Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina

By Marjoleine Kars

Ten years before the start of the American Revolution, backcountry settlers in the North Carolina Piedmont launched their own defiant bid for economic independence and political liberty. The Regulator Rebellion of 1766-71 pitted thousands of farmers, many of them religious radicals inspired by the Great Awakening, against political and economic elites who opposed the Regulators' proposed reforms. The conflict culminated on May 16, 1771, when a colonial militia defeated more than 2,000 armed farmers in a pitched battle near Hillsborough. At least 6,000 Regulators and sympathizers were forced to swear their allegiance to the government as the victorious troops undertook a punitive march through Regulator settlements. Seven farmers were hanged.

Using sources that include diaries, church minutes, legal papers, and the richly detailed accounts of the Regulators themselves, Marjoleine Kars delves deeply into the world and ideology of free rural colonists. She examines the rebellion's economic, religious, and political roots and explores its legacy in North Carolina and beyond. The compelling story of the Regulator Rebellion reveals just how sharply elite and popular notions of independence differed on the eve of the Revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2003
• ISBN: 9780807860373

Marjoleine Kars

Marjoleine Kars is a professor of history at MIT. A noted historian of slavery, she is the author of Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (The New Press) and Breaking Loose Together. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Introduction

On Wednesday morning, June 19, 1771, six prisoners were taken out of jail in Hillsborough, a small village in the North Carolina Piedmont. The men had been condemned to die for their participation in the Regulation, a farmers’ reform movement that had just been defeated by Governor William Tryon’s army in an encounter at Alamance Creek. Soldiers marched the prisoners to a field on a small hill overlooking the Eno River just east of the twenty-year-old town. The area had been carefully cleared to provide a better view for those compelled to watch. On orders of the governor, the soldiers arranged themselves around the hastily erected gallows. In front of a hushed crowd, which included the wives and children of some of the condemned men, the six farmers were hanged.¹

Among those who watched the executions were many of the major participants in the dramatic events of the previous five years. In front of the crowd stood Governor Tryon, a proud, short-tempered man. Born in 1729, the year that North Carolina became a crown colony, Tryon had become governor of the province in 1765. He had been helped by Lord Hillsborough, an influential in-law who was a member of the Board of Trade and later secretary for the colonies. Tryon had first ignored the farmers’ grievances and, later on, had vigorously opposed the Regulators; he had done much to escalate the conflict. Standing by him were many prominent eastern North Carolinians. These men, many of whom had vigorously opposed the Stamp Act and would soon emerge as leaders of the independence movement, had come west with the governor to subdue the Piedmont farmers with military force.

A second group of participants consisted of Piedmont public officials and merchants, the Regulators’ main antagonists. Chief among them was Col. Edmund Fanning of Hillsborough. At thirty-four years of age, he was the most powerful man in the Piedmont. Educated at Yale and Harvard, Fanning had come to Hillsborough in 1760; that same year he was appointed a town commissioner and elected to represent Orange County in the General Assembly of North Carolina. He quickly established himself as a prominent and increasingly wealthy lawyer who held numerous influential posts in Orange County. He was a close friend of Governor Tryon.

The majority of the spectators were farming men and women who had participated in the Regulation or were sympathetic to its aims. Many would have known the hanged men well. These people, all of them relatively recent immigrants to the colony, had begun their organized actions in 1766. In that year, a group of farmers living in Orange County on Sandy Creek off Deep River, about twenty miles southwest of Hillsborough, started the Sandy Creek Association. Its main aims were to combat corruption among local officials and to increase participation of farmers in the political system. The core of the organization consisted of a number of radical Protestants, mostly Quakers, led by Herman Husband, a prosperous farmer from Maryland, who had first come to the Piedmont in the mid-1750s and had settled on Sandy Creek permanently in 1762. Husband quickly became one of the main spokesmen for the farmers’ movement, as well as its chief chronicler and ideologue. His powerful ideas about social justice were tremendously influential among Piedmont farmers. Within two years of its organization, the Sandy Creek Association ceased to exist, but the seeds for more widespread resistance had been sown; early in 1768 many of its members joined with other reform-minded farmers under the name of Regulators to indicate they intended to regulate and reform government abuse. The term regulator had first been used in this way in England in 1655 and had since entered into common usage. Regulators organized not only in Orange County, but throughout the Piedmont counties of Anson, Rowan, and Mecklenburg as well.²

Regulators pursued legal and extralegal means to put a stop to practices by local officials that they considered extortionate. They repeatedly petitioned the governor and the assembly, tried to set up meetings with local officials, and brought suits against officials. When such legal measures had little effect, they resorted to extralegal action: they refused to pay taxes, repossessed property seized for public sale to satisfy debts and taxes, and disrupted court proceedings. In September 1768, Governor Tryon and his militia confronted a large number of Regulators outside of Hillsborough but violence was avoided. Two years later, a large group of Regulators disrupted the superior court in Hillsborough, beat up a number of lawyers, merchants, and officials, and destroyed the home of Edmund Fanning. The authorities retaliated forcefully.

Almost as soon as the assembly opened later that fall, Herman Husband, who had been elected a legislator for Orange County in 1769, was accused of libel, expelled from the assembly, and jailed. Next, the assemblymen passed a sweeping Riot Act that, among other things, gave Governor Tryon the authority and funds he needed to raise the militia and march against the Regulators. On May 16, 1771, about 1,100 militiamen confronted upward of 2,000 farmers on a field near Alamance Creek about twenty miles west of Hillsborough. Two hours after the first shot was fired, 17 to 20 farmers lay dead, along with 9 militiamen; more than 150 men on both sides were wounded. One Regulator was hanged on the spot without benefit of trial; the 6 men executed on June 19 had been hastily tried in Hillsborough. At least 6,000 Regulators and sympathizers took the oath of allegiance as the victorious troops undertook a punitive march through backcountry settlements. Some of the best-known Regulator leaders fled the province. By summer, the Regulation had been suppressed. This book seeks to understand why Piedmont farmers fought the War of the Regulation, risking their farms, the well-being of their families, and even their lives.

When I came to the United States as an undergraduate exchange student from the Netherlands, I did not imagine I would one day go to graduate school in American history, much less write a book about a farmers’ rebellion in eighteenth-century North Carolina. Instead, I fully expected to return home at the end of twelve months to begin a career in international law. By the end of my first year in college, however, I discovered social history.

I began graduate school with an interest in the questions surrounding the transition to capitalism in the early modern period, which was a matter not only of technological and economic change but of deeply contested cultural and mental shifts as well. I quickly became most intrigued by two major events in the eighteenth century: the Great Awakening (a wave of religious revivals at midcentury) and the American Revolution. In the last thirty years or so, social historians have shown just how much social conflict accompanied the War for Independence.³ Historians such as Alan Heimert, Gary Nash, and Rhys Isaac have studied the connections between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution, yet I felt that the precise links remained elusive, especially in the South.⁴ Here, between these two events, it seemed to me, lay substantial unfinished business, much of which corresponded closely to the main issues that had preoccupied me so far.

So I decided to work on social unrest in the eighteenth-century South; the North Carolina Piedmont provided the perfect field for study. Although the largest agrarian rebellion before Independence had taken place there, little work had been done on the Piedmont.⁵ The available scholarship for the most part either seemed far removed from any real people or failed to engage the larger questions I felt were crucial.⁶ Moreover, surprisingly few historians have written about the Regulator Rebellion itself, and there is no book-length treatment.⁷ Historians who have studied the Regulation most recently have explained the rebellion in several plausible ways: as the logical outgrowth of class conflict, as the result of paranoia on the part of Piedmont farmers, or as a function of frustration over thwarted upward mobility.⁸ While all three explanations have something to offer, none seemed entirely satisfactory to me. Class conflict rarely leads to rebellion in any kind of automatic way. Explanations which rely on paranoia or mere frustration to explain five years of costly struggle do not seem to take quite seriously enough the grievances of people in the past. Having pored over this recent literature, I wanted to write a densely detailed social history focused on the experiences of ordinary people in the North Carolina Piedmont. I suspected that such a treatment could help us understand how numerous free rural people in the South reacted to and were affected by the development of capitalism and what they thought about politics in the years before Independence.

I began by investigating people’s private lives. I examined bastardy bonds and fornication prosecutions in the county courts, but I realized that without a greater understanding of how people made a living, these documents would have little to say to me. I turned to church records in the hope that I might find more evocative evidence about people’s day-to-day lives. To my surprise, it was in the Quaker records in Greensboro and especially in the Moravian records in Winston-Salem that the colonial Piedmont came alive to me for the first time. The voices I heard were not those of the learned ministers so ably captured by previous historians of religion. Instead, church minutes and the conversations among lay people recorded in the diaries of local Piedmont ministers revealed a world where farming men and women were deeply influenced by revivalist Protestantism and wrestled actively with crucial moral and political questions in their local communities. It seemed it could not be an accident that the Regulator Rebellion happened in the midst of this creative and subversive religious climate. I also decided to examine the political economy of the Piedmont, to understand what farming families were rebelling against; to find out how these rural men and women thought about the world and what they hoped for; and to connect the Rebellion more closely to social unrest in the eighteenth-century colonies generally, and to the American Revolution especially.

The book has been organized around these three concerns. Part I considers matters pertaining to land and the economy. Part II chronicles the Great Awakening in the Piedmont and examines the role religion played in the Regulation. The third and fourth parts tell the story of the Regulation itself, comparing the activities of Piedmont farmers to those of the better-known, more elite Sons of Liberty, who similarly sought to obtain redress of their grievances, first by legal, and eventually by extralegal means. Part III covers the first four years of the Regulation, during which the Regulators patiently pursued the three legal strategies repeatedly urged on them by the authorities: petitioning the governor and assembly, taking officials to court to try to obtain convictions for extortion, and calling for legislative change. Part IV chronicles the intensification of the conflict as Regulators, stymied in their efforts for legal change, resorted to extralegal means of redress, such as closing courts. The governor, alarmed by the farmers’ growing strength and boldness, became increasingly anxious to subdue the uprising with military force. The result, of course, was the Battle of Alamance and the subsequent punitive march and hangings.

Early in May 1771, a young radical Protestant minister named John Williams saddled his horse at his house in Lunenburg County to ride with a fellow minister to the Separate Baptist Association meeting in Orange County, Virginia. On Saturday, May 11, the two men reached the Association meeting, where colleagues prayed, exhorted, and preached for several long days before the more than 1,200 people assembled. Radical ministers did not write out their sermons. They considered the power to preach a gift from God, and when they stood before an audience, they hoped to channel for the Holy Spirit. Ministers rated themselves, and each other, in their diaries as having preached with liberty, with great liberty, or, less often, with some liberty, or even no liberty. That first afternoon, according to John Williams, Brother Hargitt preached poorly, being but middling warm in his application. Brother Burriss, who followed him, preached with a good deal of liberty. Next Brother Waller exhorted till he was spent. But the Christians were set all a fire when Brothers Marshall and Craig caught the spirit and broke loose together, preaching in concert for more than half an hour with the audience shouting. Hereafter, mercifully, an intermission was called.⁹

I have borrowed John Williams’s powerful phrase for the title of this book for a number of reasons. First, I argue that, like Brothers Marshall and Craig, many North Carolina farmers were inspired and sustained in their rebellion by popular religion. While religious records for pre-Revolutionary North Carolina are not nearly as extensive as we might like, available evidence (Quaker and Moravian records, diaries of itinerant preachers, ministers’ correspondence, Regulator petitions, and the writings of Regulator spokesman Herman Husband) suggests that the insurgent climate created by the Great Awakening helped Piedmont farmers gain the individual and collective self-confidence to attempt to reform their government and rid it of corruption. Inspired, too, by the unfolding protests against Britain, Regulator leaders like Herman Husband combined the Protestant insistence on one’s own moral truth with radical Whig ideas about the right and duty of citizens to resist unjust government, to fuel and justify their rebellion.

Second, like many eighteenth-century protesters, Regulators proved themselves reluctant revolutionaries who firmly believed that the malfunctioning of their government ought to be corrected by legal means.¹⁰ Only when officials repeatedly thwarted them in their efforts at peaceful and legal redress did they come to see extralegal action, and even limited violence, as a legitimate alternative. Thus, the political development of the Regulators parallels that of the better-known, more closely studied Sons of Liberty, who led the patriot movements throughout the colonies. The richly detailed records of the North Carolina Regulation allow us to map with equal care the process by which rural, nonelite, free people—the great majority of white colonists—became politically active in the pre-Revolutionary decades. Such intellectual history adds an important dimension to our understanding of popular ideology, of the elusive revolution from below, and thus of the American Revolution itself. Furthermore, many of the men who opposed the Regulators most actively, in the assembly and on the battlefield, were the very same men who propelled North Carolina into the conflict with Britain, revealing the profound differences between popular and elite notions of independence.

Last, it is my belief that the Regulation represents a moment of protest against the slow separation of morality from economics that characterized (and enabled) the development of the emerging capitalist order.¹¹ The North Carolina Regulation allows us to view this process as it worked itself out in the lives of common people on the southern frontier. Regulators were certainly not opposed to private property or economic development, both of which were essential to their vision of a society of independent yeoman farmers. Yet their religious beliefs provided Piedmont farmers with a subtle critique of what they considered the selfish and relentless pursuit of unlimited material gain which increasingly became the norm in the eighteenth century and which they believed corrupted civil society. The Regulators’ insistence that everyone’s behavior, whether in the family, local community, government, or marketplace, be judged by the same set of moral standards challenged the growing separation of the private and the public realms and the relegation of morality to the former. Thus, the farmers’ attempt to break loose together constitutes an instance of resistance to the slow and massive shift in social conscience that accompanied the transition to market economics.¹²

Part One: Economics

North Carolina was first settled by Europeans in the mid-seventeenth century, when poor Virginia tobacco farmers in search of land moved south into the Albemarle region. At that time, the presence of powerful Indians prevented settlement further west. Disease, warfare, and colonial encroachment largely emptied central North Carolina of its native inhabitants over the next hundred years. By the middle of the eighteenth century, settlers from the middle colonies poured into the now deserted region. Most of the newcomers were small and middling farming families, who aimed for economic independence and political and religious freedom on the fringes of Anglo-American settlement. But many found that achieving and protecting economic independence was more difficult than they had hoped. In the developing economy of the Piedmont a small group of ambitious men with political connections controlled access to the means of economic advancement. The clash of values between such men, who sought to create a society dominated by large plantations and enslaved laborers, and settlers seeking a haven for independent farming families lay at the heart of the Regulation.

Chapter 1: Breaking the Way

Colonizing the North Carolina Piedmont

At the end of December 1700, a young adventurer and naturalist fresh from London set off from Charleston to explore the hinterland of Carolina, an area as yet unmapped by Europeans and inhabited by none but Savages. Guided by a changing cast of Indians, John Lawson and several companions walked some 550 miles in two months in a broad arc following the Santee and Wateree Rivers in a northwestern direction to the confluence of the Catawba River and Sugar Creek near present-day Charlotte, then back east toward the coast through the North Carolina Piedmont. Along the way, Lawson recorded his observations of the rich land, the abundant wildlife, and the great diversity of native cultures. The young Englishman was well aware that two centuries of contact with explorers and traders had much reduced the Piedmont Indian population. He estimated that there is not the sixth Savage living within two hundred Miles of all our Settlements, as there were fifty years ago. Wherever Europeans and Indians had come in contact, the latter had fallen sick and died, being a People very apt to catch any Distemper they are afflicted withal.¹

Yet Lawson met natives everywhere. Indian guides piloted his canoe, ferried his party over dangerous rivers and swollen creeks, shot game to sustain the adventurers on the trail, killed wolves and tygers that threatened their safety, and found the best places to set up camp. The party spent their nights in native villages and hunting cabins, where the Englishmen partook of food and shelter, picked up a few native words, and received an education in Indian etiquette which included negotiations with native women for sexual favors. They exchanged medical remedies, compared religious beliefs, checked out communal sweat lodges, and watched ceremonies and games—all with great interest and limited comprehension.

Lawson carefully noted the possibilities for European-style development in the Piedmont. The area near the Catawba Indians on the North Carolina–South Carolina border looked like as pleasant and fertile a Valley, as any our English in America can afford. Near the Yadkin River, where the Saponi Indians lived, he passed through delicious Country, promising great returns were it inhabited by Christians, and cultivated by ingenious Hands. To the east beyond Sapona-Indian town, the creeks were very convenient for Water-Mills and many thousand Acres could be fenced in, without much Cost or Labour, to raise livestock. Near the Indian town of Keyauwee on Caraway Creek, west of present-day Asheboro, he envisioned profitable mines and hills planted with vineyards. The Old Haw Fields, used by the Sissipahaw Indians living on the Haw River some twenty miles from modern Hillsborough, were extraordinary Rich, with Stone enough and plenty of good Timber to build fences and homesteads for the Thousands of Families he thought the area could sustain. The Savages do, indeed, Lawson concluded, still possess the Flower of Carolina, with, he added, referring to the fledgling European settlements on the coast, the English enjoying only the Fag-end of that fine Country.²

Some fifty years later, in the fall of 1752, Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg and five fellow Moravians traveled through the North Carolina Piedmont looking for a large tract of land on which to begin a religious settlement. The Moravians, a German Pietist sect of Lutheran background, had their origins in Bohemia as part of a fifteenth-century radical movement to reform the Catholic Church. Persecuted for several centuries, they found refuge in the early eighteenth century on the estate of a German count, Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who became their leader and reformulated their religious doctrine. Eager to found new model communities that offered separation from the sinfulness of the world and from potential enemies, and attracted to the profits a frontier region might offer, Zinzendorf at midcentury contacted the Earl of Granville, owner of the entire northern half of North Carolina, and negotiated for the settlement of a group of Moravian refugees in the province. To Bishop Spangenberg, leader of several Moravian settlements in Pennsylvania, fell the task of locating 100,000 continuous acres in the so-called Granville District.³

Unable to find the large tract the Moravians desired in the eastern part of the colony, Spangenberg was told to go to the Back of the Colony. Traveling 150 miles inland from Edenton to Orange County, he was not impressed with the work ethic of North Carolina’s inhabitants. Once he arrived in the Piedmont, the bishop noted with relief that among the immigrants just then beginning to move into the area were sturdy farmers and skilled men.⁴ Like John Lawson, Spangenberg appreciated the lush meadows, fertile soil, good woodland, clear springs, and creeks. And like Lawson, the bishop envisioned farms, mills, and roads. But much had changed in the half century since Lawson’s visit. While Lawson had been guided by Indians in his up-country travels, Bishop Spangenberg relied on the services of pioneering European American hunters, or white Indians, to scout out good lands, provide game on the trail, and carry the surveyor’s heavy chains. Where the young Englishman had seen thriving Indian villages and had met with Indians almost every step of the way, Spangenberg saw only ruins and mere traces of indigenous hunters.

The Indians in North Carolina, he reported to the leaders of his church in Pennsylvania and Germany, are in a bad way. In the Piedmont, as in the eastern part of the colony, few natives remained. Old Indian fields and abandoned villages suggested that the Indians have certainly lived here, but, Spangenberg estimated, it may be fifty or more years ago. Of the Indians who had so warmly welcomed Lawson’s party, only the Catawba, a hybrid nation living near present-day Charlotte on the South Carolina border, still inhabited the region. Most now were visitors, using the area to hunt or crossing it on their way elsewhere. Relations between Europeans and Indians were no longer amicable. In Pennsylvania, where the main Moravian settlement in America was located, no one fears an Indian, but in North Carolina, whites must needs fear them. Not merely the Indians with whom North Carolina had been at war, but all the Indians are resentful, the bishop explained, and take every opportunity to show it.⁵

The Moravians eventually found the large tract they were looking for. It had not been easy to find 100,000 acres in one block; advance settlers and speculators had already carved up the landscape and claimed the most fertile parcels of bottomland. The Moravians named their settlement, located on a tributary of the Yadkin River in Rowan County, der Wachau, or Wachovia. The religious refugees of Wachovia were but a small stream in a rapidly growing flood of colonists into the newly emptied Piedmont at midcentury, most of them sturdy farmers and many, like the Moravians, motivated at least in part by religious considerations. Their arrival made a reality out of Lawson’s and Spangenberg’s dreams of European-style development. Settling on former Indian lands, the newcomers staked out farmsteads, chopped down trees, cleared new ground, sowed crops, and built cabins, fences, barns, mills, and roads. Such improvements transformed the Indian landscape, rapidly altering its look, use, and meaning as Indian country gave way to backcountry.

Indians preceded European colonists in North Carolina by more than 10,000 years. During the Woodland period, a term archaeologists use to designate the period between about 1,000 B.C. and the arrival of Europeans, North Carolina Indians developed pottery and horticulture. Combining agriculture with hunting game and gathering wild plants, they initiated settlement in semisedentary villages. As their societies became more complex, they began to distinguish themselves from each other culturally and linguistically within North Carolina’s three distinct natural regions: Algonkians and Tuscarora on the coastal plain, Sioux in the Piedmont, and Cherokee in the mountains.⁶

Beginning around A.D. 1100, during the late Woodland period, Piedmont Indians developed what archaeologists have called the Piedmont village tradition. The growing acceptance of corn and the introduction of beans allowed women to produce and perfect the highly nutritious combination of corn, beans, and squash. The increasing importance of agriculture helped sustain larger populations in more permanent villages built on platforms near rivers and creeks, where the Indians could take advantage of fresh water and fertile bottomlands. Some fortified their circular villages with stockades as growing cultural differentiation and in-migration from adjacent areas created tensions and hostilities. Within villages, men and women each had clearly defined roles and powers; leadership was informal and based on personal influence.

Around A.D. 1200, some Indians in the Pee Dee Valley in the southern Piedmont began to develop more hierarchical societies, either under the influence of, or as a result of the actual invasion by, aggressive newcomers who belonged to the Mississippian culture then spreading across the Southeast. These societies built large ceremonial mounds. They were ruled by hereditary elites eager to expand their political influence and to extract tribute from surrounding, often resistant, peoples. While scholars believe their direct influence on most Piedmont Indians was minimal, their indirect influence may have been quite extensive, manifesting itself in better strains of corn, new ways of shaping pottery, and new understandings of power politics. Perhaps as the result of prolonged drought in the fourteenth century which reduced agricultural output and caused population decline, archaeologists speculate, these societies, such as the Pee Dee Indians who built Town Creek on the west bank of the Little River in present-day Montgomery County, turned back toward more democratic political rule. By the end of the Woodland period, they were again living much like their neighbors in the rest of the Piedmont.⁷

Piedmont Indians encountered another set of intruders in the sixteenth century. More than forty years before Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated attempt to establish an English colony on Roanoke Island in the 1580s, Indians living on the Catawba and Yadkin Rivers met with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto and his soldiers in search of gold and glory in the interior Southeast. In the 1560s, these same Indians were visited by the Spaniard Juan Pardo and his expedition. Archaeological evidence suggests that the strangers had little demographic impact in the Piedmont, somehow sparing the Indians from the devastating population losses which foreign diseases caused elsewhere in the South. From then until the mid-seventeenth century, Piedmont Indians had little contact with Europeans or Africans. While Piedmont Indians obtained some European trade goods from native intermediaries more advantageously located, European traders did not enter the Piedmont in large numbers until the 1670s, when the defeat of powerful Indians in Bacon’s Rebellion opened up the southern backcountry to Virginia traders interested in deerskins and Indian slaves. By about 1700, the Virginians were joined by traders from South Carolina, established in 1670.⁸

The increased contact with traders devastated Piedmont Indians by bringing more frequent warfare and exposure to disease. Even though Indians had experienced intertribal conflict before the arrival of Europeans and had traded both skins and captives with each other, competition for European trade encouraged belligerence. Groups with access to European guns gained power over those who lacked them. Successive waves of powerful southern and northern Indians such as the Westos, Savannahs, and Iroquois raided the Piedmont, eager for slaves and skins to sell to Europeans and anxious to swell their dwindling numbers with captives. Greater social contact with Europeans and with other natives spread European diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, to which Indians had little or no immunity.

In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, European settlement began on the North Carolina coast. The adventurer John Lawson played a prominent role in the founding of Bath on the Pamlico River, where he had settled after his adventures in the Piedmont; yet the growing presence of Europeans caused friction with local Indians. When the Tuscarora attacked Pamlico settlers in 1711, Lawson was their first casualty. The subsequent Tuscarora War decimated the Tuscarora, who lost 1,400 people in battle and saw almost another 1,000 enslaved. In the thirty years between 1685 and 1715, North Carolina’s Indian population east of the mountains fell from 10,000 to 3,000. In another thirty years, that population was halved again. Those who survived buried their dead and carried on as best they could. Some found refuge among the more remote Cherokee, Creeks, or Iroquois. Others sought protection near colonial forts and towns or on the land of powerful patrons, where as settlement Indians they quickly lost their independence and cultural distinctiveness. Yet others combined forces in hybrid communities, blending distinct customs and languages into new collective identities.⁹

By the time Bishop Spangenberg searched for a place to begin a Moravian settlement, descendants of the Indians Lawson had encountered in the North Carolina Piedmont had joined the peoples living on the confluence of the Catawba River and Sugar Creek near present-day Charlotte in a loose federation of communities that eventually became the Catawba Nation. By the mid-1750s, demographic devastation due to disease, internal divisions, competition from the Cherokee for European trade, and the growing encroachment of settlers which had begun in the 1740s reduced the Catawba population to between 1,500 and 2,000 people. In the winter of 1759, smallpox brought back by warriors who had assisted the British against the French in the Seven Years’ War (known in the colonies as the French and Indian War), which had broken out in 1756, further reduced the population to perhaps 500 people, too few to resist the tide of settlers. After the war, in 1764, the British government turned the Catawba homeland into a 143,000-acre reservation to protect the Indians from further encroachment by land-hungry colonists.¹⁰

John Lawson before his execution by the Tuscarora, sketched by one of his fellow prisoners, Christoph de Graffenreid, who was later released along with his slave. Courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives.

The same process that emptied the Piedmont of Indians eventually impacted the more remote Cherokee living in the Appalachian Mountains to the west. Initially the isolated Cherokee were spared the worst of the demographic devastation and the dislocation that resulted from European colonization. However, as the number of colonial traders and diplomats increased among the Cherokee, smallpox began to take its toll. Between 1685 and 1715, the tribe’s population was reduced from 32,000 to a mere 12,000, and the deadly epidemic that hit the southeast in 1738 may have cut those numbers in half once again. In the 1740s and 1750s, dwindling numbers of Cherokee carefully juggled traditional enemies such as the Creek, colonial governments vying for their support against hostile Indians and the French, and growing numbers of traders who settled on tribal lands, but the Seven Years’ War upset this careful equilibrium.¹¹

In the early years of the war, the Cherokee were lukewarm participants on the side of the English. Unhappy with encroachment on their land, the insulting treatment they received at the hands of their colonial allies, and the murder of some thirty of their warriors by Virginia settlers unable or unwilling to separate foe from friend, the Cherokee retaliated, after a period of increasing tension, by attacking backcountry settlements, temporarily forcing colonists in western North Carolina to flee east of the Yadkin River for safety. Between 1759 and 1761, South Carolina forces led three expeditions against the Cherokee. A small North Carolina militia contingent under Hugh Waddell, who had led North Carolina troops to Fort Duquesne in 1758 and who later commanded a force against the Regulators at Alamance, participated reluctantly. The forces destroyed Cherokee villages, spread smallpox, and extended the backcountry toward the Appalachians.¹² Even the westernmost settlers of the Piedmont now had little left to fear from the people whose land they had taken over.

Bishop Spangenberg and his Moravian brethren were not the only colonists dreaming of profitable settlement in the North Carolina Piedmont. Great numbers of Families keep daily crowding into the Back Parts of this Country, North Carolina governor Gabriel Johnston informed his superiors in Britain in 1751; they come in Waggons by Land from Pensylvania, a hardy and laborious Race of Men. Two years later, one North Carolina official estimated that just seven years earlier there had been no more than a hundred men in the militia in the Piedmont west of Hillsborough. Now there were at least three thousand for the most part Irish Protestants and Germans and dayley increasing. I am of opinion, newly appointed governor William Tryon offered in 1766, this province is settling faster than any other on the continent. Just last autumn and winter, he continued, upwards of one thousand wagons passed thro’ Salisbury with families from the northward, to settle in this province. A few of these had pushed on further south to Georgia and the newly acquired British colony of Florida, but liked it so indifferently, that some of them have since returned.¹³

The majority of immigrants reached North Carolina over land, part of a vast interior migration from the middle colonies to the southern Piedmont. Most Africans probably accompanied their masters who migrated from Maryland, Virginia, or eastern North Carolina. Although a number of Scotch-Irish, Scottish Highlanders, and Germans set sail directly from Europe, the majority of the Piedmont’s white immigrants hailed from the middle colonies. They traveled down the Great Wagon Road, a heavily used Indian trail through the backcountry, which eventually stretched 735 miles from Philadelphia to Georgia.¹⁴

In the fall of 1753, a group of fifteen carefully selected Moravian bachelors with six horses and a wagon loaded with all that is necessary for living and cultivating the land and building houses and otherwise making a beginning traveled the Great Wagon Road from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Wachovia. Almost immediately they were slowed because their wagon was too wide to keep in the beaten track of the gullied road. They found a blacksmith who narrowed it by three inches. Rocks, tree stumps, and exposed roots tested the strength of the wheels, while the overloaded wagon had to be constantly steadied with ropes to keep from overturning. They crossed swift rivers and dangerously swollen creeks with trepidation and spent hours struggling up and down muddy banks. On steep slopes, the pioneers were forced to unload the wagon, carry their effects uphill on their backs, and return to help the horses by pushing the emptied wagon. To prevent a wild ride downhill, they fastened a small tree to the back of the wagon to which they hung on with all their might. Even then the momentum frequently caused them to be dragged down the hill. Along the way they had difficulty obtaining provisions for themselves and their horses, suffered illness in man and beast, endured driving rain and heavy snow, slept on frozen ground, and regularly got lost. By pushing themselves, the Moravians managed to make the trip in a mere six weeks, but many families, no doubt, took longer.¹⁵

In search of sufficient acreage to ensure independence for themselves and their children, and lured by reports of cheap fertile land and religious freedom, settlers poured into the North Carolina Piedmont at midcentury. The population grew from a few hundred in the 1740s to more than 39,000 European Americans and 3,000 African Americans by 1767. North Carolina’s overall population more than doubled from 30,000 to 65,000 people during the two decades between 1730 and 1750; it nearly tripled to 175,000 by 1770. Slightly more than a fifth were of African descent.¹⁶

White families generally migrated in small groups and settled in communities bound by ties of blood, friendship, or religion. Some aspiring migrants sent men ahead to scout out the area and select the best land. Others relied on the recommendations of family and acquaintances who had preceded them as hunters, trappers, or farmers. Heinrich Weidner, for instance, was born in 1717, probably in Europe, and raised in the Oley Valley in Pennsylvania, a prosperous area that was home to many dissenters and sectarians. When he was seventeen, his widowed mother joined the Ephrata Cloister, a radical Pietist religious community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In the mid-1730s Heinrich made himself his own master, according to his mother, several years before the law giveth him to be free, and by the late 1740s he was spending winters with Cherokee hunters in the western Piedmont, traveling back to Pennsylvania for the summers. It was during one of his hunting forays that Weidner located a plot of land to his liking. He planted some Indian corn, a customary way to claim possession, and late in 1751, he permanently settled on the South Fork of the Catawba River with his wife Catherine and her brother Abram and his family. In the next couple of years, fellow hunters and extended farming families from the Oley Valley joined the Weidners on

Reviews for Breaking Loose Together

[shrike58 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This examination of class conflict in North Carolina just before the Revolutionary War is heavy on the social history and a little light on the examination of events. This is not to mention that though the social history of the South is not my best topic, I do have the sense that the author is reaching just a little bit in how she ultimately links the Regulators to the Populists of the late 19th century. While not a bad book, this is only a "must" read if you happen to have a paper on colonial America hanging over your head. It was just not as interesting as I thought it might be.