Containing most of the true and genuine Copies of Letters, Messages and Remonstrances, between the Parties contending:———By which any impartial Man may easily gather and see the true Ground and Reasons of the dissatisfaction that universally reigns all over said Province in more or less Degree.
Printed for the Compiler, 1770.
At the session of the Superior Court at Hillsborough, September 22, 1770, an elaborate petition prepared by the Regulators, demanding unprejudiced juries and the public accounting for taxes by the sheriffs, was handed to the presiding justice by James Hunter, a leading Regulator. This justice was our acquaintance, Judge Richard Henderson, of Granville County, the sole high officer in the provincial government from the entire western section of the colony. In this petition occur these trenchant words: "As we are serious and in good earnest and the cause respects the whole body of the people it would be loss of time to enter into arguments on particular points for though there are a few men who have the gift and art of reasoning, yet every man has a feeling and knows when he has justice done him as well as the most learned." [112] On the following Monday (September 24th), upon convening of court, some one hundred and fifty Regulators, led by James Hunter, Herman Husband, Rednap Howell, and others, armed with clubs, whips, and cudgels, surged into the court-room and through their spokesman, Jeremiah Fields, presented a statement of their grievances. "I found myself," says Judge Henderson, "under a necessity of attempting to soften and turn away the fury of these mad people, in the best manner in my power, and as such could well be, pacify their rage and at the same time preserve the little remaining dignity of the court." [113]
During an interim, in which the Regulators retired for consultation, they fell without warning upon Fanning and gave him such rough treatment that he narrowly escaped with his life. The mob, now past control, horsewhipped a number of leading lawyers and citizens gathered there at court, and treated others, notably the courtly Mr. Hooper of Boston, "with every mark of contempt and insult." Judge Henderson was assured by Fields that no harm should come to him provided he would conduct the court in accordance with the behest of the Regulators: namely, that no lawyer, save the King's Attorney, should be admitted to the court, and that the Regulators' cases should be tried with new jurors chosen by the Regulators. With the entire little village terrorized by this campaign of "frightfulness," and the court wholly unprotected, Judge Henderson reluctantly acknowledged to himself that "the power of the judiciary was exhausted." Nevertheless, he says, "I made every effort in my power consistent with my office and the duty the public is entitled to claim to preserve peace and good order." [114] Agreeing under duress to resume the session the following day, the judge ordered an adjournment. But being unwilling, on mature reflection, to permit a mockery of the court and a travesty of justice to be staged under threat and intimidation, he returned that night to his home in Granville and left the court adjourned in course. Enraged by the judge's escape, the Regulators took possession of the court-room the following morning, called over the cases, and in futile protest against the conditions they were powerless to remedy, made profane entries which may still be seen on the record: "Damned rogues," "Fanning pays cost but loses nothing," "Negroes not worth a damn, Cost exceeds the whole," "Hogan pays and be damned," and, in a case of slander, "Nonsense, let them argue for Ferrell has gone hellward." [115]
The uprising of these bold and resolute, simple and imperfectly educated people, which had begun as a constitutional struggle to secure justice and to prevent their own exploitation by dishonest lawyers of the county courts, now gave place to open anarchy and secret incendiarism. [116] In the dead of night, November 12th and 14th, Judge Henderson's barn, stables, and dwelling house were fired by the Regulators and went up in flames. Glowing with a sense of wrong, these misguided people, led on by fanatical agitators, thus vented their indiscriminate rage, not only upon their oppressors, but also upon men wholly innocent of injuring them—men of the stamp of William Hooper, afterward signer of the Declaration of Independence, Alexander Martin, afterward governor and United States Senator, and Richard Henderson, popular representative of the back country and a firm champion of due process of law. It is perhaps not surprising in view of these events that Governor Tryon and the ruling class, lacking a sympathy broad enough to ensure justice to the oppressed people, seemed to be chiefly impressed with the fact that a widespread insurrection was in progress, threatening not only life and property, but also civil government itself. The governor called out the militia of the province and led an army of well-nigh one thousand men and officers against the Regulators, who had assembled at Alamance to the number of two thousand. Tryon stood firm upon the demands that the people should submit to government and disperse at a designated hour. The Regulators, on their side, hoped to secure the reforms they desired by intimidating the governor with a great display of force. The battle was a tragic fiasco for the Regulators, who fought bravely, but without adequate arms or real leadership. With the conclusion of this desultory action, a fight lasting about two hours (May 16, 1771), the power of the Regulators was completely broken. [117]
Among these insurgents there was a remarkable element—an element whose influence upon the course of American history has been but imperfectly understood—which now looms into prominence as the vanguard of the army of westward expansion. There were some of the Regulators who, though law-abiding and conservative, were deeply imbued with ideas of liberty, personal independence, and the freedom of the soil. Through the influence of Benjamin Franklin, with whom one of the leaders of the group, Herman Husband, was in constant correspondence, the patriotic ideas then rapidly maturing into revolutionary sentiments furnished the inspiration to action. As early as 1766, the Sandy Creek leaders, referred to earlier in this chapter, issued a call to each neighborhood to send delegates to a gathering for the purpose of investigating the question "whether the free men of this country labor under any abuses of power or not." The close connection between the Sandy Creek men and the Sons of Liberty is amply demonstrated in this paper wherein the Sons of Liberty in connection with the "stamp law" are praised for "redeeming us from Tyranny" and for having "withstood the lords in Parliament in behalf of true liberty." [118] Upon the records of the Dutchman's Creek Church, of "regular" Baptists, at the Forks of the Yadkin, to which Daniel Boone's family belonged, may be found this memorable entry, recognizing the "American Cause" well-nigh a year before the declaration of independence at Philadelphia: "At the monthly meeting it was agreed upon concerning the American Cause, if any of the brethren see cause to join it they have the liberty to do it without being called to an account by the church. But whether they join or do not join they should be used with brotherly love." [119]
The fundamental reasons underlying the approaching westward hegira are found in the remarkable petition of the Regulators of Anson County (October 9, 1769), who request that "Benjamin Franklin or some other known patriot" be appointed agent of the province in London to seek redress at the source. They exposed the basic evil in the situation by pointing out that, in violation of the law restricting the amount of land that might be granted to each person to six hundred and forty acres, much of the most fertile territory in the province had been distributed in large tracts to wealthy landlords. In consequence "great numbers of poor people are necessitated to toil in the cultivation of the bad Lands whereon they hardly can subsist." [120] It was these poor people, "thereby deprived of His Majesties liberality and Bounty," who soon turned their gaze to the westward and crossed the mountains in search of the rich, free lands of the trans-Alleghany region.
This feverish popular longing for freedom, stimulated by the economic pressure of thousands of pioneers who were annually entering North Carolina, set in motion a wave of migration across the mountains in 1769. Long before Alamance, many of the true Americans, distraught by apparently irremediable injustices, plunged fearlessly into the wilderness, seeking beyond the mountains a new birth of liberty, lands of their own selection free of cost or quit-rents, and a government of their own choosing and control. [121] The glad news of the rich valleys beyond the mountains early lured such adventurous pioneers as Andrew Greer and Julius Cæsar Dugger to the Watauga country. The glowing stories, told by Boone, and disseminated in the back country by Henderson, Williams, and the Harts, seemed to give promise to men of this stamp that the West afforded relief from oppressions suffered in North Carolina. During the winter of 1768-9 there was also a great rush of settlers from Virginia into the valley of the Holston. A party from Augusta County, led by men who had been delighted with the country viewed seven years before when they were serving under Colonel William Byrd against the Cherokees, found that this region, a wilderness on their outward passage in 1768, was dotted with cabins on every spot where the grazing was good, upon their return the following year. Writing to Hillsborough on October 18, 1770, concerning the "many hundred families" in the region from Green River to the branches of the Holston, who refused to comply with the royal proclamation of 1763, Acting-Governor Nelson of Virginia reports that "very little if any Quit Rents have been received for His Majesty's use from that Quarter for some time past"—the people claiming that "His Majesty hath been pleased to withdraw his protection from them since 1763." [122]
In the spring of 1770, with the express intention of discovering suitable locations for homes for himself and a number of others, who wished to escape the accumulating evils of the times, James Robertson of Orange County, North Carolina, made an arduous journey to the pleasing valley of the Watauga. Robertson, who was born in Brunswick County, Virginia, June 28, 1742, of excellent Scotch-Irish ancestry, was a noteworthy figure of a certain type—quiet, reflective, conservative, wise, a firm believer in the basic principles of civil liberty and the right of local self-government. Robertson spent some time with a man named Honeycut in the Watauga region, raised a crop of corn, and chose for himself and his friends suitable locations for settlement. Lost upon his return in seeking the mountain defiles traversed by him on the outward journey, Robertson probably escaped death from starvation only through the chance passing of two hunters who succored him and set him upon the right path. On arriving in Orange he found political and social conditions there much worse than before, many of the colonists declining to take the obligatory oath of allegiance to the British Crown after the Battle of Alamance, preferring to carve out for themselves new homes along the western waters. Some sixteen families of this stamp, indignant at the injustices and oppressions of British rule, and stirred by Robertson's description of the richness and beauty of the western country, accompanied him to Watauga shortly after the battle.