Conceived in Liberty (183 page)

The experience of the Townshend crisis imparted certain lessons to the radical leaders in America. In the first place, it was clear that revolutionary violence was a powerful weapon against the British. Where it could be employed, as against stamp distributors, customs officers, or British troops, it either accomplished its task of getting rid of the oppressive officials or effectively mobilized mass support by raising popular indignation against the violence
of the British. In some cases, it is true, as in the Battle of Golden Hill, violent rebellion led to a victorious counterrevolutionary reaction. But these two consequences were not contradictory; in any case, violence radically polarized public opinion, and the question to be weighed was which newly polarized side would be the stronger. Since the revolutionary movement was a mass movement of the American people, in most cases such polarization could only help the radical cause.

Second, while voluntary boycott of British goods was certainly a vital weapon, it had proved most effective when used in conjunction with violence, as in the stamp crisis. When the boycott dragged on for several years, as in the Townshend crisis, inevitable strains might lead to a breach in the agreement, and one important breach was bound to end the movement. Furthermore, it was realized that a boycott movement confined to merchants would be particularly vulnerable to breakup from within.

*
See David S. Lovejoy,
Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 1760–1776
(Providence: Brown University Press, 1958), pp. 145f.

*
It must be noted that New York merchants felt aggrieved that New York had relatively the best record of abiding by the nonimportation agreement, and had therefore suffered the greatest loss of trade. See Knollenberg,
Growth of the American Revolution,
pp. 223–24.

*
Arthur M. Schlesinger,
The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763—1776
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957), p. 229. The Schlesinger volume is indispensable for an account of the entire nonimportation movement.

*
Sam Adams, for his part, denounced the defecting merchants who “like a spaniel meanly cringed and kissed the rod that whipped them” (quoted in John C. Miller,
Sam Adams
[Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1936], p. 225).

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.