On his return to Hillsborough the governor issued a proclamation denouncing Herman Husbands, James Hunter, and some others, asking "every person" to shoot them at sight, and offering a large reward for their bodies alive or dead. Of the prisoners still in his hands, he had six of them hung in his own presence for the crime of treason. Then, some ten days later, having played the tyrant to the full in North Carolina, he left that colony forever, having been appointed governor of New York. The colony was saddled by him with an illegal debt of forty thousand pounds, which he left for its people to pay.
As for the fugitive Regulators, there was no safety for them in North Carolina, and the governors of South Carolina and Virginia were requested not to give them refuge. But they knew of a harbor of refuge to which no royal governors had come, over which the flag of England had never waved, and where no lawyer or tax-collector had yet set foot, in that sylvan land west of the Alleghenies on which few besides Daniel Boone, the famous hunter, had yet set foot.
Here was a realm for a nation, and one on which nature had lavished her richest treasures. Here in spring the wild crab-apple filled the air with the sweetest of perfumes, here the clear mountain-streams flowed abundantly, the fertile soil was full of promise of rich harvests, the climate was freshly invigorating, and the west winds ripe with the seeds of health. Here were broad groves of hickory and oak, of maple, elm, and ash, in which the elk and the red deer made their haunts, and the black bear, whose flesh the hunter held to be delicious beyond rivalry, fattened on the abundant crop of acorns and chestnuts. In the trees and on the grasses were quail, turkeys, and pigeons numberless, while the golden eagle built its nest on the mountain-peaks and swooped in circles over the forest land. Where the thickets of spruce and rhododendron threw their cooling shade upon the swift streams, the brook trout was abundant, plenty and promise were everywhere, and, aside from the peril of the prowling savage, the land was a paradise.
It was not in Kentucky, where Boone then dwelt alone, but in Tennessee that the fugitive Regulators sought a realm of safety. James Robertson, one of their number, had already sought the land beyond the hills and was cultivating his fields of maize on the Watauga's fertile banks. He was to become one of the leading men in later Tennessee. Hither the Regulators, fleeing from their persecutors, followed him, and in 1772 founded a republic in the wilderness by a written compact, Robertson being chosen one of their earliest magistrates. Thus, still defiant of persecution, they "set to the people of America the dangerous example of erecting themselves into a separate state, distinct from and independent of the authority of the British king."
Thus we owe to the Regulators of North Carolina the first decided step in the great struggle for independence so soon to come. And to North Carolina we must give the credit of making the earliest declaration of independence. More than a year before Jefferson's famous Declaration the people of Mecklenburg County passed a series of resolutions in which they declared themselves free from allegiance to the British crown. This was in May, 1775. On April 12, 1776, North Carolina authorized her delegates in the Continental Congress to declare for independence. Thus again the Old North State was the first to set her seal for liberty. The old Regulators had not all left her soil, and we seem to hear in these resolutions an echo of the guns which were fired on the Alamance in the first stroke of the colonists of America for freedom from tyranny.
LORD DUNMORE AND THE GUNPOWDER.
In the city of Williamsburg, the old capital of Virginia, there still stands a curious old powder magazine, built nearly two centuries ago by Governor Spotswood, the hero of the "Golden Horseshoe" adventure. It is a strong stone building, with eight-sided walls and roof, which looks as if it might stand for centuries to come. On this old magazine hinges a Revolutionary tale, which seems to us well worth the telling. The story begins on April 19, 1775, the day that the shots at Lexington brought on the war for independence.