Conceived in Liberty (185 page)

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.
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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.