OMG the Storm (N.C.4)

What Up, Nerds?

1768. Eight years before the penning of the Declaration of Independence. Seven years before the beginning of the American Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord.


Last time we left North Carolina on the brink of a major upheaval. The whole north part of the state was chafing under the British government's partition of it into the separate Granville District. The whole western part of the state was likewise groaning under the weight of corrupt government officials, courts, and lawyers from Britain and from the east. And in the east Governor William Tryon was building himself an ostentatious opulent mansion. Carolina had suffered like this for years.

And now was the time to do something about it.



They met in the seat of the corrupt North Carolina colonial court system. This was the town of Hillsborough which lay in both the west of the state and in the Granville district, so it was especially badly hit by corruption.


 Sometimes what follows is portrayed as a dry-run for the American Revolution. But it wasn't really. The angry Carolinians who met weren't riled up for the principles of self-government. They weren't interested in the constitutional theories behind the link from taxation to representation. They were just angry about the men who had installed themselves as masters of backwater North Carolina. These men were corrupt and greedy and terrible administrators. Many of the Regulators wouldn't have gave a rat's ass about whether the administrators, were British, American, elected, or appointed. Just as long as they did their jobs correctly.


The anti corruption movement did not precede the revolution in creating an executive council, structured army, and high minded declaration of grievances. If they had written a declaration like that, it would have been pretty short. It would be something like "Fire officials who are corrupt, and don't tax us for the mansion Governor Tryon is building himself." They liked to say they just wanted some modest regulations put on the corrupt government. So they got themselves called the Regulators.


Instead of a Continental Congress the Regulators decided that they'd rather just meet as a colonial mob. No formal structure, no formal leaders. Just a community mob that would meet to f*ck sh*t up. Perhaps the best comparison you could make would be the mobs of the wild west in the 1800's who would meet and dish out cowboy vigilante justice.


So they met in Hillsborough, stormed the court, and carried off the corrupt officials. Next they tried to force the Judge to try and condemn these officials, but he managed to delay for a day and then slip away in the night. They captured the chief corrupt lawyer who was named Edmund Fanning and beat him nearly to death before burning down his house. Next they vandalized the courtroom, pooped in the judge's seat, and sat up the decomposing corpse of an enslaved man at the lawyer's bar. 


For several years the regulators held this kind of sway in the west. There was periodic violence. Petitions were circulated. But the question never really moved towards a solution. In 1770 much of the Granville district also rose up for similar purposes, but Governor Tryon obliterated that uprising with the eastern Militia.


The important thing to understand right now is the Regulator's image problem. In the west of North Carolina it was largely understood that these were just good, reasonable, simple backwoods poor folk who had been exploited by corrupt officials and lawyers. That much was actually pretty true. But in the east the officials weren't corrupt, and they didn't imagine the west was either. The Regulators just looked like wild self-entitled cowboy vigilantes. They were a literal mob of roughnecks who wouldn't accept their government, burned down the house of a "leading" citizen, and pooped in the Judge's seat.






In 1771 Governor Tryon decided enough was enough. He called together a thousand eastern militiamen and organized them into fighting order. And then he set out with his own private army to destroy the Regulators.


The Regulators decided that this would be their chance to teach those easterners that they couldn't just mess with the west. About two thousand of them gathered with guns to whoop Tryon's ass. When the sides met the Regulators showed up in an enormous armed mob of vigilantes with groups of soldiers milling around loosely appointed captains. Tryon's men were arranged in lines of battle, with cannons for support.


Both sides sent demands and conditions for peace. But the Regulators sent over petitions and emissaries without organization or collaboration. Tryon sent over demands, but these were unmet, soon the two armies faced each other over a very short distance.


It was then that the de facto leader of the Regulators left the battlefield. Why? He was a Quaker, a sect of Christianity that involves a strict pacifism. So staring battle in the face the Regulators not had no leadership.


Two Regulators had crossed the lines to try to negotiate peace, but were unsuccessful. Sensing danger, these two had tried to flee. One of them had escaped the easterners' line. The other had been captured by Tryon. And then in a fit of rage at the Regulators Tryon pulled his pistol and executed the captured peacemaker. When Tryon cooled down enough to recognize the implications of what he had done he tried to send over an emissary to cool things down. Enraged about the summary execution of their peace emissary, the Regulators opened fire when they saw one of Tryon's men approaching.


The Battle of Alamance erupted.


At first the Regulators did well. A man named Montgomery had risen up as a temporary battle leader since the Quaker leader had left. And the rebels were able to hide behind trees in the woods and fire at the easterners from there. They even managed to capture one of the governor's three cannon, though they had no ammunition. 


Governor Tryon began to see which way the battle was going and sent another emissary to offer a ceasefire. The Regulators, unfortunately, shot him. At the same time the temporary Regulator battle-leader Montgomery was shot dead. Tryon was enraged by the shooting of his peace emissary and reordered his troops to attack again.


The Regulators were trying to hold out for two hundred more reinforcements that were on on their way. But as Tryon attacked again they began to run out of ammunition. Most of them fled when they ran out of bullets, but a few stayed to fight on. Tryon had the woods they were fighting from lit on fire, and the last of the Regulators fled before their reinforcements could arrive.


In the end the battle had a surprisingly low toll. Out of a thousand easterners and two-thousand regulators, only between twenty four and thirty six people were killed. Nine of the dead were Regulators and between fifteen and twenty seven were easterners. Because he had taken the field Tryon was able to capture thirteen Regulator prisoners and he executed seven of them. Despite a good early performance, the Regulators had left the field and the spoils to Tryon. That was a significant defeat for them and Regulator military power was broken up.


Tryon roved around the captured Regulator territory with his army, burning down regulator homes and exacting even more and higher taxes to pay for his army's supplies from the battle. In the east and in the other colonies people called Governor Tryon a hero, and saw him as the fearless crusher of a bunch of lawless amoral greedy vigilantes. Social order is indeed a very difficult thing to maintain. It is perhaps one of the great underappreciated challenges in social history. And Tryon did enforce order on a fairly unordered place. But whether he was in the right to do is still a question with an ambiguous answer at best.


Many of the defeated Regulators fled further west, into the mountains in present day northeast Tennessee. There they governed themselves and in 1772 created the Republic of Watauga, which operated separately from any British or Colonial government. This republic eventually served as the nucleus for the Free Republic of Franklin after the American Revolution. Franklin applied to join the United States under the Articles of Confederation in 1785 as the first new state to be added, but lost the confirmation vote by two votes in the Continental Congress.


Eventually, Franklin became the nucleus for the State of Tenessee. But it's lost some of it's Regulator ethos since then.

OMG Carolina Colony Part 1

What Up, Nerds?




Between 1658 and 1660 eight men risked their lives working in a movement that was trying to replace the heir of an ambiguously benevolent dictator with the heir of their old de-throned king. They succeeded when they put the new king, Charlie Two, on the throne of England. Once king Charlie was secure in his place these eight men expected him to reward them for their part in helping to give him England.


They got their reward. It was a pretty expansive one, too. Three years after his coronation the king gave these three men a present. What was that gift?

It was all the land in blue.
I wouldn't mind finding THAT under a Christmas tree.

The king wanted to use the gift to honor his dethroned and decapitated daddy, king Charlie One. So he called it the Carolina Colony--so called because Carolus is how you say Charles in Latin, and because "Charlolina" sounds stupid. One of those eight men who were given the colony was named Lord Shaftesbury. He had his favorite secretary draw up a constitution for the Colony. And that secretary? He was none other than John Goddamn Locke, the political-philosopher and father of liberal democracy. Locke, Shaftesbury, and a friend drew the document up, and this wonderful new transcontinental colony was bequeathed a constitution.


And so the Carolina Colony got off to a great start.


There was only one problem. There were not a lot of people who thought king Charlie had owned the land in the first place. Charlie had basically only called "dibs" on the area. And that weak claim was even weaker because the Spanish had already claimed it a hundred and seventy years earlier. Never mind the local American Indians who had also already dibs-ed it long before that.


The question is that of who supported Carolina's claim to the land?


Did the inhabitants of Carolina think that the English owned the land? Nope. There were enormous numbers of people who lived in the lands that Carolina Colony occupied. But they were the American Indians who'd been hanging out on the continent for a few tens of thousands of years already. They had very little reason the care what some guy named Charlie across an ocean declared about their land.


Did any other European countries think Charlie Two owned the land? No. People either recognized the Spanish right to that land or claimed it themselves. And there were actually Spaniards living in the territory to enforce Spanish rule.


But at least the English agreed that the territory belonged to England, belonged to the king, and belonged to those eight men. Those Englishmen were willing to fight to support their King's claim. And those who lived in Carolina could fight to enforce English administration. Surely there must have been at least a few Englishmen somewhere in this huge swath of land. Right?




Well. Let's look at the land's history.


Way back in the day the English had built Lost Colony at Roanoke within the bounds of Carolina Colony. That had disappeared mysteriously, but in the far northeast corner of the territory  a small community of Englishmen had recently appeared. Ten years before Carolina Colony was chartered, there had been a few rapscallions in Virginia and other British colonies who had decided that the ungoverned Virginia frontier just had too much Johnny Law for them. So they picked up, left, and settled themselves on the inland shore of the Albermarle sound. This settlement is located in the northeast of modern North Carolina. Because of these settlers' dispositions, the Virginians called their settlement "Rogues' Harbor." That small Virginian frontier community constituted all of the Englishmen in Carolina.


So what the eight men had been given was actually lordship over these few citizens in Rogues' Harbor, and the right to fight off the Spanish and the local Indians before trying to colonize the rest.

You know what? Could I actually have a different reward?
Please? Any different reward?

Except it was an even worse deal than that. Because the king had messed up and drawn the border so that Rogues' harbor was actually just outside of the Carolina border to the northeast.


That meant that the number of Englishmen who actually lived in Carolina Colony was officially zero. The eight men had been given no citizens to live in their vast tract of territory.


So the king decided to be a little more generous, and in 1665 he added a little more land to Carolina. He added everything in the light blue below. This larger grant included the Spanish City of St. Augustine, in Florida. Needless to say, the Spaniards living there did not feel very Carolinian. Indeed, they still insisted the King of Spain's dibs from a hundred and seventy years earlier meant the whole continent belonged to them. And they were well enough armed to fight over the point. Undoubtedly the eight recipients of Carolina were somewhat less than overjoyed at this.

Oh yay, more of a reward I really don't want.

It is hard to imagine that the colony was the world's most attractive gift. But when your king gives you something you don't tell him "no." So the eight men accepted this vast swath of earth that several other people already owned. And they started planning how to make something out of it.


They decided that the first necessary step in improving Carolina was to try and get a few more Englishmen living in it. At least then they'd have somebody to rule. One man established the town of Clarendon near modern Wilmington, NC. But that town town didn't really take off though. It suffered from the northern Carolina problem of bad ports. And for the next five years Clarendon just puttered along and communed with Rogues' Harbor.


In 1670 the eight men decided to try to settle the colony again. They sailed a boat to the geographical center of the colony's east coast where they discovered a good harbor at the mouth of two rivers. They set up a new town on the edge of the wilderness there, and it flourished. They named the two rivers after one of the eight: Lord Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury's real name was Anthony Ashley Cooper. So one river was named the Ashley and the other was named the Cooper. They named the town after the king, and called it Charleston.


Charleston was a good place for a port and the city grew and flourished. Before long it was the biggest city in all of Carolina. But the success of this big old town was going to lead to some problems between the north and the south.