Conceived in Liberty (184 page)

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.

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.