1775 (33 page)

Other fringe elements of some local significance included the Reformed and Seceder church offshoots of Presbyterianism in the Carolinas. The Methodists were still nominally part of the Church of England, and several of their British-born missionaries in Maryland were expelled for Tory sympathies.

Nevertheless, from the roof of New England to Carolina’s Piedmont balcony, the most important apathy toward the Revolution came from enthusiastic and doctrinally militant “Separate” Baptists. Theirs was a religion in which unschooled preachers itinerated, exhorted, shook, and trembled to assert their own direct summons to God. They condemned the constraints imposed on them by civic authorities, state-sanctioned Congregationalists, and vestry Anglicans—the same Patriots who complained about the injustices Parliament and the king’s ministers sought to impose. This made for uncomfortable political as well as religious relationships.

Ironically, Baptist fervor was introduced to the southern backcountry by missionary-minded evangelicals from New England. The leader, Shubal Stearns, built a Separate Baptist network in North Carolina. Then disciples of Stearns, moving to upcountry South Carolina, built an outsider culture of itinerancy, “love feasts,” female deaconesses, adult immersion, and disdain for learned ministries that was unpopular with local authorities. These practices also put them at odds with the more sedate theology and behavior of other Baptists—the long-established Regular Baptists of Charleston and the Welsh Tract, most of them Patriots, as well as older Baptist associations in Philadelphia and Rhode Island.

However, before we discuss the attributes of religion in the Carolina hinterlands, it is necessary to understand the sometime role of the backcountry as a political subculture or mistreated stepchild of established government. Such circumstances became an understandable nursery of disrespect for civic authority. From the Bay of Fundy to the Savannah River, backcountry residents, most of them new arrivals, had reasons to distrust
their provincial governments, complaints that often distanced them from the dominant Patriot-faction elites.

Backcountry Grudges and Ambivalent 1775 Loyalties

In roughly half of the thirteen colonies, official neglect, corruption, or misgovernment of backcountry districts—this in addition to newly settled areas’ typical lack of nearby courts, adequate law enforcement, or representation in provincial legislatures—bred serious disaffection among new arrivals. Parts of New Hampshire, the Maine district of Massachusetts, northern New York, Pennsylvania, and both Carolinas are examples.

Little should surprise us about how provinces and counties with exploding populations quickly outgrew twenty-year-old, ten-year-old, or even five-year-old frameworks of government. Or how colonial assemblies, content with familiar arrangements, were slow to reform regional maldistributions of districts and courthouses that by the 1770s had become unacceptable. However, when government facilities remained three to five days distant for fair-sized populations, that went beyond mere inconvenience; so, too, when land sales, record keeping, and sheriff’s offices evolved beyond sloth into open corruption. In colonies that made reasonable efforts to keep up standards—this list usually includes Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut—no great alienation was apparent in the expanding hinterlands. However, several provinces let discriminatory practices and corruption breed enough resentment to influence backcountry loyalties as the Revolution approached.

Here squabbles over
external
territory can be set aside. Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut all had unsustainably remote outliers: Virginia soon lost her settlements in western Pennsylvania and in Kentucky (which became a separate state in 1792). Massachusetts had no claim to its settlements on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, and its noncontiguous Maine district became a separate state in 1820. Connecticut lost its outlier in northeastern Pennsylvania, and Vermont became a separate state in 1791. These claims complicated relations between Virginia and Pennsylvania and between Connecticut and Pennsylvania, but fortunately not in ways that seriously threatened the Revolution.

The internal circumstances of New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and South Carolina were more complicated—in several cases, divisive enough to endanger provincial stability. Small to begin with, New
Hampshire almost became smaller. Its western and northern towns in the Connecticut Valley, little tied to the eastern seacoast centers that were New Hampshire’s early core, had been largely settled from Connecticut and Massachusetts. They were grossly underrepresented in the New Hampshire legislature under Royal Governor John Wentworth in 1775, and the inequity persisted under the province’s new 1776 constitution. Many western townships considered splitting off entirely. According to the principal history of New Hampshire in the Revolutionary period, between 1776 and 1782 “a part or a whole of this [Connecticut Valley] region was independent,” and in 1781 thirty-five of those distant towns tried to join up with Vermont.
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If northern New England was somewhat unstable and ambivalent during the 1775–1777 period, next-door New York had its own headaches. Back in 1764, King George III had ruled that New York, not New Hampshire, held proper title to the “Grants” west of the Connecticut River. Once empowered, New York, ever at odds with New England, speedily set up its own counties, courthouses, and Anglican Church entitlements. Well-connected Yorkers obtained large land grants in the new territory, while New York officials disallowed titles awarded earlier by New Hampshire. By 1770, this had brought on small-scale border warfare, which pitted the Green Mountain Boys, led by the Connecticut-born Allen brothers and their cousin Seth Warner, against the despised Yorkers attempting to rule the Green Mountains from Albany. In 1771, Ethan Allen and his irregulars faced down and scattered a large New York posse under Albany sheriff Henry Ten Eyck. Although angry New York authorities outlawed Allen, no serious invasion was ever mounted.
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New York ultimately had to surrender its Green Mountain slice of New England, but Yankee gains might not have ended there.

By 1775, independence-wary New York had stumbled into its own reverse vulnerability. Some Patriots in Connecticut and Massachusetts hoped that amid the chaos of 1775–1776, New York’s boundaries could be trimmed for their benefit. Through grants in the 1750s and 1760s, New Hampshire had claimed westward to the Hudson. The Grants took over that claim. Massachusetts and Connecticut also had border disputes with New York. Eastern Long Island, in turn, had once been part of Connecticut. Alexander Hamilton was not the only New Yorker to worry about the possibility of dismemberment.

In a second scenario, had New York factions, Patriot and Crown supporters
alike, fallen into civil war in 1775, more Yankee troops might have crossed the border in various places—and stayed.

Pennsylvania was a more remote possibility for dismemberment. For decades, as we have seen, its Quaker-run Assembly had offended popular opinion in three principal ways: (1) antique legislative districts that guaranteed control of the Assembly to the three original Quaker counties while grossly shortchanging the burgeoning half dozen to the west; (2) a persisting refusal to establish a provincial militia to protect western settlers; and (3) enough general nonresponsiveness to bring about a movement during the mid-1760s to end government under the charter given William Penn and remake Pennsylvania into a regular colony. By the winter of 1775–1776, backcountry hostility had firmly set against Philadelphia’s conservative Anglican and Quaker elites. Had these conservatives managed to hold control and block independence in May and June 1776, could Pennsylvania have fragmented? Could the Susquehanna and the northeast have gone to Connecticut, and the west to a Patriot-governed Virginia, while greater Philadelphia slipped under militia government? Probably not, but who can be sure?

In short, large backcountry populations were sometimes major destabilizing forces within provinces, and the Carolinas stood out. Their backcountries were the two areas that royal governors told London were certain to rise against coastal Patriot elites. And to an extent, they did.

The coastal Whigs controlling North Carolina’s Assembly may have been no more politically devious than the Philadelphia Quakers. However, they had tolerated and sometimes condoned the abusive and corrupt land-related and tax-collection practices that helped to provoke the Regulator movement. That famous insurgency began in 1766 with the founding of the Piedmont-based Sandy Creek Association, and it ended in 1771 after bloody suppression at the so-called Battle of Alamance. As a movement, the hapless insurgents combined an unusual blend of naïve politics, economics, and religion with a generally valid indictment of corrupt land practices and sheriffs.

So compelling were the complaints of corruption and malpractice that the new royal governor arriving in late 1771, Josiah Martin, worked to reposition the Crown as more sympathetic to what Regulators had sought. Convinced that he had struck a popular chord, in 1775 Martin assured London that many ex-Regulators would rally to the king’s standard, joining the interior’s thousands of loyal Scottish Highlanders. Martin misread the
practicalities—many disillusioned ex-Regulators had already headed west to the mountains. However, the coastal plantation elites captaining the Revolution, some of them prominent at Alamance as militia officers, also worried about the enmity still lingering in the Piedmont.

South Carolina’s coastal elites, more powerful and much richer than those in North Carolina, had also for some years neglected the province’s burgeoning backcountry. Courts, law enforcement, and seats in the legislature were thinly provided, but laws passed to meet some of these needs had been disallowed by the Privy Council, so the Crown lacked clean hands. Even so, a considerable historical confusion—widespread belief that the two Carolina “Regulation” insurgencies were similar—requires a basic reinterpretation.

Except in name, the two were not alike; fundamental differences existed. In North Carolina, that colony’s Regulators were predominantly New Light or Inner Light religious believers, partly swayed by radical theology, partly acting out of political naïveté, and generally immature in tactics. Numerous women also participated, unusual in that era, and Regulator ranks included Separate Baptists, disowned and fallen-away Quaker emigrants from Pennsylvania, some pacifist Moravians and Dunkers, and only a small minority of Presbyterians. Significantly, the colony’s Presbyterian clergy and Sons of Liberty opposed both the Sandy Creek Association and the local Regulation, and strongly discouraged Presbyterian participation.
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Not so in South Carolina. Many of that colony’s Regulators were to a considerable degree regional vigilantes and were for the most part tied to the backcountry’s white, male power structure. Besides pressing for local courthouses, close-at-hand law enforcement, and new backcountry seats in the South Carolina Assembly House of Commons, these Regulators worked to break up or round up so-called Scovilites or Coffelites—horse thieves,
banditti,
runaway slaves and servants, vagrants, and white hunters who lived with Cherokee women.
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This was an important distinction. Most of these Regulators were neither politically naïve nor religiously spiritual. Denominationally, they were an ordinary mixture of the unchurched with Presbyterians, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Regular Baptists. As we will see in
Chapter 19
, they fought overwhelmingly on the Patriot side when backcountry civil war broke out in 1775.

Backcountry unhappiness, then, was less an aberration than a commonplace in the American colonies circa 1775. The catch is that each set of intraprovincial
antipathies had local ingredients that only subtle and well-informed British strategy could have maximized. The border situations in Pennsylvania and the Hampshire Grants doubtless swayed some wartime loyalties. But for all that data is thin, the cultural and religious dissonance in the Carolinas was more important. The royal governors of both Carolinas, who told London that backcountry malcontents would support the Crown against the Whig gentry, were overconfident and inept. On the other hand, five years hence in 1780 and 1781, British policy makers brought about a prolonged civil war in the two Carolinas along somewhat similar fault lines.

Tomahawk Patriots: The Frontier and the Indian Threat

Across much of the South, a frontier Indian menace worked wonders for the Patriots of 1775 in subordinating backcountry dissension. The term
menace
is no exaggeration, because roughly a decade after the French and Indian War, and the aftershock of Pontiac’s War in 1763–1764, few observers doubted the intensity of ongoing settler fear.
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The North American colonies had spent two thirds of the years between 1739 and 1764 in French and Spanish wars that included a bloody Indian frontier. The year 1774 alone saw war with two tribes—the Shawnee in western Virginia and the Creeks in Georgia. Many of the tribes, by this point, preferred to resist rather than be pushed back farther by never-ending white-settler incursions.

Through 1774, frontier uncertainties kept some white loyalties conditional: Would King George and his Indian Department officials offer the best protection? Would the Patriots now taking control appoint equally effective Indian agents? George Galphin, who represented both Georgia and South Carolina with the Creek tribe, was one who appeared to fit the bill. Would the Shawnee (or Ohio’s Delaware) be neutral? By mid-1775, the Abenaki and some Iroquois factions seemed well disposed, but would they remain so? Prospects remained murky for many months after Lexington and Concord.

New England was no longer on the front line of colonial Indian fighting, save for what is now Vermont. As conflict spread in 1775, the Champlain corridor stood to be a principal British invasion route, renewing the importance of yesteryear’s tribal enemies. Patriot envoys were hard at work. Colin Calloway, the principal chronicler of Indian attitudes toward the American Revolution, described the courtship of the formerly French-allied
Western or St. Francis Abenaki: “Before his abortive attack on Montreal, Ethan Allen sent a Stockbridge [Indian] ambassador in May 1775 to win the support of the Caughnawaga, St. Regis, Lake of the Two Mountains, and St. Francis Indians, promising them blankets, tomahawks, knives and paint, and proclaiming his love of Indian peoples and knowledge of their ways. The Seven Nations of Canada declared their intentions not to fight the Yankees, and the Penobscots, Passamaquoddies, Micmacs and St. Johns Indians [of Maine and New Brunswick] displayed pro-American sentiments. In December 1775 the Continental Congress passed a resolution to call upon the Stockbridge, St. Johns, Penobscot and St. Francis Indians ‘in case of real necessity.’ Caughnawaga became a major center of Indian activity in the opening months of the war as redcoats and Yankees vied for Indian support and the tribes assessed the new state of affairs.”
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