The North Carolina Regulatory War (1764-1771): a Case Study in the Nexus of Issues during the Drift to Independence and War in the West

 

 

Herman Husband did not cause the War of Regulation, but he is the activist who became so intertwined with its development and conduct that its story cannot be told without describing him and the role he played. Born to a 1724 Maryland-Chesapeake Bay tobacco planter family, Anglican and relatively well-off, he is an unlikely candidate for the South’s leading late 18th century populist activist. By instinct he was a non-conformist and so hard to control he was sent off at seven to live with his profoundly religious maternal grandfather. His grandfather apparently instilled in him a religious devotion that inspired hard work and a concern for the larger community. The old man, anti-slavery to his core, passed it on to Herman, marking him in a slave-owning society as a radical deviant from its way-of-life. However, his religious inclinations did not include inhibitions on his lifestyle, which included nearly every sin known to an Anglican. This changed considerably when fifteen-year old Husband attended a 1740 religious revival meeting conducted by an English minister on a preaching circuit in America, George Whitefield–whom we know today as the principal founder of America’s First Great Awakening.

Conducted in revival meetings, in the open field, Whitefield preached to thousands at a time. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin heard him–and while Franklin remained unconverted, the two became life-long friends. Whitefield evangelism, Anglican in origin, quickly disparaged the “organized”, “old-light religions which emphasized ritual and who’s preaching and religious activities only inhibited the salvation of its members. He urged conversion (a new birth), today we would call it “born-again”, perhaps even “woke”. This was a direct challenge to Calvinist predestination and it offered to all a path to salvation through being reborn and committed to God. At least indirectly, or implied, it was also a challenge to established elites, those who seemingly were predestined or the “betters” of society. Deep in the spirit of the Great Awakening was an elite versus masses distinction, whose implication was not “deference”, but the opposite–that corrupt and hurtful behavior of the elites was “corruption”, and their pursuit of luxury and personal enrichment. The elites, however, as we shall discover, not especially attracted to evangelism and new light thought, would turn to education and the use of reason as the path to individual enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers would be their Whitefield substitute. What we are describing is a multi-generation polarization of elites and masses in the decades preceding and during the drift to Independence and War [1].

Husband’s, and the typical First Great Awakening, conversion was a feeling, an emotion, that did not require doctrine, but rather a commitment of the individual to live a life that reflected God, and served his purposes–no matter what the individual’s past life had involved. Offered salvation and redemption through personal individual commitment to God, awakened at a mass revival meeting where many simultaneously became saved and reborn, a community of believers was created. As his breaching evolved Whitefield increasingly blurred the redemption of the individual with the redemption of a sinful society: “spiritual justification [salvation] depends not on acts of devotion, nor on passive belief, but on acting through God, with loving responsibility to other people[2]. From this colonial awakening experience, we can still see the defining characteristics of today’s twenty-first century evangelical:

What all legitimately termed evangelicals have in common [Thomas S. Kidd] contends, is a belief in the Bible as the Word of God, an emphasis on personal conversion, and the conviction that the individual believer knows or experiences God [2a]

In any event the Awakening infused the new western migrants with a new spirit, even Scots-Irish. It challenged the old-light established religions, prompting a considerable push back. Instead of exhausting itself, as the decades passed into the 1760’s and 1770’s. Whitefield died, 1770, in Newburyport Massachusetts ensuring the First Great Awakening extended to a second generation that became of age during our drift to Independence and War. Inevitably perhaps, the enhanced role of the individual, opportunity to link individual and community salvation simultaneous action, and most of all the implicit challenge to existing authority, religious as well as government, as a barrier to salvation, weakened both and fit very nicely in the facilitating and fostering the drift to American independence. It also made it more likely that activists motivated by these beliefs and emotions would assume leadership in disruptive and troubled times, and their leadership would be well-received by a larger population who saw the logic of collective action to create a new community and the removal of the stains and sins of the older one. The preaching of the Great Awakening fit precisely the needs of western migrants, determined to follow their American dream and found new communities in the wilderness West.

In any event the Awakening infused the new western migrants with a new spirit, even Scots-Irish. It challenged the old-light established religions, prompting a considerable push back. Instead of exhausting itself, as the decades passed into the 1760’s and 1770’s (Whitefield died in Newburyport Massachusetts in 1770) it extended into a second generation that became of age in the period of our drift to Independence and War. Inevitably perhaps, the enhanced role of the individual, opportunity to link individual and community salvation simultaneous action, and most of all the implicit challenge to existing authority, religious as well as government, as a barrier to salvation, weakened both and fit very nicely in the facilitating and fostering the drift to American independence. It also made it more likely that activists motivated by these beliefs and emotions would assume leadership in disruptive and troubled times, and their leadership would be well-received by a larger population who saw the logic of collective action to create a new community and the removal of the stains and sins of the older one. The preaching of the Great Awakening fit precisely the needs of western migrants, determined to follow their American dream and found new communities in the wilderness west.

Husband, remember him?, became enveloped in all this Great Awakening. It drove him to Quakerism, the religion he deemed closest to the values and practices of his new light beliefs. It was an ill-fit at best, Husband did little other than drive other Quakers into a fury. Still “he married, had children, bought his own plantation in Maryland [owning no slaves], and became rich as many Quakers did. He was a land speculator, and part-owner of two copper mines and a smelting business, an investor in a Caribbean shipping firm”[3]. It was land speculation that drove him to visit western North Carolina in the 1750’s. He bought up thousands of acres for a land development company with which he was associated–eventually he personally amassed over 10,000 acres in several western North Carolina counties–becoming the largest single landowner. He moved his family there upon is wife’s death in 1762. Upon arrival, he urged the then North Carolina governor to outlaw slavery in the western counties–and blocking the establishment of the Anglican Church as the state religion–true to his Great Awakening value system.

Husband also wasted no time in infuriating the local Quakers and was in short order excommunicated by them–he was simply too woke. In the same year the Stamp Act was passed. But Backcountry people, hundreds of miles from the seaboard where [anti-Stamp Act] colonial fervor coalesced, had little to do with protest, petitioning, and Assembly battles over the Stamp Act, but Husband in his spiritual loneliness [saw the link between it and his latent beliefs that North Carolina’s western county governments] were “dismayingly corrupt” [composed] “of kings, nobles, scholars and lawyers not … possessed of revelation” [4]. He came to the conclusion that these corrupt individuals should be opposed and their actions and sins terminated. He became the principal activist that led the first years of the Regulator War–and he did so within the confines of North Carolina’s (East) core policy system. The first question that needs some thought is “why and how” did North Carolina’s northwestern counties see themselves abused, and by who.

North Carolina was considerably younger as a colony than Virginia and its initial policy system was more hodge-podge than most. Settled by different migrant flows from South Carolina and Virginia, it the colony suffered from an inherent north-south sectionalism–even though they shared a plantation-driven economic base, in the North tobacco was dominant, and rise and indigo in the south. It had developed no port city for export, and necessarily was dependent on Norfolk or Charleston. On top of this, after 1750 its isolated Wagon Road western counties had simply exploded. Those migrants who did not pause in North Carolina’s western counties often continued on south into South Carolina and Georgia. When Husband arrived in the early 1760’s, he was certainly not alone–probably a majority of his neighbors had settled over the last five years before his coming.

Heterogeneous, this western migration was principally composed of New Light Scots-Irish, pouring out of Virginia–compared to the East’s English third or more generation Anglican American and Scottish Highlanders. All this prevented an early formation of an stable initial colony-level policy system. Virginia’s essentials of government were heavily copied, especially its reliance on an active decentralized county government and the county as the states electoral unit, the inheritance of a planter oligopoly, however fragmented it might be, and a colony-level policy system torn between weak and ineffective royal governors and domestic legislatures. East North Carolina so fragmented and at odds with itself, could only finally agree on a stable colony capital in 1766 at New Bern, only when a strong royal governor, William Tyron, newly-arrived (1764) on the scene. By that time North Carolina had further fragmented into a serious and polarized East–West division.

Strong as he might be, the new governor immediately commenced building a governor’s “palace”, as it soon came to be thought of. Expensive as it was elaborate, it fit rather poorly into a colony literally on the edge of formal bankruptcy. That Tyron used appropriated funds meant for schools made that decision even more unpopular. The governor also imposed a tax on domestic whiskey (exempting imported English whiskey) only added to the East-West woes. A palace built for an unpopular but powerful governor in the East, paid for by western whiskey-making and drinking migrants who had few schools inflamed the western passions. It soon became apparent that western counties were so malapportioned (an inheritance from Virginia) they lacked anything close to a near-majority in the legislature to press for change, and sympathy for western initiatives.

Perhaps the major cause of discontent in western counties was the domination of provincial government by the eastern planter aristocracy. The county was the unit of representation in the Assembly and there were many more counties in the East than in the West. … The practice of creating new counties by act of the General Assembly was such as to guarantee political domination by the East. In the fifteen years after 1740, seven new western counties and six eastern counties were formed, through nearly all of the population increase was in the West. In 1754, the six westernmost counties … had 22,000 people and only twelve representatives. The remaining counties had 43,000 people and forty-five representatives. By 1771 about one-half of the colony’s estimated 250,000 population [notice the population explosion] were in the above-mentioned six [western] counties, … yet these counties had only seventeen [representatives] to sixty-one for the [eastern] counties … one representative for 1,700 people [in the East] and … one for 7,300 [in the West]… From 1765 to 1771, the ‘Regulator period the governor, all [upper house] councilors, all the judges and the treasurer, and the Speaker of the House, lived in the East [5].

Amazingly, in the few counties settled by the hordes of western migrants, control over the county government was predominately in the hands of eastern North Carolina elites, and their appointees. Due to multiple simultaneous office-holding, a few easterners held most of the key offices. “The common people resented the fact that not a single officer was chosen by popular vote. The county court consisting of the justices of the peace of the county, appointed by the governor, controlled almost every aspect of local government and administration…. The election machinery was in the hands of the ‘courthouse ring’, the sheriff being the [governor-appointed] chief election official. Accordingly, in Herman Husband’s Orange County, Edmund Fanning, a “personal friend of Governor Tyron, Yale graduate and holder of honorary degrees from Oxford … the best educated man in the [entire] province [who] between 1766 and 1768, was a lawyer … assemblyman from Orange County, registrar, superior court judge, and colonel of the militia. [The other Orange County assemblyman] Francis Nash was clerk of the courts, [county] justice of the peace, member of the county court, and colonel in the militia. In adjoining Rowan County John Frohock was assemblyman, clerk of [county] court, justice of the peace, member of the county court, and colonel of the militia” [6]. These men were prominent players in the War of Regulation.

The undemocratic nature of North Carolina local government is not new to our Virginia-based chapter. The control over local government and the local economic base by a planter oligopoly was well-discussed to this point. That the local oligopoly were able to exert considerable, if not controlling influence over the organs of colony-provincial government has also been established as a central feature of Tidewater policy system. In addition, as in Virginia, the vagaries of land ownership created a large, sixty mile wide parcel of land (roughly about one-eighth of the colony] was legally owned by one of the Carolina’s Lord’s Proprietors [North Carolina as split off from it] Baron Carteret, whose descendants, the family of the Earl of Granville. Beneficiary of a royal grant, the Granville District as it came to be called, was from 1744 remarkably identical in its ownership structure to Virginia’s Northern Neck.

In Virginia, Lord Fairfax treated the migrants into his western county lands to favorable land sales and sharecropper leases–and made land grants to, Germans in particular, set up towns and public use facilities. The opposite was the case in North Carolina’s Granville District. With the lands outside of the authority of the governor, and even the legislature, the land agents of Granville were able to exact from the migrants all sorts of excessive fees, sale prices, and outright corruption in its administration of the land sales recordings and legal records. As with the Northern Neck, colony taxes (quitrents) were paid to Granville through his land agents. Despite two decades of complaints to any who would listen, the residents of the counties in the Granville District were beyond frustration. In 1763, Lord Granville died and in the decade-long interregnum the residents of the District made piles of formal complaints to the Assembly and the Crown regarding corruption, malfeasance, excessive costs and land sales prices–and observed the rapid wealth garnered by local officials such as Fanning, Nash and Frohock–and others–who had participated in the various legal and sales transactions [7]. The involvement of sheriffs in tax collection in the Granville District was notorious; in 1767, Governor Tyron publicly acknowledged that in one county over fifty percent of the tax receipts never were paid to the budget [8].

In fact in 1759 there was an uprising in the county seat (Enfield) against Granville’s land agent–taking him prisoner. In 1765 riots broke out in Mecklenburg County, on unsold lands owned by an absentee landowner. Demands were then made to sell the land to squatters who had taken possession. When a surveyor was called in to start the process, the insurgents unable to achieve satisfaction over the process of selling the land to the squatters, painted themselves in blackface, and severely beat and stripped naked those involved–including our above friend John Frohock. The episode, called the War on Sugar Creek, fell apart when Governor Tyron made efforts to identify the insurgents, causing their disappearance. In no time, yet another demonstration followed in Granville County. A local school teacher was arrested for not paying all his debts. In his trial he made a direct appeal to his friends, neighbors and residents, calling on all to oppose those deemed corrupt and in association with the misdeeds:

The enemies he cited included lawyers, court clerks, and sheriffs and he mentioned specific examples of unlawful fees they charged … his address was directed only against the county officers, and not against the king … ‘It is not our mode or form of government, nor yet of the body of our laws that we are quarreling with, but with the malpractices of Offices of our County Court‘. The schoolmaster called on the people to meet for a discussion of other grievances, but the only result of his appeal was a petition to the Assembly which was ignored. County officials continued their abuses as before. [9] .

The first organized meeting to redress these abuses took place in August 1766, a mass meeting at Sandy Creek (Orange County) which issued the a memorandum called  “Regulator Advertisement Number 1″. It appealed to the people of North Carolina to resist local oppression and put an end to the extortion of county officials [10]. The lightning rod for Regulator complaint was Edmund Fanning, whose ostentatious lifestyle, elite background, and a centerpiece role in both private and public corruptions had made him a center of attention in the increasing public agitation. Fanning refused to attend the public meeting as did other Orange County public and private elites, but the meeting itself was a success in that it brought out large numbers and motivated/mobilized several activists, notably Herman Husband to leap into the fray. A series of “neighborhood” Regulator meetings followed over the next year, with passions increasing and elite reaction still not forthcoming. When Governor Tyron issued his governor’s “palace” tax in 1768, however, that proved to be the spark that set off the War.

The Regulators reacted with a formal statement  (1) to pay no more taxes until their were satisfied that [tax] assessments were according to law, and lawfully applied: (2)pay no fees greater than provided by law; (3) [for public officials] to attend meetings of the Regulators as often as possible; (4) [and for members] to contribute  to the expenses of the organization, and (5) abide by the will of the majority. As time went on they sharpened their list to demands and complaints, demanding in the context of the time a radical restructuring of county policy that included a public land bank and easy credit, payment of taxes in “soft” paper money not hard species, direct scrutiny of sheriff’s debt repossession lists, published fee schedules, land titles granted to active users/improvers of the land not absentee, no court costs on land-related transactions, an investigation into local corrupt officials–and taxes proportionate to wealth [11].  The boycott of tax payment worked famously. A follow-up correspondence direct to the county officials demanding a strict accounting and sent them a warning that a public officer is ” a servant of the Publick” and that they were determined “to have the officers of this county under better and honester(sic) regulation than they have been for some time past“. [12]. From this the reader can understand the meaning intended in the name of the resistance association. All that letter did was further incense the county officials against the “Mob”.

If Fanning was the focus of Regulator attack, Husband was the public figure that was held responsible for their escalating activities and demands. During these events Husband became active, not as a formal member of the Regulator Movement, but as an activist who sympathized and stove to satisfy Regulator complaints and demands–but as a good Quaker (in his mind at least) he remained a pacifist and refused to join their anomic uprising and raids. Instead he published a series of pamphlets that explained and publicized the plight and the need for public action to satisfy Regulator complaints. As one of the largest landowners in the region, and because of his sympathies Husband ran for, and was elected to, the General Assembly in 1768, where he unsuccessfully pressed hard to achieve that he could in favorable legislation from that body.

This despite the fact Husband was a moderate, not a member of the Regulators, a member himself of the local planter elite. As a condition for favorable public legislation he demanded the Regulator’s disband. His attack was never on the King or even London, but the corrupt county government. His manner, style and appearance (disheveled, wild hair, plain and consistent agenda–only in his forties he looked like an old man), however matched that of Bernie Sanders, and served only to put off the more prosperous North Carolina establishment. His radical agenda in the General Assembly actually enjoyed some support from Governor Tyron who was much concerned that matters needed to be addressed to avoid a large scale insurrection.  But the eastern planter elite embedded in New Bern would hear none of it. After bringing the matter  before his upper legislature and cabinet (equivalent to Virginia’s Council of State), Tyron rebuked the Regulators saying their concerns did not justify their public disruptions and demands for redress, ordered that he be provided the names of the Regulator membership, cease organized activities, and pay their taxes and not molest public officers. [13].

At that point (summer of 1768) several events conflated to produce what has become known as the Hillsboro Trials. Some county officials agreed to meet with the Regulators to attempt some resolution. The Regulator demand for investigations of corrupt officials had exposed Edmund Fanning, and an indictment against him for taking excessive fees as regulator of deeds had been issued and his trial by the county court was scheduled for September 1768. On the threshold of the trial, the sheriff repossessed a Regulator’s horse and saddle and sold it to satisfy a debt. Fanning, on his own volition collected several friends, and arrested Husband and other Regulator-associated activists and imprisoned them in the Hillsboro jail. Seven hundred residents sympathetic to the Regulators and Husband, armed themselves, then marched on the town. They held the town for several days, conducted a mock trial, dragged the public officials through the streets, and destroyed Fanning’s house, which they “dismantled brick by brick”. Husband and the others were set free. The raid was a thunderbolt to the North Carolina elite and its oligopolistic policy system. Governor Tyron mobilized almost 1500 militia and sent them to Hillsboro–and then billed the county over $5,000 pounds to pay for its cost.

In this atmosphere the Fanning’s trial was held, presided over by a larger wealth planter-legislative leader and militia colonel, Richard Henderson (he will be an important Kentucky/Tennessee land developer, employer of Daniel Boone, and founder of Nashville Tennessee). Included in the militia sent to Hillsboro, were six Assembly militia colonels (planters all), eighteen other Assemblymen, nearly one-fourth of the Assembly members. . An estimated 3700 Regulators were in attendance (somehow); they were waiting for a second trial of four Regulators for inciting violence to rebellion–which included Husband. Husband was acquitted–the other four convicted, but Fanning was convicted of one count of taking six shillings for a two shilling land claim fee. He was fined one penny and costs. He did, however, have the good sense to resign the office. The “trials” were a farce, a kangaroo court from the Regulator perspective–but amazingly no riot or civil disruption followed. Every bit as dramatic as the later Boston Massacre trial would be to Boston, the Hillsboro trials represented a major escalation of events and polarization had now spread to the entire colony. No longer was the Regulator uprising a western regional matter; it was perceived by the eastern oligopoly, and the core North Carolina colony policy system as an existential threat to North Carolina’s political and even economic stability.

To steady nerves, the Regulators backpedaled their demands, and more importantly their tone, in order to enlist more widespread support. In Regulator Advertisement Number 8 (May 1768), signed by over 500, they apologized to the Governor for any discomfort and asserted their actions and concerns did not entail the King or his colonial administration. Their actions were leveled at “the corrupt and arbitrary practices of nefarious and designing men who being put into posts of profit and credit among us, use every artifice, every fraud, and where these fail, threats, and menaces are not spread to squeeze and extort from the wretched poor” [14]. With hope and faith placed on negotiation in the General Assembly, the 1769 Assembly elections were to a degree a referendum on the Regulators and their agenda. The success of the Regulators in these elections gave the Regulators some hope. A solid phalanx of Regulator delegates from the core five Regulator counties extended into a second ring of surrounding counties. Their leaders, including Husband, were returned to New Bern to continue the fight in the colony legislature. Fanning, remarkably was also elected from a “pocket county” which Tyron created to secure a safe borough from which his friend could be elected. Along with Fanning was a larger equally intense anti-Regulator core of delegates from the East who were determined to contain, if not curtail the Regulator infestation.

The Assembly session that followed (1769-70) was brutal. The Regulators presented their demands as outlined above, and after four days of debate, Tyron shut it down (mostly because the Assembly was also discussing its participation in the revolutionary non-importation movement), and sent it packing. The Regulators seemed at their high water mark in the period that followed. Their popularity in the west increased, and solidarity internally intensified and hardened. New local disorders occurred irregularly but were increasingly disruptive. The worst one (September 1770) was again in Hillsboro which the Regulators again invaded in force (about 150), took over the courthouse, assaulted lawyers, and dragged Assemblyman Fanning once again through the streets, down the courthouse stairs, broke into his house, burned his library, and pretty well ruined the dwelling. Before going to bed that night, the Regulators had Fanning publicly whipped. All this caused presiding judge Richard Henderson to flee the county, for all intents and purposes permanently (he left politics and became a full-time land developer) for safer grounds. Again mock trials were held and it took little time for rumors to spread to New Bern that a new invasion was imminent.

In due course, Tyron reconvened the Assembly (December 1770) to deal with the Regulator matter, yet again. Partly to deflate the Regulators the Assembly approved the creation of four new counties in Regulator territory–giving them the potential for eight more votes in the General Assembly. But to counter that the Assembly also passed the horribly controversial Johnson Riot Act of 1770 [15]. “‘The Bloody Riot Act’ as it was called empowered the attorney general to move cases involving charges of riot to another venue, proclaimed all outlaws (defined as anyone who refused to submit to court summons for sixty days) , and empowered the Governor to mobilize the militia in response to a riot. to be killed with impunity, and empowered the Governor to mobilize the militia in response to a riot–and more to the point refused Herman Husband the right to take his elected seat in the Assembly. In short order, they formally expelled him for libel, not being a ‘credit to the Assembly. Governor Tyron, fearing Husband’s return to the Orange County would lead to yet another march on New Bern, jailed Husband. A “Grand Jury”, however, found no guilt and released him.

The Johnson Riot Act and Husband’s expulsion and subsequent arrest were the last straw. From this point on the Regulator’s uprising became today’s textbook’s War of Regulation. The Regulators applied the terms of the Riot Act to their locally corrupt officials, told their members to kill Fanning on sight, and implied they would do the same to all lawyers. The tax boycott was resumed, and suspend the holding of any court in a county they could control–essentially this was a virtual secession from the main North Carolina policy system. Tyron, who had just been appointed royal governor of New York, but was still resident and in charge of North Carolina convened the Assembly in Hillsboro for March 1771. On the advice of the Council of State, he mobilized the militia and sent about 1600 to protect the Assembly at Hillsboro—it reached the town and set up camp on the Alamance River outside of Hillsboro by May 16.

After a short attempt by Husband to negotiate a compromise, peace, cease fire, Tyron order the surrender and dispersal of the 2000+ man Regulator force that had assembled nearby. Giving them one hour to comply, the Regulators refused and at the end of the hour, the battle ensued. Casualties were few on both sides, but the Regulators were simply overwhelmed by the trained and well-armed militia. Several Regulator leaders were captured, one hanged on/near the battlefield–and the rest fled. Tyron, at that point showed some leniency by only hanging six of the captured leaders and pardoning the rest. He then offered and secured a pardon for the mass of the Regulator force when individual by individual they took an oath of loyalty, which most who had not fled the county did. The Battle of Alamance was short, but its effects were long-lived. It became the rallying symbol of many westerners who sympathized with its aims, general motivations, and perceptions regarding the eastern core policy system of their colony. A second Regulatory uprising in South Carolina had commenced in 1768, and it continued through 1773, two years after the 1771 Battle of Alamance. Husband fled the county, and thousands of other Regulators did as well. Reputed to mostly resettle in in the isolated towns of trans-Appalachian Kentucky/Tennessee. Husband himself returned to Maryland, but after a few years, in secret and under threat of arrest, went to the far outreaches of western Pennsylvania, on the threshold of its Appalachians. We shall deal with him again on our next Pennsylvania chapter–and we shall deal with Governor Tyron in our Massachusetts chapter, as he encountered a fine fellow named Ethan Allen.

Take Aways and Segue Way– It is evident in our telling at least, the Regulator uprising and War, which permeated the decade during our drift to American Independence and War, was not the first battle in that war, but rather arose not from a need or desire for American independence, but from corruption, unchecked power of local courthouse rings, non-response from the colony legislature and governor insensitive at best, opposed when threatened to the interests and demands of its western frontier residents. To be sure a strong royal governor figured prominently, and the events in other colonies, Stamp Act, Boston Massacre and the Non-Importation Acts did protrude into the overall Regulator context. Also true as we shall discover, many leaders and participants of the Regulation War will become involved in the War of American Revolution, and others will enter the pages of future modules in this history. Future governors of North Carolina and Tennessee (William Blount) were in the militia–and as for Husband, he is a candidate for early membership as a colonial/revolutionary war era community developer. We will reevaluate that last toss away in the next chapter.

More to the point of our module, as its title suggests, within the War of Regulation are the seeds of western change that will harvest in the period during and after the Revolutionary War. The new mix of ethnic groups and cultures that had settled on the periphery borders of the old eastern core colonial policy systems will be drawn into the War of Independence and will be somewhat dragged into the formation of our Articles of Confederation and the Early Republic. Theirs in the politics and policy of land, its conquest, development, and economic use. In land these new arrivals to America saw as the necessary means to attain and hold political rights and empowerment as individuals. How they viewed land was different from how land was viewed by the established (and wealthy) elites that arose from coastal eastern policy system and economic base. The latter viewed land as a commodity to sell and develop for future use and profit. Today this is linked to early American capitalism, but as we have seen in Virginia, American elites were drawn to land and land development not by capitalism as an economic system, but by early elites long tradition (from medieval times) to land and land ownership as the source of their wealth. In wilderness America land was arguably the chief commodity America had to offer, but the greatest opportunity to create a new world and a new life. In this last aspect, we see the potential whereby elites and western residents could come together to achieve their distinct but shared goals. In any case. the development of land will be the prime economic development nexus  that first developed in colonial America. The power of land as a key driver of American economic growth will not abate during the entire 19th century.

One last thought. North Carolina’s War of Regulation is a powerful contrast with Virginia’s path during the drift to Independence and War. The two colonies largely shred common policy systems and economic base. North Carolina was by far the more fragile of the two colonies, and the younger; it was not settled from South Carolina as well as Virginia, although the essentials of the Virginia policy system were incorporated into North Carolina’s. Of special note, we can see both shared in the peculiar politics generated by massive royal land grants: the Granville District and the Northern Neck. The Northern Neck land development, however, was not that of Granville. And it produced distinctly different results.

There is no Regulator War in Virginia, as land sales and relatively honest, if eastern dominated local government granted considerable discretion to western residents. In Virginia, western residents did not rise in rebellion, but as we shall see, nor did they see politics, political values and their future in quite the same way. Patrick Henry was never George Washington, but neither was he Thomas Jefferson. The Scots-Irish western Piedmont populist leader could enter into and participate in Virginia’s more flexible planter oligopoly. Slave holder, plantation owner, and major league land developer, the “give me liberty or give me death” revolutionary was never outside the Virginia policy system and culture as much as Herman Husband. Different land dynamics had produced different styles of populism.

Still in western North Carolina we see the Darth Vader of Virginia’s decentralized local government dominant policy system controlled by a planter oligopoly cemented in power by an electoral franchise run out of counties, with voting restricted to the propertied, and with county government shaping the colony-level policy making to reflect its interests, world view and perspective. County government in Virginia was no paradise, and even besides slavery, it was grossly unequal and systematized inequality, but it was more a patriarchy than a Putin-like exploitation by thugs and sheer corruption. In this the royalist political culture, with its standards and value system, had to have played a major role.

 

 

 

Footnotes

[1]  Robert William Fogel, the Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism (University of Chicago Press. 2000), pp 19- 21)

[2] William Hogeland, the Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (Scribner, 2006), p. 74

[2a] Thomas S. Kidd, Who is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis (Yale University Press, 2019) in Barton Swain, Wall Street Journal review, November 15, 2019

[3] William Hogeland, the Whiskey Rebellion, p.78

[4] William Hogeland, the Whiskey Rebellion, pp. 80-1

[5] Hugh Talmage Lefler & Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina: the History of a Southern State (University of North Carolina Press, 1954), pp. 166-7

[6] Hugh Talmage Lefler & Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina, p. 167

[7] Hugh Talmage Lefler & Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina, p. 167

[8] Hugh Talmage Lefler & Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina, p. 173

[9] William S. Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries (University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 151

[10] Hugh Talmage Lefler & Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina, p. 171

[11] William Hogeland, the Whiskey Rebellion, p.82

[12] William S. Powell, North Carolina, p. 153

[13] Hugh Talmage Lefler & Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina, p. 174

[14] Hugh Talmage Lefler & Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina, p. 171

[15] William S. Powell, North Carolina, p. 156