Conceived in Liberty (186 page)

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.

While North Carolina was going through bloody internal conflict, the rest of the colonies had settled into uneasy stability with regard to Great Britain. The lull came with the repeal of the Townshend duties and the collapse of nonimportation in late 1770. But Boston and Massachusetts still served as the focal point of trouble and dispute. Massachusetts continued feeling restive over talk in England of such drastic changes as substituting a royally appointed Council for an elected one, and abolishing the Massachusetts town meeting. The stationing of British instead of provincial troops at Castle William, coupled with the British navy in Boston harbor, was seen as a harbinger of such an unwanted change.

Another feared change was that the British themselves would pay the salaries of American officials, thereby putting the latter beyond the control of colonial assemblies. This would lead to stricter enforcement of the trade and revenue laws. The first step in this crucial change was the decision of Britain in early 1771 to pay the full salary of Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts. Hutchinson was of course jubilant over this development and over the stationing of the military in the harbor, but Sam Adams perceived that the governor was now independent of popular check or control.

There is no question that the grip of the radical-liberals on the people of Massachusetts declined considerably during this lull, this period of “sullen silence” (as Adams put it), and Adams could not succeed in rousing the people against the Hutchinson salary. But despite hints of defection by John Hancock and others, the liberal party held together in the 1771 elections, and the House strongly denounced the Hutchinson salary payment.

The Tories of course tried their best to exploit this period of quiescence by
splitting and weakening the liberals. The opposition to Britain, they thundered, was trying to lead the colonists into a “state of anarchy” under the name of “liberty.” The grand old colony of the Puritans, the Tories warned, was now permitting itself to be misled by such “virulent opposers of our holy
RELIGION”
as Dr. Thomas Young and William Molineux, leading rationalists and deists. Sam Adams, a devout Congregationalist and an advocate of old Puritan virtues, could not be baited for his supposed atheism. Unassailable on this charge, he sprang to the defense of Dr. Young. Young, Adams reminded his readers, was an “unwearied asserter of the rights of his countrymen,” a man who should be judged rather by his political than by his religious views. Of course, the man most hated by the Tories was Sam Adams, and Hutchinson charged that the “incendiary” Adams “wishes the destruction of every Friend to Government in America.”

The crowning effort by Hutchinson and the Tories to crush the radicals during the lull period took place in the Massachusetts elections in 1772. A concerted effort to defeat Sam Adams failed, but it did succeed in reducing his vote to thirty percent below that of his colleagues, Thomas Cushing and John Hancock. And of these, Cushing had always been a conservative opportunist, and John Hancock was seriously flirting with desertion of the liberal cause. Hancock, indeed, had shifted toward a relatively neutral position. Furthermore, James Otis, in moments of sanity, drifted in the conservative direction; John Adams withdrew to the quiet of private life; a disheartened Dr. Thomas Young left Massachusetts for North Carolina; and another of Sam Adams’ leading followers, Dr. Benjamin Church, secretly sold out his colleagues and attacked his own Whig writings in the Tory press. And Sam Adams was rebuffed by such other American leaders as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, when he urged them to help him keep alive the spirit of opposition to British encroachments. Yet Adams remained undaunted, writing that “where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will enkindle it.” Perhaps he realized that no revolutionary movement has ever proceeded in a straight-line fashion; rather, it runs a zigzag course, with periodic bursts of intensity alternating with periods of lull and consolidation, and even partial retreat.