups had to fill the function of defense against and suppression of the outlaws, so now a private group had to arise in the back country to defend the people against the Regulators.

As the Regulators tightened their control in the latter half of 1768, the oppressed lower people as well as many conscientious planters began to unite against the new despotism. The latter, especially the justices of the peace, had also felt personally the violence of the Plan of Regulation. The concrete incident that sparked a vigorous reaction to the plan was the Regulator beating and pursuing of John Musgrove, a leading planter and major of the militia. Along with his friend Jonathan Gilbert, a justice of the peace, Musgrove traveled to Charleston in late February 1769 to convince the governor and Council of the crimes and misdeeds of the Plan of Regulation. The Council was persuaded to deprive eleven leading Regulators of their commissions as justices of the peace or officers of the militia.

Having secured at least the sympathy of the governor and Council, Musgrove and Gilbert set about organizing a private armed force against the Regulators; by early March they had formed the Moderator Movement. Fire, they realized, had to be fought with fire, and force with force. The Moderators had several hundred followers in the back country. To organize them, the leaders found the tough, brash mercenary Joseph Coffell, who proved an effective head of the Moderator military force. A Charleston judge proceeded to give legal coloration to the Moderators by authorizing them to execute warrants against some of the Regulators. The Moderators arrested the leaders, but obviously were not able to travel through Regulator country to take them to trial at Charleston. Charleston was again reluctant to come to the aid of the beleaguered Moderators, who managed with no small effort to slip through the countryside and bring in the prisoners. Charleston’s vacillation increased when news arrived of the criminal excesses of “Colonel” Coffell, who thought nothing of seizing provisions at will and imprisoning women and children as well as actual Regulators. Charleston simply withdrew its legal coloration for Coffell—and with it, any support whatever in the developing conflict.

The Moderators remained undaunted, however. Charleston’s support at best had never been more than perfunctory. On March 25, 1769, six or seven hundred armed Regulators and an equal number of Moderators assembled for a showdown conflict near the junction of the Saluda and Bush rivers. Just as the great conflict was beginning, a miraculous intercession appeared in the person of three notable emissaries of peace from Charleston. The three, large planters of the back country and led by the eminent Colonel Richard Richardson, had remained more or less aloof from the dispute and were thus uniquely qualified to serve as peacemakers. The peace agreement was in reality a total and bloodless victory for the Moderators, for in return for the Moderators’ agreement to disperse, the Regulators agreed to dissolve and let the law take its normal course. The Regulator movement had effectively ended under the pressure of a Moderator counterforce.

The Regulators, however, could not have dissolved so quickly had they not been assured that their main grievance, and the main grievance of the entire back country, would be removed shortly. Accordingly, the Assembly and the Council, at the end of July, enacted the Circuit Court Act, which brought the approval of the governor and the Crown. The act established a regular system of circuit courts in the back country as well as sheriffs for each of the four newly created judicial districts. Two years later, the governor decided to liquidate the remnants of the controversy by pardoning seventy-five Regulator wrongdoers.

*See Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1965), p. 35 and passim.

*Brown, The South Carolina Regulators, p. 1.

51

The North Carolina Regulation

Inspired by the success of the South Carolina Regulators, a group of citizens of St. George’s parish in back-country Georgia formed an “Association” movement in the late spring of 1768. The aim of the Association was armed action against Indians in the locality. Fearful of a full-scale Indian war, Governor Wright promptly told the local militia captains to order the Association to disperse on pain of prosecution. The Associators apparently obeyed the order, as nothing more was heard of them.

The term Regulator, however, found its most important place in history in a movement that had only that name in common with the South Carolina organization. This movement, the Regulators of the North Carolina back country, also adopted the name in April 1768, but its nature and purposes differed radically from those of its southern neighbor.

One of the early roots of the North Carolina Regulation lay in land monopoly. Large tracts of land had been arbitrarily granted to one George Selwyn. In Mecklenburg County in western North Carolina, numerous settlers and squatters refused to acknowledge Selwyn’s claim or to pay him for the land. When in May 1765 Selwyn sent his agent Henry McCulloh and a group of surveyors to Mecklenburg to enforce payment or eject the settlers, the latter rose up in defense of their land. A mob of settlers, led by Thomas Polk, set upon and severely whipped the surveyors and threatened McCulloh with death. The North Carolina Council refused the request of the governor to intervene against the settlers.

Another root of the Regulation emerged also in the spring of 1765. In Orange County and in Granville County near the Virginia border, disturbances arose from the exactions of excessive and even illegal fees by county officials. The “Nutbush Paper,” issued by George Sims, schoolmaster of Nutbush, Granville County, in June, denounced extortionate court fees imposed upon the public. The author pointed out that to pay a debt judgment of five pounds, a man had also to pay more than forty-one shillings, or over forty percent of the amount, to the county clerk, and thus was forced to contribute his labor to the clerk for twenty-one days. In addition, the debtor was enslaved for nineteen days to pay legal fees and a further nineteen days to pay the sheriff for prosecuting him. The climax arrived when the author peacefully drew up a petition protesting these outrages. Not only was the petition ignored, but the said government officials sued the petitioners for libel and imprisoned the author!

These incidents were illustrative of the intense resentments and grievances of the back country against the government of North Carolina. And the major grievances were specifically against government: against excessive taxes and quitrents, against extortionate fees, and against dishonest and extortionate sheriffs and other appointed government officials. Nearly all government officials in North Carolina were paid in fees, and the fees were of course exacted from the hapless inhabitants of whatever locality the officials ruled. Indeed, as the historian John S. Bassett wrote, as soon as frontier counties were organized, “sheriffs, clerks, registers, and lawyers swooped down upon the defenseless inhabitants like wolves.”* The various ranks of fee-charging officials conspired together; for example, lawyers and officials of county and superior courts collaborated to delay cases and thus collect increased fees.

Another major grievance of the people of the North Carolina back country stemmed from poll taxes, which constituted virtually the only tax and the bulk of the revenues in the province. The poll tax bore most heavily upon the poor. The settlers were plagued with quitrents and high fees and taxes. To compound the evils, the people were plagued by dishonest and oppressive sheriffs. A common practice of the sheriff was to call upon a farmer without advance warning and demand that he pay his poll tax immediately. Refusing to give the farmer a chance to borrow in order to pay the tax, the sheriff would promptly seize the property and then quickly sell it cheaply to a friend of his before the farmer could come up with the money. To add grave insult to grievous injury, the sheriff charged the farmer an extra fee for the trouble of calling at the latter’s house. As icing on the cake of the sheriffs’ calling, the lawmen generally embezzled the revenues that they thus collected.

Conditions, in short, were becoming ripe for rebellion in the North Carolina back country by the mid-1760s. The conflict reached the stage of definite organization in the Sandy Creek movement of the late summer of 1766. In late August the leaders of the libertarian reform movement in Orange County, concentrated in the county seat, called a countywide meeting of the delegates from each neighborhood to meet at Maddock’s Mills at Sandy Creek on October 10. No county officials sanctioned the “unauthorized” meeting, which nevertheless went ahead and hailed the recent victory of the Sons of Liberty against the Stamp Act, and called for extension of this concept of liberty closer to home. The meeting delivered a trenchant attack upon the corruption of power: “Take this as a maxim, that while men are men, though you should see all those Sons of Liberty (who has [sic] just now redeemed us from tyranny) set in offices and vested with power, they would soon corrupt again and oppress if they were not called upon to give an account of their stewardship.” The Sandy Creek meeting called for annual meetings of such delegates, in a continuing voluntary association of the people to keep check on the activities of their representatives and appointed rulers.

Chief officer of the county and chief enemy of the Sandy Creek Association was the roundly hated Edmund Fanning. Fanning, a native New Yorker and a graduate of Yale, was a prototype of the provincial bureaucrat and the leader of the “courthouse ring” in his county. A favorite of Governor William Tryon, young Fanning had managed to acquire a justiceship of the peace and numerous important county offices: judge of the superior court, register of deeds, militia colonel, and member of the Assembly.

Colonel Fanning denounced the Sandy Creek meeting as “insurrectionary,” and threatened its leaders with punishment. Yet the leaders of the North Carolina protest movement were at this early stage far from revolutionary. The main leader of the Sandy Creek organization was Hermon Husband, an intelligent and learned Quaker from Orange County and a man of considerable property. Husband, an active pamphleteer, led the agitation of public opinion, but shackled the movement by insisting strictly on Quaker nonviolence. Continually, Husband urged peace and nonviolence and denigrated any form of violent revolution.

During 1766 and 1767, the opposition to North Carolina government grew. Brunswick, Cumberland, and other counties refused to pay their taxes, and petitions similar to Sandy Creek’s were submitted and similarly ignored in Anson, Granville, and Halifax counties, and in the Piedmont of North Carolina. But Orange County remained the focus of conflict. In 1767, a justice of the county court found a very scarce copy of the laws of North Carolina, and discovered that the extortionate court fees of the province were illegal. Rather than mend its illegal ways, the tight-knit bureaucratic oligarchy of Orange County threatened the judge with arrest for contempt of court. The judge quickly fell silent and was soon dismissed from his post. The power of the courthouse clique remained impregnable.

The contemptuous dismissal of the partially courageous judge disheartened the Sandy Creek Association and threw it into a disarray from which it never recovered. It became clear to the libertarian protesters that peaceful nonviolent protests of the Husband variety could accomplish nothing. The people had protested at Sandy Creek and had suggested reforms; their protests had been brusquely ignored. It was now evident that stronger and more radical measures of protest were required. Leadership of the liberal protest movement of back-country North Carolina now passed into more vigorous and determined hands—those of James Hunter, the “general” of the movement; of William Butler; and of the poet and songsmith Rednap Howell, a former New Jersey schoolmaster.

The next phase of the protest movement was touched off in early 1768 when Sheriff Tyree Harris, of Orange County, posted the taxes for the coming year. Poll taxes had to be paid at a few centralized locations; any tax paid at a different location would be automatically raised. This penalty tax was soon raised even higher by Colonel Fanning. Public opinion was further inflamed by an Assembly appropriation of the large sum of five thousand pounds to build a “palace” for Governor Tryon, a boondoggle of which one of the chief sponsors was Edmund Fanning. In ensuing years, ten thousand pounds more was appropriated for a home for the governor.

The higher taxes and the generous perquisites granted to the governor initiated the development of a new association in Orange County, first known informally as “The Mob” and then borrowing the name of Regulators from the successful South Carolina movement. The first thing that The Mob did in Orange and other counties was to announce its refusal to pay taxes until its grievances were redressed and government fees and taxes lowered. Similar meetings were held in the spring of 1768 in counties west of the Haw River, and the various Regulator Associations took oaths to pay no taxes or illegal fees until redress was achieved. South and west of Orange County, sympathy for the movement was expressed in Anson and Rowan counties. The Sandy Creek organization, incidentally, far from leading the new Regulator movement, lagged behind this new radicalization, and refused to join the tax strike as “too hot and rash, and in some respects not legal.”

Orange County, however, remained the heart and center of the growing Regulator movement. Once again, as has happened so often in history, actual armed hostilities were opened by the men in power—by the panicky forces of counterrevolution. On April 4, a meeting of Orange Regulators asked the sheriff and vestrymen of the county to meet with a Regulator committee to give a full account of their use of public monies. The “reply” of Sheriff Harris was typically swift and brutal: the horse and saddle of a Regulator were seized and sold for nonpayment of some governmental levy. Here was the spark of armed rebellion in North Carolina. A crowd of nearly one hundred armed Regulators rode to the county seat of Hillsboro, seized the sheriff, rescued the horse and saddle, and returned them to their owner. After an official threatened to fire at the crowd, they shot up the roof of Colonel Fanning’s house.

Colonel Fanning was not the sort of Tory oligarch to take such an incident lying down. First he had to gain the wholehearted support of Governor Tryon. Hysterically, Fanning falsely claimed to Tryon that the Regulators were insurrectionaries who had sworn to pay no more taxes, to kill all tax collectors, to burn Hillsboro, and to become “sovereign arbiters of right and wrong.” Tryon and the Council then agreed to authorize Fanning to call out the militia to suppress the “rebellion.”

Striking back with all the might of government, Fanning ordered the arrest of three leaders of the Regulator rescue party: William Butler, Peter Craven, and Norman Bell Hamilton. Seven companies of militia were now called up to suppress the Regulation. Only 120 people appeared, and very few of these could be relied upon to fight the people of the county. About one-half of the people of Orange County were ardent Regulators and the others were strongly in sympathy. Thus, an Orange Regulator petition of protest collected over four hundred signatures.

The Regulators called a confederation of inhabitants throughout the county, to maintain enforcement of their tax strike, and to prepare for a march in force on Hillsboro. But the Regulator resolve to press its advantage was tragically weakened by the advice of such men as the Reverend George Micklejohn, who counseled delay and the holding of a large peace meeting, on obtaining a promise of the county officials to meet with the settlers. The peace meeting was scheduled for May 11, but no officials deigned to appear. And while the bemused Regulators peacefully elected delegates and waited for the peace meeting, Colonel Fanning seized the opportunity to swoop down upon them. Denouncing the Regulators as “traitorous dogs,” Fanning seized the startled Regulator leaders on May 2, arresting Butler and Husband. The two were given a quick kangaroo trial and promptly imprisoned at Hillsboro.

The seizure of Husband and Butler was enough to rouse the ire of all the populace, Regulator and non-Regulator alike. Seven hundred men marched to Hillsboro and forced Fanning to release the prisoners. Seeing the might of the Regulator uprising, Governor Tryon used his wiles to lure the Regulators again into passivity. He promised the Regulators that if they behaved properly and returned to their homes to confine themselves to drawing up a petition, he would seek redress of their grievances before the Assembly. The Regulators naively agreed, forgetting the great principle of the English rebels of old, that grievances must be redressed before the keen edge of protest is allowed to soften.

Once again the bemused Regulators allowed their movement to retreat to the naive petitioning of Sandy Creek days. At the end of May, the Orange Regulators drew up a petition signed by Hunter, Howell, and 450 others, and Hunter and Howell were selected to present it to the governor and Council. Meanwhile, Fanning had tried hard to split the Regulators and to induce them to sign a humble and contrite petition confessing their sins and errors and throwing themselves upon the mercy of the governor. Otherwise, he threatened the protesters, he would urge Tryon to regard them as traitors. Farming’s efforts were partly successful in weakening the timbre of the Regulator petition.

But Governor Tryon and the Council, scenting weakness in the popular opposition and largely forgetting the governor’s promises, replied on June 25 by hinting at treason and demanding total submission and contrition by the Regulators. All future meetings of Regulators were banned and they were ordered to pay their taxes. At the same time, local governmental fees were raised still higher.

Although the Regulators had been lured again into dispersing their armed force, they did hold a trump card: continued refusal to pay taxes. Though nonviolent, this step was far from passive; in fact, such refusal struck aggressively at the root of the oligarchic power structure of North Carolina. The Regulators continued to meet and continued to refuse taxes. At a Regulator meeting on August 1, Tryon sent a sheriff to demand submission and the payment of taxes, but the people continued adamant. Four hundred men quickly met and unanimously resolved to refuse tax payment and to kill any man who seized property for taxes due. Five hundred Regulators gathered a week later at Peeds, threatening to burn the county seat at Hillsboro, and began to march on the town. Rapidly the confrontation escalated: Tryon called out the militia and an alarmed populace gathered in a meeting of one thousand Regulators.

Cowed once again by force majeure, Tryon, on August 11, again turned wheedling and conciliating and promised that the sheriffs would now satisfy the people and give them an accounting at a general meeting on August 17, provided that the armed Regulators would again disperse. And once again the Regulators, at the brink of victory, gullibly gave credence to Tryon’s promises. Once again they weakened their pressure to shift suddenly to peaceful and passive tactics. Once again, when the naively confident Regulators assembled on the 17th, they were stunned to find a severe condemnation by Tryon denouncing them as criminal and illegal insurrectionaries and demanding a bond to insure that no attempt would be made to rescue the imprisoned Butler and Husband. Tryon then proceeded to raise a mighty force of militia from all over the North Carolina back country.

But while Tryon was raising his counterrevolutionary forces far and wide, people from other counties were increasingly joining Orange in the Regulator protest. For instance, people from Anson County, in southwest North Carolina. Anson County was tightly governed by a ruling clique of three men: Samuel Spencer, county clerk, assemblyman and colonel of the militia; and two embezzling ex-sheriffs who had moved up to become county judges. A citizens’ association was formed in early 1768 to oppose this oligarchy. The Anson Association of Regulators, headed by Charles Robinson, pledged to refuse payment of taxes, to rescue any imprisoned members, and to retake any property seized for nonpayment of taxes. In April, 100 Anson Regulators gathered at the county court, drove the tyrannical judges off the bench, and made ready to run Robinson for Assembly.

Governor Tryon was also moved to promise Anson County Regulators redress of grievances if they would disperse. Turning to the Orange Regulation for advice, the Regulators received counsel that sowed dangerous illusions, disarmed the movement, and crippled its momentum; they were advised to abandon violence for a peaceful and friendly petition of grievances. One hundred and twenty people of Anson signed this petition during August, but Tryon’s only acknowledgment was to hail Anson County’s “submission.” When Anson County found the governor calling out the militia in force, five hundred men of the county resolved on armed self-defense against the government forces.

Moreover, in Johnston County, close to the low country, a mob of eighty Regulators threatened to oust their judges, but here the judges were able to mobilize governmental forces to defeat the rebels. Another Regulator failure occurred in near-lowland Edgecombe County, where thirty men tried unsuccessfully to release an insurgent leader from jail.

Throughout the latter part of August and September 1768, both sides gathered their forces in the rapidly polarizing conflict. Rowan and Mecklenburg counties, in the southwestern back country, sent particularly ardent progovernment militia, which were all assembled at Hillsboro, in the heart of the Regulator rebellion. The counterrevolutionary militia were bolstered and egged on by four leading Presbyterian ministers of the back country, who called for steadfast support of government on principle, and in this call they were backed up by Baptist and German ministers. All in all, Tryon was able to gather by the beginning of September nearly fifteen hundred militia. The main clue to their recruitment was the enormous proportion of top-ranking officers (largely politicians and bureaucrats). Fully one-quarter of the assembled militia were officers and thirty-four officers were ranked at major or higher. Of these, twenty-four were assemblymen or councillors, consisting of one-quarter of the members of the legislature. Here was another indicator of how civil and military affairs of the province, whether local or central, rested in the hands of a small, tight bureaucratic clique.*

Ranged against the militia was a massive force of some three thousand seven hundred Regulators. But the Regulators, timorous and lacking determined and efficient revolutionary leadership, pleaded for negotiation. The only “terms” that Governor Tryon would consider were that the Regulators disarm themselves, agree to pay all taxes, swear oaths of loyalty and allegiance to their rulers, and surrender nine of their leaders for trial, in addition to the still incarcerated Husband and Butler. The Regulators did not agree to these arrogant and insulting terms; but neither were they brave enough to use their overwhelming force. The Regulators dispersed, with thirty of them accepting the terms of submission. Pressing his advantage, Tryon quickly sent troops to round up and arrest the Regulator leaders. They met with no resistance from the demoralized Regulators, and thirteen leaders were placed on trial. The Regulators, moreover, resumed payment of their taxes.

The second phase of the Regulator protest movement had ended in total and abject failure. Governor Tryon’s shrewd and cunning strategy had been met by bumbling confusion and ineptitude on the part of the popular opposition. Of the Regulator leaders, William Butler was convicted for riot and rescue of confiscated property and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. John Philip Hartso and Samuel Devinney received three months. Hermon Husband was acquitted on a charge of riot. James Hunter was convicted but freed at a new trial. The three convicted leaders had their sentences suspended, and were finally pardoned at the king’s instructions in September 1769. Meanwhile, Edmund Fanning was convicted of extorting illegal fees, but was fined only one penny in punishment and shorn only of his post as register of deeds.

Governor Tryon had happily not followed the advice of various Presbyterian and other ministers who had preached triumphantly to the militia after the Regulators had slunk back to their homes. Particularly fiery was the Reverend George Micklejohn, whose speech was distributed by the public printer. Micklejohn had urged the government to hang at least twenty of the rebels, and he assured one and all that their souls would surely travel to hell.

The governor had promised to bring extortionate officials to trial. The trial of Fanning was, in particular, a mockery of that pledge. Other Regulator charges against officials were systematically obstructed by the government; complaining witnesses were driven away by the guards and ordered out of town; and grand juries were systematically packed with government officials themselves.

The abject crumbling of the Regulator movement did nothing of course to allay the grievances of the back country. After a lull of many months, Regulator agitation welled up once more. In the spring of 1769, Orange County sheriff John Lea, trying to arrest Ninian Hamilton and other Regulator leaders, was set upon and severely whipped by a mob led by Hamilton and Devinney. But this was an exceptional incident. The Regulators generally turned to concentrate on political action; specifically, to try to change Assembly policies in the July elections. The Regulators of Orange, Anson, and Rowan counties formulated their political program in petitions: asking for an end to poll taxes (and a shift to property taxes), drastic limitations on legal fees, payment of taxes in kind, lower quitrents, a cutback of land grants to councillors and other governmental favorites, and a secret ballot for Assembly elections. In contrast was the petition of one thousand Presbyterians in back-country Mecklenburg County. The petitioners proclaimed their loyalty to the government and requested repeal only of the Anglican establishment in their counties.

The July elections did result in a general overturn of the North Carolina legislature; of seventy-seven assemblymen, forty-five were new. Only a handful of the new representatives were Regulators, but Regulators did sweep the elections in Orange, Granville, and Halifax counties in the northern back country and Anson County in the southwest. Rowan County also returned the ardent Regulator Christopher Nation. Orange County, for its part, elected Hermon Husband to the Assembly, while hidebound Mecklenburg County remained committed to the status quo.

After the flush of enthusiasm over their political victory, the Regulators found to their dismay that their victory had won them nothing. The Assembly did nothing to redress their grievances. Indeed, the elections of the spring of 1770 only weakened Regulator strength in the Assembly. The Regulators were neither the first nor the last revolutionary movement to become disillusioned with the fruits of political action, and to find that voting and politics were just another blind alley to blunt their effectiveness, deflect them from their course, and weaken their purpose. The Regulators, in fact, had tried every form of legal or nonviolent protest: petitioning, suits in court, tax strikes, and political action. Each in its turn had totally failed. The Regulators were finally learning that only one course of action remained to them: armed rebellion.

Matters came to a head (inaugurating the fourth phase of the North Carolina Regulation) in late September 1770. The incident began on September 24, when James Hunter and other Orange Regulators presented a petition at Hillsboro against the peculation and systematic bias of the county sheriffs, officers, and juries. Backing up the petition was a determined crowd of 150 Regulators led by Hunter, Butler, and Howell, who invaded the county courtroom. The crowd threatened Judge Richard Henderson, who fled town, and began to set upon its enemies: the courthouse lawyer, John Williams, was beaten up, and leading county bureaucrats were given a severe trouncing. The crowd also proceeded to the highly satisfactory whipping of their arch-enemy, Colonel Fanning. Fanning was generously permitted to flee town, and his new, pretentious house, reviled as being built from illegal fees, was thoroughly burned to the ground. The same treatment was meted out to Judge Henderson’s house in Granville County some weeks later. Thus the Regulators followed the model of the Stamp Act rebels.

The Regulators were now feeling their oats. Determined violent action had redressed their grievances by forcibly stopping the machinery of government in the county. Although the two years’ delay had reduced the movement from several thousand to several hundred, the Regulators, growing stronger by the day, threatened to storm the capital, New Bern, to be joined by the Regulators of Bute and Johnston counties, to prevent the Assembly from seating Edmund Fanning from a newly created “rotten borough” of Hillsboro.

The Assembly, now genuinely alarmed, did a little to remedy the problems of the back country by increasing representation of the Piedmont in the Assembly and limiting governmental fees. But most of its panicky reaction centered around savage repression of the Regulator movement. Its resolve for repression was strengthened by a secret agreement with the Presbyterian leaders: in exchange for the Assembly’s permission to perform the marriage ceremony, Presbyterian ministers pledged their support against the Regulation. With the back country thus split, the Assembly passed a law in January 1771, sponsored by Samuel Johnston of Edenton (in the low country), for suppressing riots. The death penalty was decreed for any assemblage of ten or more people that refused to disperse. Anyone ignoring subpoenas for rioting would be declared an outlaw. The militia was authorized to enforce these decrees. Furthermore, any uplander could now be tried in low-country courts. And anyone opposing the militia would be deemed guilty of treason. Furthermore, the Assembly arbitrarily expelled Hermon Husband for criticizing a reactionary assemblyman, and then had Husband summarily arrested. The Assembly finally released Husband after a couple of months, when a grand jury refused to indict him.

The release of Hermon Husband served to disperse a threatened Regulator rescue march on New Bern. But Tryon, furious at the release, determined to pursue a massive program of armed repression. There were several prongs to this campaign. First, Tryon called up the provincial militia, since the local back-country militia were now ineffective. Second, the governor mobilized a private force of “Redressers” organized by Fanning, Thomas Hart, and Alexander Martin (who had all been beaten up at Hillsboro) in an armed association against the Regulators. Particularly formidable was the aristocratic armed association of Cape Fear Loyalists, headed by General Hugh Waddell. Third, Tryon brazenly ordered the packing of all juries (for trying Regulators) with aristocratic “gentlemen of the first rank, property, and probity,” who would take care to hear only pro-official witnesses.

The Regulators of 1771 were not the Regulators of three years earlier. Disappointments at suppression had radicalized them, and particularly infuriating was Tryon’s raising of the massive provincial force against them. The people were incensed. Rednap Howell composed forty popular ballads to stir up the public. Edmund Fanning was declared an outlaw (who could therefore be shot on sight) by the Regulators. One gauge of the intensity of Regulation feeling was the refusal of militiaman Jeremiah Pritchett to obey military orders, and his attempt to “breed a mutiny” in support of the Regulation. Pritchett was sentenced to the huge total of 150 lashes. At Pritchett’s public flogging, one of the spectators tried to get the crowd to pelt the floggers with eggs. The man was immediately arrested and the colonel in charge threatened to run through any other heckler with his sword. Regulator forces sprang up in Halifax, Edgecombe, Bute, and Northampton counties. In Rowan County the people refused to pay fees and threatened to kill every clerk and lawyer in the area. The court at the Rowan County seat of Salisbury was threatened with the same treatment as at Hillsboro. Rowan County and other Regulators nevertheless proposed to arbitrate their disputes, but Governor Tryon adopted an implacably hard-line antiappeasement view. No negotiations were possible with rebels, he declared, nor would there be arbitration by any organization but the government. At this rebuff, the Regulators protested that every man would rise up and defend his just rights: “Our civil liberties are certainly more dear to us than the good opinion of a ruler....”

Governor Tryon tried to raise an armed force of twenty-five hundred men. Despite determined efforts, including a subsidy to each volunteer, he could only raise less than eleven hundred men, who were supplemented by General Waddell’s irregulars of less than three hundred men. Tryon’s force had no fewer than one hundred and fifty officers and Waddell’s nearly fifty. Most of Tryon’s men came from Orange and Dobbs counties in the back country and Craven County in the lowlands.

Tryon’s and Waddell’s forces were supposed to meet at Hillsboro, but Waddell’s column was stopped by a large body of Regulators on May 9 and forced to fall back to Salisbury. Waddell’s ammunition had been destroyed by a heroic group of young rebels called the “Black Boys of Cabarrus.” Going to the rescue of his ally, Tryon moved westward from Hillsboro to the Alamance River, reaching it with a little less than one thousand men. There he encountered a Regulator force of two thousand, of which only one thousand, however, were armed.

The final conflict was now at hand. The Regulators, though radicalized to the point of gathering an armed force, were still gravely undermined by the lack of firm and resolute leadership. There was no overall leader. The major leaders bickered among themselves and tragically weakened the movement by preaching against the use of armed force. Hermon Husband would not fight at all. The other leaders naively counseled a token fight to induce Tryon to negotiate. They did not realize the absurdity of threatening or beginning the use of force without being prepared to use it effectively. Moreover, it was incredibly naive of them to still believe Tryon would negotiate honestly. James Hunter, when asked to take command of the Regulators, replied in a magnificently individualistic but militarily ineffectual vein: “We are all freemen, and everyone must command himself.” As a result, each company of Regulators had a captain, but there was no overall commander.

Shorn of any effective leaders on or off the field, the Regulator movement had therefore no effective field command and no theoreticians to define their goals and purpose, their strategy and tactics. In such a case only one outcome was possible. On May 16, Tryon’s forces advanced, demanded unconditional surrender, and then, after a two-hour fight, routed the disorganized Regulators into wild disorder. Thus ended the Battle of Alamance. Nine Regulators were killed and many wounded and captured. Surprisingly, the brief Regulator resistance also took a toll of nine killed and several score injured.

Tryon now had the opportunity to wreak his will on the routed and demoralized Regulators. One leader, young James Few, a prisoner of the battle, was executed the next day on the ground that he had been made an outlaw for ignoring a court subpoena for burning Fanning’s house. Tryon, then joined by Waddell, marched unresisted through the back country, looting and burning the houses and plantations of the Regulator leaders, including the home of William Few, father of the hanged prisoner. In the brutal Tryon victory march, thousands of settlers were forced to take an oath of allegiance to him, promising to pay their taxes and obey the laws in exchange for the governor’s pardon.

Tryon’s largesse, however, was not at all extended to the prisoners taken in battle. Summary court-martials were held in mid-June, and twelve prisoners were sentenced to death for high treason. Six of the convicted were pardoned, but the other six were publicly executed on the spot. One of the executed Regulators was Captain Benjamin Merrill of the Rowan County militia, who died supposedly repenting in order to allow his family to inherit his property. But another of the executed, James Pugh, remained steadfast to the end and indeed was hanged in the middle of a rebuke that he was delivering to Edmund Fanning. Assemblyman Thomas Person, who had been sympathetic to the Regulators, was arrested by Tryon on his march but was ultimately acquitted.

All the major leaders of the Regulation had managed to escape capture. Rednap Howell fled north to Maryland and eventually settled in New Jersey. Hermon Husband fled north to western Pennsylvania. Other leaders escaped to South Carolina. And thousands of Regulators soon trekked westward, over the mountains.

The government quickly moved toward pardon of the Regulator leadership. The implacable enemies of the Regulators, Governor Tryon and Edmund Fanning, both left in the summer of 1771, Tryon to become governor of New York and Fanning to be his secretary. The new governor of North Carolina accelerated the pardoning of the wanted leaders. The latter petitioned for mercy, and when the Riot Act expired in 1772, they were allowed to surrender, come into court, and be pardoned. James Hunter returned from Maryland to general acclaim and remained free. The returning William Butler crawled to the authorities, proclaiming his “utmost abhorrence” of the Regulation. Soon, in fact, the king had pardoned all the old leaders except Hermon Husband, who remained in Pennsylvania.

The North Carolina Regulators, as we have seen, were far different from their namesakes to the south. The South Carolina group arose from lack of law enforcement in the back country, and the ensuing conflict was largely intra–back country, with the private Moderator movement finally checking the invasive acts of the Regulators. In North Carolina, however, the major grievance was too much government—specifically, too much revenue extracted from the public in taxes and fees. Hence the conflict was much more sectional than that in South Carolina, where the local courthouse oligarchies in the back counties were appointed by the royal provincial officials in Charleston. Within the back country, the bulk of the split was waged between the people and the oligarchy of bureaucrats.

The Regulator conflict cannot be properly interpreted—as many historians have done—in religious terms: for example, as low-country Anglican versus back-country Protestant. As we have seen, the Presbyterian church was very active in opposing the movement; its ministers wrote a circular letter urging Presbyterians not to join the Regulators. And of course the established Anglican church was also opposed to the Regulators. But so too were the Baptists, who were almost all opposed—indeed, pro-Regulator Baptists were excommunicated from the church. The German and Quaker sects also opposed the Regulation.

*John S. Bassett, “The Regulators of North Carolina, 1765–1771,” American Historical Association, Annual Report (1894), p. 153.

*The thirty-four leaders of the North Carolina oligarchy who headed the assemblage at Hillsboro to defend their vested privileges against the Regulators included: John Rutherford, president of the Council; five other councillors; Edmund Fanning; Samuel Spencer; and a superior court justice, Maurice Moore.