Episode 14: The Corruption

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode Fourteen: “The Corruption”

Written by Jim Ambuske
Published 5/6/2025

JIM AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.   

AMBUSKE: Judge Richard Henderson was uneasy as he opened the Superior Court in Hillsborough, North Carolina. It was 11 o’clock in morning on Monday, September 24, 1770. Earlier that day, “a great Number” of people calling themselves “Regulators” had filled Hillsborough, “shouting hallooing and making a considerable Tumult in the Streets.” Now, as Henderson looked out from his bench and ahead to the day’s docket, he could see Regulators packing his courtroom. 

AMBUSKE: Like many of the people in the courtroom that day, Henderson wasn’t a native North Carolinian. He had been born in Hanover County, Virginia in the mid-1730s. As a child, Henderson and his family migrated south to the North Carolina Piedmont, joining other British Americans from the middle colonies of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey who traveled down the Great Wagon Road in search of new lands, new opportunities, and for some, God’s grace, the promise of good government, and an independent living.

AMBUSKE: Together with Scots, Scots-Irish, and German-speakers from abroad, the largely white colonists who settled in the Carolina backcountry in the mid-eighteenth century farmed and speculated in land once owned by powerful Indigenous nations. War, disease, proclamations, and treaties had reduced native numbers in the region, but not evidence of their presence. 

AMBUSKE: Henderson had lived a life very different from the people present in his courtroom on that September morning, the people who now gave him such pause. As a young man, he had served his father as deputy county sheriff, read law with his mother’s cousin, and then married his legal mentor's stepdaughter. Henderson had made a fortune as a lawyer, representing wealthy clients, often land speculators, in debt suits against settlers who could scarcely afford to pay their bills. His wealth and social status elevated his standing in the eyes of the colony’s elite. In 1768, Governor William Tryon appointed Henderson as an associate judge on the colony’s Superior Court. 

AMBUSKE: For the Regulators who stared back at him on that Monday morning in 1770, elite, learned men like Henderson were an insidious threat to their liberty and independence. 

AMBUSKE: For more than a decade, backcountry settlers, many of them farmers, many of them evangelical Protestants who had experienced a Great Awakening in the depths of their very souls, had complained about corrupt officials, unfair land sales, an unresponsive assembly, inexplicable laws, and unjust taxes that enriched the few at the expense of the many. 

AMBUSKE: They had no love for the Stamp Act, nor the Townshend Duties – of Parliament’s attempts to bind the colonies closer to the Mother Country in ways that most British Americans had once thought unimaginable – and yet for many backcountry settlers, the more pressing concern wasn’t the men who ruled them from London, but the provincial elites who governed them at home. 

AMBUSKE: To the governor and to the assembly, the king’s loyal subjects had petitioned for the redress of their grievances, but those prayers had gone unanswered. By the late 1760s, their patience had worn thin and time was running out. If the government would not reform itself, then, with God’s help, some North Carolinians would regulate it. 

AMBUSKE: As Judge Henderson contemplated the scene unfolding before him, the courtroom:

JUDGE HENDERSON: “[filled] as close as one Man could stand by another, some with Clubs, others with Whips and Switches, few or none without some Weapon!”

AMBUSKE: A farmer named Jeremiah Fields approached the bench and informed Henderson that he had something to say before the court began the day’s work. Regulators like Fields believed that Henderson and other judges were deliberately ignoring lawsuits they had filed against their alleged oppressors, using the rule of law to protect the wealthy. As Henderson later wrote to Governor Tryon, Fields:

HENDERSON: “proceeded to let Me know that He spoke for the whole Body of the people called Regulators, That they understood I would not try their Causes, and that their Determination was to have them tryed, for they had come down to see Justice done, and Justice They would have.”

AMBUSKE: Fields counseled the judge that if he tried their cases, “it might prevent much Mischief,” and for the next 30 minutes, Henderson did his best: 

HENDERSON: “to soften and turn away the Fury of this mad People in the best Manner in my power as much as could well [...] pacifie their Rage and at the same Time preserve the little remaining Dignity of the Court.”

AMBUSKE: Sudden calls rose up from among the Regulators to let the court go about its business. Many who had packed the room went back outside, giving Henderson reason to think that all would be well, but:

HENDERSON: “The little Hopes of Peace derived from this Piece of Behaviour were very Transient.”

AMBUSKE: As deputy attorney general John Williams made his way into the courtroom, the Regulators grabbed him. Williams was both Henderson’s legal partner and his father-in-law, and months earlier he had signed an order authorizing the arrest of two Regulators. 

AMBUSKE: The Regulators battered and beat Williams with sticks and clubs before he managed to flee, taking refuge in a nearby store. Rushing back inside the courthouse, they found another lawyer, Edmund Fanning, a member of the provincial assembly and a man known for extorting Piedmont settlers, hiding behind the bench. They dragged Fanning outside, beating and spitting on him as they went. When Fanning escaped to hide with Williams in the store, the Regulators turned their attention to other local officials, who received a similar dose of the farmers’ fury. 

AMBUSKE: Back inside the courtroom, a Regulator named James Hunter informed a cowering Henderson that he would not be harmed if he agreed to hold court. The judge had little choice but to comply. That night, after Henderson held hearings under the Regulators’ watchful eye, they made sure he got home safely, but not before extracting a promise that he would reopen the court the next morning. Fanning, they allowed safe passage as well. 

AMBUSKE: But as dawn broke on Tuesday, September 25th, the Regulators awoke to find that Henderson had fled. Without the judge, the court could not reopen, and justice could not be done. 

AMBUSKE: Turning their anger on Fanning, they ran him out of town, and in a scene as familiar in Boston or New York City as it was in the North Carolina backcountry, the Regulators broke into Fanning’s home, ransacked his possessions, and dismantled it.

AMBUSKE: They left Hillsborough the next day, breaking windows in local shops as they went. Weeks later, they reduced Judge Henderson’s home to ashes. 

AMBUSKE: If the Regulators wanted the provincial government’s attention, to make it finally see the injustices suffered by the king’s subjects, the governor and the assembly were certainly listening, but not in the way the Regulators wanted. For Governor Tryon and the provincial elite, the attack on the courthouse was a herald of things to come. But not of a reformation; of a revolution. 

AMBUSKE: I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution. 

AMBUSKE: Episode 14: The Corruption.  

AMBUSKE: In August 1766, five months after Parliament repealed the hated Stamp Act, farmers gathered near Sandy Creek in Orange County, North Carolina to demand answers from their local officials. Inspired by the resistance movements in Boston, New York, and Charleston, the assembled farmers charged the provincial elite with subverting their rights and abusing their power. In a published advertisement, they proclaimed:

FARMERS: “While the sons of Liberty withstood the Lords in Parliament in behalf of true Liberty let not Officers under them carry on unjust Oppression in our own Province..there is many Evils of that nature complained of in this County of Orange in private amongst the Inhabitants therefore let us remove them (or if there is no cause) let us remove the Jealousies out of our minds.” 

AMBUSKE: These Sandy Creek Associators, as the mostly Quaker farmers came to be known, called on elite officials like Edmund Fanning to appear before them to hear their grievances over land, taxes, and representation. Such a meeting, they wrote, would examine:

FARMERS: “whether the free men of this Country labor under any abuses of power or not”

AMBUSKE: And it would “certainly cause the wicked men in power to tremble.” 

MARJOLEINE KARS: When the Sandy Creek starts in 1766, they have seen the Sons of Liberty protest the Stamp Act. The Sons of Liberty draw on a radical political tradition that argues that a government is based on the consent of the people, and that people turn over some of their liberties and some of their powers to a government in exchange for that government acting in the public good and acting to protect them, and that when a government violates that contract, people not only have a right but even a duty to protest.

KARS: My name is Marjoleine Kars. I am a Professor Emerita at UMBC, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and I am now a senior scholar in the history department at MIT.

KARS: These farmers begin to see themselves as akin to the Sons of Liberty, who are also arguing that Parliament is corrupt and that the government doesn't have their best interest at heart. The Sandy Creek farmers are inspired by that. They're like, oh, if our leaders on the coast can stand up for government, then we should too. Of course, these leaders don't see it that way. They think there's a huge difference between elite men opposing Britain and ordinary farmers opposing local elites. 

AMBUSKE: Edmund Fanning refused to meet with the Sandy Creek Associators in 1766. Nor did he or any other official bother to appear when their constituents asked for another meeting a year later. By 1767, it seemed that peaceful, organized resistance to government corruption in North Carolina had come to an end.

AMBUSKE: But in 1768, farmers in the North Carolina Piedmont from Orange, Rowan, Anson, Mecklenburg, and other counties - Quakers as well as Baptists, Presbyterians as well as Protestant evangelicals - awakened under a new movement with a new name: “Regulators.”

AMBUSKE: So, why did a large protest movement erupt in the North Carolina backcountry in the years after the Seven Years’ War? How did radical religion inspire settlers to combat corruption wherever they found it? And why did the Regulators’ rebellion come to a swift and bloody end?

AMBUSKE: To begin answering these questions, we’ll head first down the Great Wagon Road to the North Carolina Piedmont, to reconstruct the world the Regulators hoped to build. We’ll then travel deep into the Regulators’ hearts, to explore the inner light that fired their divine sparks, before setting out a long march with provincial forces to confront the Regulators near Alamance Creek, to witness the beginning, and the end, of a revolution. 

AMBUSKE: Over a century before the Regulator uprising, the North Carolina Piedmont was part of a much grander imperial vision. In 1663, King Charles II granted a charter to eight men for the Province of Carolina. These Lords Proprietors, as they were known, had remained loyal to the king’s family during the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, a revolution that led to the execution of the king’s father, Charles I, and the transformation of England into a republic. When the commonwealth collapsed and Parliament restored the monarchy in 1660, the return of the king heralded great rewards to those who had bent the knee. Carolina became the property of the eight lords in England.

AMBUSKE: The Lords Proprietors envisioned a colony where the few ruled the many. Under a constitution drafted in part by the philosopher John Locke, they imagined a Carolina controlled by men with vast, hereditary estates worked by tenants and enslaved people. To encourage settlement, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina called for religious toleration for “Heathens, Jews, and other dissenters,” but not Catholics.

AMBUSKE: Attracting settlers to Carolina proved difficult. Southern Carolina quickly became more prosperous than the north, while the colony as a whole grew unruly. In 1712, the Proprietors divided the colony into two, hoping separate Carolinas would make them more governable, but by the end of the decade most of them concluded that the colonies were no longer worth the investment. They sold South Carolina to the crown in 1719, transforming it into a royal colony. Ten years later, seven of the eight proprietors sold their shares in North Carolina to George II. Only Lord Granville retained his share, leaving him in control of the northern half of North Carolina.

AMBUSKE: Unlike Virginia and South Carolina, North Carolina had no deep harbors, and comparatively fewer connections to the Atlantic trade.

AMBUSKE: But North Carolina did have plenty of available land. 

AMBUSKE: By the 1760s, disease, war, and treaties had diminished the presence and power of native peoples like the Cherokee and the Catawba in the Piedmont and throughout the backcountry of both Carolinas. And for British Americans struggling to find land elsewhere, the North Carolina Piedmont was a tremendous opportunity. Marjoleine Kars explains:

KARS: White settlers had come into the Piedmont beginning, really in the 1740s and 1750s. The great majority of them came from the middle colonies down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania into western North Carolina. Some came from Europe directly, but the great majority came from the middle colonies.

CYNTHIA KIERNER: Western North Carolina, or the area called the back country, was the fastest growing part of the fastest growing colony in British North America. 

KIERNER: Cynthia Kierner, Professor of History at George Mason University.

KIERNER: It was populated mostly by white farmers who had traveled southward from places like Pennsylvania and Maryland and Virginia to settle in the Carolina back country where the land was cheaper. 

KARS: And they were partly pushed out of the middle colonies because land prices were really rising there, and so people hoped to come to North Carolina to find cheap land in in good sized lots. And they came to North Carolina looking for family competency, as they called it, which meant that you had enough land to remain independent and to be able to settle your sons nearby when it came time for them to be independent.

KIERNER: We're talking about a white population that has tremendous religious and ethnic diversity, there's German, there's Scotch Irish, there's English, there's a lot of people from different places mixing there, and a lot of religious diversity to go with those different ethnic groups as well. There were some wealthy people in the area, and therefore also some enslaved people owned by the wealthy people, but not very many. There were relatively few towns and the towns that were there were quite small. So the population was overwhelmingly white, it was overwhelmingly rural. People did kind of like mixed agriculture. They grew grain, mostly wheat, they kept livestock. It wasn't an easy life.

AMBUSKE: Jane and William Spurgin were among the many British Americans who traveled south in search of family competency. By the late 1760s, they were among the more than 42,000 white settlers in the Piedmont.

KIERNER: Both Jane and William are born in Maryland in the 1730s. They got married in the 1750s. They settled in the North Carolina back country, specifically Rowan County, or the eastern part of Rowan County, an area called Abbott's Creek, by around 1757. Like a lot of other people who migrated into that area, they came with siblings, they came with their parents, and they came with other members of extended family and their neighborhoods, people tended to migrate in groups. And I think that that really helped in terms of setting up new farmsteads they kind of worked communally, at least initially.

AMBUSKE: The Spurgins settled in Rowan County in the late 1750s, using money from land William had sold along the Potomac River to help pay for their Carolina property. 

KIERNER: By the time of the Imperial crisis, like the Stamp Act, the Spurgins were prosperous, they owned about six or 700 acres of land. They may have owned one enslaved man as well. But most impressive of all was the fact that in 1764, just one year after the end of the Seven Years’ War, and one year before the Stamp Act crisis, William gets himself appointed as a justice of the peace in Rowan County, which is a really big deal that makes him in effect, a member of the county's ruling elite.

AMBUSKE: Despite William’s appointment, most of his, Jane’s, and their children’s time was spent running their farm. 

KIERNER: Jane would have surely enjoyed the prosperity and the elevated status that came as a result of of her and her husband success. But she would have been a hard working farmer's wife, not least because she had borne five children by 1754, and less you sigh and think that's a lot. In fact, she and William ended up having a total of 13 children altogether,

AMBUSKE: William managed the farm, cleared fields, and tended to the wheat and other crops. He possibly built a grist mill, and gave orders to an enslaved man the Spurgins may have owned.  

KIERNER: Even before he became a justice, he probably would have gone to town for the court sessions, which were quarterly, or in other words, four times a year, because that's what men did. You know, it was a way that you kept up on the news, it was a way that you sort of made connections and contacts. 

AMBUSKE: While very few of Jane’s own words survive, we can reconstruct her daily life using other evidence from the eighteenth century. 

KIERNER: There's a very popular housewifery book from the period that I'm sure Jane and her neighbors did not own. But it has this cool little passage in there where it basically says that women are housewives, were responsible for the physical well being of their families, which I think is a really kind of concrete way to think about it. So what does that mean? Well, it means producing and preserving food. Women were typically in charge of poultry. They were in charge of dairying, orchards, vegetable gardens, and so like not only producing this stuff, but preserving it. It also meant clothing your family, making and maintaining things like clothing and bed linens. Probably the most sort of demanding task in terms of clothing of family was laundry. Both William and Jane were literate. And since there were no schools in the area, it would have been Jane who taught her children to read and write and to do the sorts of kind of simple arithmetic that would be useful to them in their future lives. So it was a busy life.

AMBUSKE: Many of the British Americans who resettled in the North Carolina backcountry brought with them more than just a desire for new lands, they carried a New Light within them as well. Here’s Marjoleine Kars:

KARS: The settlement of the Piedmont happens at the same time that this big religious movement that historians call the Great Awakening happened, which started in New England in the 1730s and 1740s and then moved south. 

AMBUSKE: The Great Awakening swept through British America in the mid-eighteenth century, led by men like Anglican preacher George Whitefield and Congregational minister Jonathan Edwards. In their view, all people were “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” a God who alone was sovereign over salvation, but also a merciful being to those willing to open their hearts to the light. In emotive and emotional styles of preaching, Protestant divines like Whitefield sometimes preached outdoors in fields and parks to thousands of people at a time, instantly awakening them to God’s grace.

KARS: These folks who come down the Great Wagon Road bring many of these ideas with them, and these are ideas that are based on a long radical Protestant tradition that says that after a deep conviction of one's sins, people can be reborn. And once they are reborn, they carry within them a God, like Spark, an inner light, as they often call it. That means that they communicate with God directly.

AMBUSKE: Herman Husband was one of many British Americans who felt a stirring in their souls.

KARS: Herman Husband was born to middling relatively well to do farming parents in Maryland. He grows up in the Anglican Church. At some point he experiences one of these conversion experiences in response to Whitfield, who comes from England and makes a big tour through the colonies, calling upon people to experience a rebirth. Herman Husband is one of those people who falls under his spell and experiences rebirth, and eventually he finds a home among the Quakers.

AMBUSKE: In a 1761 pamphlet published in Philadelphia, Husband described the moment of his awakening:

HERMAN HUSBAND: “I began to feel the Wrath of God to kindle in my Bosom, and I cried ‘O Lord Jesus! Convince me of a Truth that it is thee, and I will go at thy Command!’ and I can in Truth declare it, in a Moment’s time he appeared like a Blaze of Light, enlightening the whole Room and said, ‘It is, I, be not afraid.’ I had shut my Eyes from seeing the Glory of that Light…and being told to be not afraid, I opened my Eyes and had to behold, that Light was wholly within my Soul.”

KARS: People who separate themselves from the Congregational Church in New England or the Anglican Church in the south, they either join more democratic congregations, such as the Baptists or Mennonites or Dunkers or Quakers. Others become Separates, and they remain independent, and they just attend services wherever they can, or they begin their own meetings where people who are inspired by God as they see it, will lead prayers and give sermons.

KARS: These people often begin to feel that they don't need a learned minister to tell them what to believe, that they can read the Bible for themselves, that this god like Spark will help them interpret it and that, in fact, learned ministers who are not themselves reborn, who have not experienced this deep conversion are, in fact, people who are not to be trusted and not to be followed. 

AMBUSKE: This evangelical emphasis on personal salvation and rebirth challenged the power and authority of the learned men who led traditional churches. In North Carolina, as in other colonies, the Anglican Church was the official, established church, though it was not as influential in the colony as some wanted. For Charles Woodmason, an English-born Anglican minister who settled in South Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century, the maddening number of Protestant sects in the two Carolinas was both a threat to the social order and the people’s spiritual wellbeing. 

AMBUSKE: In January 1767, Woodmason was on a missionary tour of the Carolina Backcountry when he preached at a settlement near Lynch’s Creek, not far from the border between the two colonies. And what he found there troubled him:

CHARLES WOODMASON: “I returned and preached the 27th in my Way back at Lynch’s Creek to a great Multitude of People assembled together, being the 1st Episcopal Minister they had seen since their being in the province–They complain’d of being eaten up by Itinerant Teachers, Preachers, and Imposters from New England and Pensylvania—Baptists, New Lights, Presbyterians, Independents, and an hundred other Sects–So that one day You might hear this System of Doctrine–the next day another–next day another, retrograde to both–Thus by the Variety of Taylors who would pretend to know the best fashion in which Christs Coat is to be worn, none will put it on–And among the Various Plans of Religion, they are at Loss which to adapt, and consequently are without any Religion at all.”  

KARS: Charles Woodmason is absolutely appalled by these congregations, in part because the congregations are rather egalitarian, and the Anglican Church is rather hierarchical, partly because women can breastfeed their babies in in the middle of a meeting, people come and go as necessary. People discipline their children. Children are talking to them. It's just chaotic and disrespectful and not, not at all like what a service ought to look like. 

AMBUSKE: Even worse in the eyes of the cantankerous cleric:

KARS: He also feels that it's preposterous that these formerly uneducated people who are self taught, many of them know the Bible by heart, but who have not been to seminary or to university, would have the wherewithal to give a sermon, and they speak really from the heart and the point of their speaking is to elicit an emotional response in their listeners, and that to Woodmason is, of course, also abhorrent, because church is supposed to be a place where people sit and in silence, learn, listen to a learned sermon by their ministers, and they don't interrupt, and they don't shout, and they don't ride on the floor, and they don't move. He's altogether disgusted by them, and at the same time, he's very worried, because he realizes that these folks are making enormous inroads. The Anglican Church is not well established in the Piedmont in North Carolina, but it really impedes efforts to establish it more firmly, because people don't want to go to those churches. They want to go to their own meetings. 

AMBUSKE: But perhaps most concerning of all for a minister like Woodmason, the sheep in the backcountry seemed to have no real need for a shepard like him. Nor did they readily defer to their social betters, the elite men who ruled the counties and governed the colony. And with growing unrest in the Piedmont over allegations of corruption levied by backcountry settlers against their provincial government, Woodmason feared they were “meddling with powers they could not possibly comprehend.”

KARS: These folks believe very deeply that this spark within them is it's sort of like your conscience. It becomes your moral compass, and it allows ordinary people to separate good from bad, evil from godliness. And eventually, it extends to people beginning to think that even though prevailing elite notions say that ordinary people are not smart enough, educated enough with it, enough to dabble in politics, these people begin to believe that that God like spark within them, allows them not only to ferret out sin in each other, but ferret out sin in the larger political sphere. And therefore, these people are inspired, in part, in their activities as regulators, by a religious climate that empowers ordinary people to trust their own conscience and their own moral compass.

AMBUSKE: The quest for good land and a divine moral compass guided farmers who settled in the North Carolina Piedmont in search of independence, of what Herman Husband called “a new government of liberty.” 

KARS: Independence looked like, first of all, having enough land so as not to have to be a tenant farmer. So and it meant having enough land so your sons didn't have to be tenant farmers. You could leave them all, you know, a 200 acre or whatever farm. It meant growing enough produce on your farm and being able to sell it so that you could pay your taxes and you could pay your debts, and you were beholden to nobody. So independence meant economic independence, literally, but it also meant for many of them, independence from a state church, the ability to live their religious lives as they wanted to. 

AMBUSKE: But as they began to build this new government of liberty, they began to believe that the old one was plagued by corruption and rot. The power of land speculators, the lack of hard money, and the self-interest of local officials help to explain why.

AMBUSKE: When colonists like Herman Husband or Jane and William Spurgin headed for the North Carolina backcountry, they did so with the intention of owning their own land. 

KARS: People come to the Piedmont, expecting that they can get deeds to land. And that process turns out to be much more complicated than many of them had thought. In part that is because half of North Carolina is owned by Lord Granville, a descendant of one of the former proprietors who had been given big pieces of land in North Carolina in the 17th century, all the other proprietors have sold out to the king. Granville refuses. The other half of the colony is all in the hands of the king. And both Granville and the king employ land agents to sell land to people. The way it's supposed to happen is people settle down on a piece of land, they begin to improve it, and then they when they have a little bit of money, they make the long trek to New Bern to go to the land offices and register, have their land surveyed and register it, and then they will get a deed.

AMBUSKE: Many prospective Piedmont settlers, however, encountered a vastly different reality. 

KARS: A lot of these land agents, who are not well regulated or closely overseen, use this process to enrich themselves. So they do that by selling the same piece of land to three different people, by charging much bigger fees than they should for registering a deed, for saying to somebody, oh, that's a really nice piece of land you found there. Unfortunately, that land has already been promised to somebody else, usually one of their own friends.

AMBUSKE: Even when settlers believed they had clear titles to land, the records in the colonial capital of New Bern sometimes told a different story.

KARS: Herman Husband at some point after he has moved to the Piedmont in the early 1750s goes to New Bern to look at the records there is appalled that all these people from whom he had gotten notices that their deeds should be there, their deeds are not there. The land office is chaotic. People feel exploited. A lot of people can't get clear title nearly as easily, and the trek to the coast is really far, so people cannot do this repeatedly.

AMBUSKE: Unscrupulous land agents weren’t the only obstacles to the settlers’ pursuit of good ground.

KARS: Big parts of the Piedmont are in the hands of speculators, big time speculators, some of whom own as much as 2000 square miles. And these men are supposed to make their money by bringing settlers into the Piedmont in order to augment a population that will pay quit rents to the king. But instead of spending their own money to bring people from Europe, they just sit back and wait till these folks come from the middle colonies, settle down on the land, spend a couple of years of hard work, sweat and tears, to turn those pieces of land into nice farms. And then they go up to them, and they say, Nice farm you have here that's worth a lot of money. Unfortunately, you are sitting on my land. So I'll sell you your own farm if you want me to. And then, in other words, they retail land to farmers who have already improved it and thereby made it valuable. So these settlers are basically turning what is a paper fortune into an actual fortune for these speculators and people resent this greatly. They feel that frontier land should be available to the people who do the work of turning wilderness and Indian land into European farms, these speculators feel very differently. They feel that they obtained these large pieces of land, usually through connections, very cheaply, and they spent their money by selling that land as farms to the very people who created it.

AMBUSKE: That left settlers with few good options. 

KARS: These farmers are willing to pay fees for the land and modest sums of money, but they're not willing to pay these speculators what the farm is worth, given that their labor created that worth in the first place, but given that money is scarce in the Piedmont and people have trouble coming up with money to pay. These speculators. They're often put in very awkward positions, cause the speculators say, if you can't pay, or you don't want to pay, just move. That means leaving three, four, five years of work behind. People are often in a real fix. 

AMBUSKE: The lack of circulating hard money in North Carolina only compounded the settlers’ problems, giving land speculators the advantage. In 1764, Parliament passed the Currency Act, forbidding the colonies from issuing paper money as legal tender, and outlawing its use for satisfying public or private debts. The act was designed to prevent colonists from paying British merchants with depreciated paper currency, but it also drained the colonies of hard money, making it difficult for settlers in North Carolina to buy land, pay imperial stamp duties, and even local taxes. 

KARS: They're worried about these taxes which they have trouble paying and which are highly regressive because people pay taxes not according to how much land. They own, but they pay what is called a head tax, meaning that everybody pays the tax, regardless of how much you own or don't own. So a speculator with 100,000 acres pays the same as a man with 200 acres or a man with no acres. 

AMBUSKE: As one farmer in Mecklenburg County lamented:

FARMER: “A man that is worth £10,000 pays no more than a poor back settler that has nothing but the labour of his hands to depend upon for his daily support.”

AMBUSKE: Religious taxes added to the Piedmont settlers’ growing list of complaints. North Carolina tolerated other Protestant sects and religious faiths, but like other colonies it did not grant them religious freedom. Quakers, Baptists, Moravians, and Independents were required to pay a vestry tax to support the Anglican Church in their respective counties. 

AMBUSKE: And while the vestry tax funded the salaries of local Anglican ministers, supporting the salaries of local sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other court officials was an entirely different matter. 

ABBY CHANDLER: North Carolina cannot afford to pay salaries for many of its positions of the colonial government: the royal governor gets a salary, the Chief Justice gets a salary, the Governor's Council gets a salary. But the positions at the county level, county clerks, county sheriff's, essential for making county work, do not get paid salaries. 

CHANDLER: I'm Abby Chandler. I am Associate Professor of early American history at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. 

CHANDLER: The system that the North Carolina legislature comes up with is that the county sheriff is responsible for collecting taxes, both colonial and Imperial taxes. And he can then collect a percentage on top of that. There are no rules that say how large that percentages. So the sheriff could come out to your farm and say I'm here to collect the colonial taxes. And that'll be 8% on top of that, and you'll pay him the taxes plus the 8%. He goes off. There's also no system for documenting the collection. So he can come back two weeks later and say hi, I'm here for the taxes. And you can say but I paid them and he can say no you didn't. This is a problem that everybody in North Carolina is aware of. And in the 1750s Governor Dobbs mentions this is a problem we need to fix this. But the colonial legislature has no interest in fixing the problem, because the men who are in the colonial legislature are from those powerful eastern North Carolina families. And the county clerks and sheriffs are their brothers and their sons and their nephews. And this system is financially benefiting their families. So why fix it?

AMBUSKE: By 1766, Piedmont farmers began to believe it was up to them to fix what they saw as a corrupt system, and defend their rights and liberties as the king’s subjects. Quakers and other Protestants, men as well as women guided by an inner light, met at Sandy Creek in Orange County that August to discuss their plight. Marjoleine Kars explains why: 

KARS: The Sandy Creek Association is started in 1766, by a number of farmers who are deeply disappointed by what they found in the Piedmont, the ways in which it did not turn out to be a new government of liberty, and who decide that together, they are going to agitate for greater fairness, for farmers to root out government fraud, government officials on the local courts, who charge people more fees than they should, this land situation, but also the fact that people have to use the courts for pretty much everything that happens to a farmer when they interact with government. 

AMBUSKE: From the farmers’ point of view, local courts and court officials were at the heart of an unfair, unjust, and immoral world that sacrificed virtue, Godliness, and the community’s well being in favor of self-interest, greed, and naked ambition.  

KARS: If you want to register a deed or you want to register a contract, or you want to sue for a debt, or you want to contest the debt, you go initially to your local court, and those local courts charge fees, and those fees add up very fast, and what court officials are doing is charge fees that are way higher than what's allowed, and they frequently postpone cases, you pay fees every time your case comes up again. Fees go up because court cases are postponed, and also people have to travel 10,15, 20,30 miles to come to court. So postponements are expensive in a number of different ways. 

AMBUSKE: And then there were lawyers like Edmund Fanning, a native of Long Island, New York, and a favorite of Governor Tryon, who made a very good living in Orange County representing land speculators and wealthy clients in local courts. Around 1765, one disgruntled backcountry settler entertained wedding guests with a song about a poor man who had become very rich:

REGULATOR SONG: When Fanning first to Orange came

                      He looked both pale and wan,

                      An old patched coat upon his back,

                      An old mare he rode on.

                      Both man and mare wa'n't worth five pounds,

                      As I've been often told,

                      But by his civil robberies

                      He's laced his coat with gold.

KARS: So the Sandy Creek Association starts initially as a way to figure out, how can they make government more responsive and more fair and less corrupt. 

AMBUSKE: The farmers called on Edmund Fanning, their representative in the provincial assembly, as well as other officials to appear before them at Sandy Creek. In a manifesto written by Herman Husband, the farmers demanded that these officials “give an account of their Stewardship.” Fanning declined.

AMBUSKE: Nor did petitions to the governor and the provincial assembly have much effect. 

KARS: They have very limited success, and in 1768 they reorganized and they rename themselves “The Regulators.” 

AMBUSKE: When dawn broke in 1768, settlers in the North Carolina Piedmont ushered in the new year with a renewed sense of purpose and determination that justice would be done. Farmers in Orange, Anson, Mecklenburg, and Rowan counties resurrected the spirit of the Sandy Creek Association, this time calling themselves “Regulators.”

AMBUSKE: The choice of that name was no accident. It revealed the farmers’ familiarity with English history, and a common, moral sense informed by their evangelical beliefs. 

KARS: It's a term that originates in Britain in about the mid of the 17th century, where regulators were actually government officials who were appointed to travel around and ferret out government corruption in local in towns and cities. By adopting that name, farmers are trying to give themselves a certain amount of legitimacy and say we too are going to ferret out government corruption in order that government work better. 

AMBUSKE: The Regulators agreed among themselves not to pay taxes nor pay court officers any fees greater than those allowed by law, unless their grievances were redressed, or they were compelled by force. 

FARMERS: “We will stand true and faithful to this cause until We bring them to a true regulation.”

AMBUSKE: But who were the leaders of this cause? Unlike settlers’ formal petitions to the governor or the assembly, the Regulators often didn’t sign their public communications. And that was intentional. 

KARS: They are a very egalitarian group of people. A movement that loosely hangs together by people who, who share grievances, who share similar ideas about how it ought to be relieved or how things ought to be made better, and who come and go as the situation requires it. 

KARS: They repeatedly refuse to have leaders. Or when people are appointed and asked to take leadership roles, those men say, no, we're all doing this together. We shouldn't have leaders.

AMBUSKE: Nevertheless, some settlers exerted a greater influence than others over the movement. Men like Jeremiah Fields, James Hunter, and most especially Herman Husband. 

NAHTAN SCHULTZ: I would describe Herman Husband as a radical, theocratic Democrat, he believes in radical politics. He cares about the common people. He really hates these courthouse rings. He literally calls him the beast in a very clear biblical reference. 

SCHULTZ: I'm Nathan Schultz, the site manager at Alamance battlegrounds, the historic site as part of the North Carolina State Historic Site system.

SCHUTLZ: He had religious visions about his place in the world and how the world should be. And he cared deeply about the regular people.

AMBUSKE: Husband is a complicated, confounding figure, a man who in this moment and in the decades to come seemed to relish rebellion and revolution wherever he found it. When he migrated to the North Carolina Piedmont in the 1750s, he joined the Quaker community at Cane Creek in Orange County. But in 1764, the community expelled him following a years-long dispute over the membership of a woman named Rachel Wright, who had very publicly supported her young daughter Charity after her alleged rape by Jehu Stuart.

AMBUSKE: Husband didn’t abandon his Quaker beliefs after his expulsion, but he struggled to reconcile Quaker pacifism and moderation with evangelical ferocity, and his own sense of his English rights and liberties. He was willing to lift the terrible, swift sword of God’s righteous justice, but leave it to others to swing it. 

KARS: Men like Herman Husband take that idea of a compact that people have a duty to protect, and he melds that with this radical Protestant idea about people having a God like spark within them that tells them what's right and wrong. And so Herman Husband begins to argue that not only do people have a right and a duty to protect government, but that the God like spark within them makes that duty a sacred duty, so that radical religion not only makes it okay for ordinary people to engage in politics, but it makes it imperative that men do so, and in fact, God is on their side.

AMBUSKE: In Husband’s view, the Regulators had a singular objective: 

HUSBAND: “All we want is to be Governed by Law, and not by the Will of officers, which to us is perfectly despotick and arbitrary.”

AMBUSKE: But from the perspective of Governor Tryon, the provincial assembly, and local officials like Edmund Fanning, the Regulators and the backcountry were on the edge of lawlessness. 

AMBUSKE: Tryon was a soldier of empire and a man of imperial ambition. Appointed governor by the king in 1764, Tyron had his eyes set on an even greater prize – the governorship of New York. But first, he had to prove himself in North Carolina. Here’s Nathan Schultz:

SCHULTZ: He's really this typical British imperial official. He had family connections, both through his own family and his wife's family, who were considerably wealthy and influential.

SCHULTZ: He's also a career military officer. He started in the first Foot Guards, the most prestigious, unit in the British Army. And he eventually rises all the way up to Lieutenant Colonel at that regiment, and fights with them during raids to France during the Seven Years’ War. And gains this royal appointment to become Governor of North Carolina. 

AMBUSKE: In North Carolina, the Governor hoped to improve the colony’s image.

SCHULTZ: He tries, from his perspective, he tries to raise the prestige of North Carolina. He improved the postal system. He views that to have a respectful colony, you need to have a place, a center, a focal point of government power. And that's where he constructs what becomes Tryon’s palace.

AMBUSKE: In the spring of 1768, word of a new round of taxes reached farmers in Orange County. The new levies would pay for the construction of an ostentatious building in the capital of New Bern. Three years earlier, the Stamp Act crisis had soured relations between Governor Tryon, who had a duty to enforce Parliament’s detested law, and the provincial assembly, who resisted it. With the crisis abated, and in an effort to restore harmony with the governor, the assembly appropriated a total of £15,000 to fund the construction of a new official residence for the colony’s governors that some would soon call “Tryon Palace.” 

AMBUSKE: For Tyron, the erection of the fine red brick Georgian-style building was in keeping with his efforts to elevate North Carolina from a colonial backwater into a proper imperial province. 

SCHULTZ: He comes with an architect to build this, the assembly originally authorized £5000 to construct it, eventually cost £15,000 pounds, and so the difference has to be made up from the population.

AMBUSKE: To Piedmont farmers, Tryon Palace was a monument to malfeasance, an edifice that symbolized the wealth in which they did not share. They learned of the palace’s greater costs shortly after the sheriff of Orange County announced he would no longer travel from farm to farm to collect all due taxes. Instead, colonists would be required to pay them at one of five different collection points, putting the responsibility – and any expenses that came with it – on them. 

AMBUSKE: As farmers began working their fields that spring, the backcountry reached a breaking point. In March 1768, Regulators in Orange County protested the new appropriations for Tryon Palace, declaring they would not pay any tax until Edmund Fanning, their representative, could justify it to them. 

AMBUSKE: In April, an armed Regulator mob confronted the county sheriff near Hillsborough after he had seized the horse of a Regulator accused of not paying his taxes. Fanning informed Tryon that he could not rely on the county militia to help restore order. Most militiamen were sympathetic to the Regulators’ cause, if not Regulators themselves. 

AMBUSKE: Two weeks later, some 40 armed Regulators in nearby Anson County barged into the local court in Salisbury and disrupted its proceedings. They came back days later – and in greater numbers – expelling the judges, holding their own court, and debating whether to burn the building. They warned the sheriff he would do well to make no attempt to collect taxes. 

AMBUSKE: In the wake of these events, Tryon believed it had become necessary to reassert the provincial government’s authority in the Piedmont. On April 27th, the governor issued a proclamation ordering the Regulators to disburse, submit to law, or face force. He deputized Edmund Fanning and a company of men to arrest the chief agitators, leading to the arrest of Herman Husband and William Butler on May 1st. 

AMBUSKE: Men, women, and children gathered by the hundreds on the streets of Hillsborough to protest the arrests, raising fears of a violent confrontation – or something far worse. As one Regulator wrote, if government officials could arrest Husband and Butler, then “none were now safe, whether active, passive, or neutral.”  

AMBUSKE: Fortunately, Tryon’s private secretary managed to calm the mob. He pledged that if the crowd dispersed the governor would receive their petitions. For the Regulators, this was a victory, a chance to open the governor’s eyes to their plight, and the corruption that threatened the liberties of all the king’s subjects. That assurance was, for the moment, good enough. The crowd went home. 

AMBUSKE: When the Regulators sent their petition to Tryon in late May 1768, they apologized for the recent upheavals, but assured the governor they were necessary:

REGULATORS: “Those Disturbances had their source in the corrupt and arbitrary Practices of nefarious & designing men who being put into Posts of Profit and Credit among us, and not being satisfied with the legal benefits which arose from the execution of their Offices have been using every artiface, practicing every Fraud…to squeeze and extort from the wretched Poor.” 

AMBUSKE: But Tryon was not as receptive as the Regulators had hoped. Their complaints, he replied, did not justify their actions. Nor did they have any right to call themselves “Regulators.”

KARS: Governor Tryon is very upset about them using that term, and he's constantly saying quit using that term regulators. He says it means that you are assuming a constitutional authority that you do not have. 

AMBUSKE: Still, Tyron could not ignore the merits of some of the Regulators’ grievances. In July, he issued a proclamation commanding court officials to cease charging excessive fees. Yet, he could not turn a blind eye from the perceived weakness of the government in the backcountry. He paid a visit to Hillsborough that summer, to make a point.

KARS: He really relishes taking the fields. He, from the very beginning, refuses to take farmers’ grievances seriously. I argue that he does much to inflame the situation. Several times, coming to Hillsborough, ostensibly to meet with people, but then, in fact, bringing soldiers with him, arguing that these farmers are disrespectful, that their grievances are made up, that they are violating the Constitution. He ratchets up the situation. He makes what could have remained peaceful protests into something that becomes increasingly contentious and intention filled. People increasingly come to believe that he wants to militarily fight against them. They no longer believe that he is out to help them.

AMBUSKE: Tryon returned in late September leading a force of over 1,400 men. He marched them through Regulator country in a show of force. Though over 3,000 Regulators turned out to meet the governor and his soldiers in Hillsborough on September 19th, they had little wish for an armed confrontation. Nor did they show any enthusiasm for obeying Tryon’s order to turn over nine of their men, and all of their weapons. They simply faded into the night. 

AMBUSKE: Tryon and the militia remained in town as the trails of William Butler and Herman Husband got underway. In a token measure, Edmund Fanning was charged with extortion. Martin Howard, the colony’s new chief justice, presided over the trials, along with Judge Richard Henderson. Howard was no stranger to provincial unrest. Three years earlier, he had fled Rhode Island after colonists confronted him over his support of the Stamp Act. 

AMBUSKE: His court found Husband not guilty. It convicted Butler of illegally retaking the horse confiscated by the Orange County sheriff. He was sentenced to prison. Fanning was found guilty of extortion, but fined only a single penny. 

AMBUSKE: Ann Hooper, the wife of prominent attorney William Hooper, was disappointed that Tryon, who had been ill on the march to Hillsborough, had not done more to end the Regulator uprisings. As she wrote to a friend in the wake of the trials: 

ANN HOOPER: “[A] number of men mostly from orange county who took the title regulators have given great disturbance to the County. They demanded that the Register & Clerk of Orange should be given to them[,] refused paying their taxes[,] desired the assembly might be Dissolved[,] [and] threatened to pull the Province House down…..People imagine they have been too passive with them[.] if the Govr had been well he would have pursued more vigorous measures & have humbled them sufficiently.” 

AMBUSKE: If Governor Tryon believed that his martial tour of the backcountry had sufficiently humbled the people, he was wrong. And though the provincial government’s flaws were the Regulators’ most immediate concern, for Tryon, the Regulators were fast becoming part of a much larger imperial problem. 

AMBUSKE: In early 1768, just as Piedmont farmers began reforming themselves into Regulators, the Massachusetts House of Representatives issued a Circular Letter to the assemblies in the other colonies, calling on them to unite in a coordinated resistance to the Townshend Acts. In response, the Earl of Hillsborough, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, and the namesake of the Piedmont town, ordered governors to suspend or dissolve their assemblies should their members open debate on the Massachusetts missive. 

AMBUSKE: For months, from the fall of 1768 through the fall of 1770, Tryon and the North Carolina assembly danced a delicate minuet. Tryon needed the assembly to appropriate money for the militia should they be needed in the backcountry, and the assembly wanted to avoid its suspension or dissolution so it could consider measures to counter Parliament’s perceived overreach. Neither the governor nor most of the representatives, however, had much sympathy for the Regulators’ grievances.

AMBUSKE: In the fall of 1768, the assembly finished its legislative work – including funding the militia – before it began a debate on the Massachusetts Circular Letter, prompting Tryon to prorogue it. But by May 1769, when the assembly began considering a boycott of British goods until Parliament repealed the Townshend Acts, Tyron dissolved it entirely. He called for new elections, hoping that by the time the new assembly sat in October, cooler heads would have prevailed. 

AMBUSKE: The Regulators saw the assembly’s demise as a major opportunity. If they wanted to purge the colony of corruption, they would have to do it from within the government itself. In Orange, Anson, Rowan, and Granville counties, Regulators ran for the assembly. And much to the delight of Regulators in Orange, and the dismay of Tryon and other leading men, Edmund Fanning was defeated, and Herman Husband was elected in his stead. 

KARS: They see him as a threat, precisely because he has so many followers, so many people who are willing to come out for him. He's imprisoned in 1768 and hundreds of people come and confront a governor demanding his release. They are afraid of him because he's articulate, he's tenacious, and people are willing to to put bites behind his words.

AMBUSKE: From England, Henry McCulloh, one of the largest North Carolina land speculators, believed that the election of Herman Husband from Orange and Regulator Christopher Nation from Rowan was a sign of a “dangerous spirit of levelling” in the colony:

HENRY MCCULLOH: “the madness of the people must be great indeed, to trust such wretches as Herman Husbands and Christopher Nation as their representatives.”

AMBUSKE: What McCulloh imagined as “madness,” and a threat to the social order, the Regulators and their supporters saw as a chance, with God’s help, to usher in a new government of liberty. They called for secret ballots and an end to public voice voting in elections, a practice that exposed voters to intimidation and pressure by elite candidates . They sought the elimination of regressive taxes, and the adoption of a more progressive scheme. And they suggested that local officials be given salaries, instead of being paid out of fees, to remove their corrupting allure. 

AMBUSKE: The growing conflict over the Townshend Acts dashed the Regulators’ hopes for any meaningful government reform. When the new assembly met in New Bern in late October 1769, its members began debating a non-importation agreement, forcing Tryon to prorogue it once more. 

AMBUSKE: With the assembly no longer in session, Regulators in the Piedmont turned to the local courts for relief. They sued men like Edmund Fanning whom they believed had extorted them. But over the winter of 1769 and into the fall of 1770, as judges delayed cases and ruled against them, as court clerks pocketed fees, and as lawyers grew wealthier at their expense, the Regulators’ long simmering frustration began to boil. 

AMBUSKE: On the morning of Monday, September 24, 1770, they gathered at the courthouse in Hillsborough, where Judge Richard Henderson was about to begin the day’s proceedings. Nathan Schultz helps us understand what happened next. 

SCHULTZ: They engage in a very loud conversation with Henderson to try their cases. They've been sitting on the docket for a long time, and he refused to do it. And at some point somebody says, Let's retire. Let's go out of the room. Let's figure this out. 

AMBUSKE: And that’s when deputy attorney general John Williams walked into the room. 

SCHULTZ: Now, this is the guy who had been trying people had been really ruining a lot of these people's lives, you know, and they attack him. We don't know, as always, these things go we don't know who threw the first punch. We know that some of them were armed with clubs, whips and a few other things. They attack him. And this is when a lot of order begins to break down. They rush into the courtroom. They grab Edmund Fanning and a couple other corrupt officials, and they drag them out into the streets and beat them in nearly inch of their lives. 

AMBUSKE: The Regulators allowed Williams and Fanning to take refuge in a nearby store. 

SCHULTZ: And they then go back into the courtroom and they start, they're like, we're in control. Now to judge Henderson to try cases. Now, Henderson will write in his own report saying that he didn't, he didn't try any cases. He adjourned the court. We know that's not true. Under duress. He tried cases because the actual leisure from the court in Hillsborough survives, and in the leisure written in a different hand, in a different tone, are notes on cases on the docket.

AMBUSKE: At the day’s end, the Regulators allowed Henderson to go home, after he gave his word that he would reopen the court the next day. But:

SCHULTZ: The regulators wake up. They go back to the courthouse. They see Judge Henderson skip town, and that's when they decide to sack revenge. They start rioting through the street. They go and target the officials offending them. They go to Edmund Fanning's nice timber frame house, and disassemble it. They rip off all the siding, stack it up next to it. They take his furniture out of the house and destroy it with axes. They grab piles of his clothing, throw it out into the streets. And after that incident, after all this happens, they leave Hillsborough and go from there. And that incident, the Hillsborough riots, September 1770 is what escalates everything.

AMBUSKE: For Governor Tryon, and for the bulk of the Assembly, the Regulators’ attack on the courthouse changed the calculus of the crisis. This was no longer a matter of keeping the peace in the backcountry, it was about suppressing a growing colonial rebellion. 

AMBUSKE: But Tryon nor the colony had the legal powers sufficient to quell the uprising. The colony’s attorney general advised the governor that the Regulators could be charged only with rioting and misdemeanors, and not with rebellion or treason. And under current law, cases would be tried in the local district courts, which the Regulators seemed to have under their control. 

AMBUSKE: To counter the emerging Regulator threat, Tyron reconvened the assembly and asked it to pass a new, powerful riot act. Samuel Johnston introduced his eponymous bill on December 15th.

SCHULTZ: It's based off English law where you read the riot act, or you read some command to for a group to disperse or force is legalized.

KARS: The Johnston Riot Act allows for pretty amazingly strong punishments for these rioters, which allows for these people to be tried for rebellion and to be outlawed if they don't turn themselves in. And it also authorizes the governor to raise an army against the regulators to go restore order in the Piedmont and that the public monies will be used to pay for it. 

AMBUSKE: The Johnston Riot Act passed in early January 1771. Besides the legal penalties, the ex post facto provision, and the money for the militia, the act enabled the government to create courts of oyer and terminer, courts that allowed judges to hear and determine a case without a jury at a place of their choosing, regardless of where the alleged crime was committed. 

SCHULTZ: And it only goes through that year, and it backdated the Hillsborough riots to being under that law too. 

AMBUSKE:  By then, Herman Husband had been languishing in a New Bern jail for weeks. The Assembly expelled him on December 20th, five days after the Johnston Riot Act was introduced. The assembly accused him of being one of the architects of the Regulator rebellion. Chief Justice Howard promptly issued an arrest warrant on charges of libel and had him confined. 

AMBUSKE: Husband’s arrest enflamed the backcountry. Rumors began swirling that thousands of Regulators were prepared to march on New Bern to rescue him, prompting Tryon to keep the militia in the capital in a state of readiness. When Husband was released in mid-February, hundreds of Regulators who had been making their way to the capital in the snow halted their march, and returned home. 

AMBUSKE: But by March 1771, Tryon had learned the king had appointed him governor of New York. He was due in the northern province by the summer. Not wishing to leave his successor a southern colony in a rebellious state, Tryon committed himself to bringing the Regulator revolution in North Carolina to an end. 

AMBUSKE: The governor invoked the Johnston Riot Act and began assembling a provincial army. That task was not as easy as he might have hoped.

KARS: A number of historians have sort of explained to regulation as a sectional conflict of back country versus the coast. But I think that's not quite accurate, because by 1771 when Tryon is trying to raise the militia, regulators have already sent sort of advanced troops out east, and they are beginning to organize there, and Tryon, in fact, has a really hard time raising the militia almost everywhere. Militia men come out and say, We don't want to fight the regulators. We kind of agree with them. And so he has to resort to intimidation to get local militia leaders to fulfill their quota. He offers big bounties. And even that doesn't do it in some counties, they have to institute a draft which did not exist. And in the end, instead of the 2200 men he had hoped to raise, he only raises 1100 his army is top heavy with officers. He has about 300 officers who are quite eager to prove their support of the Governor at this point in 1771and I think one of the reasons is this worry that the regulation will spread east, and that they're all potentially sitting on a powder keg. 

AMBUSKE: General Thomas Gage, the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, was equally supportive. At Tryon’s request, Gage shipped:

SCHULTZ: Two six pound artillery pieces, some flags, some drums and kettles and other support. 

AMBUSKE: If Tryon ever asked for or if Gage ever offered a regiment of British regulars, no record has survived. Neither seems likely. In the wake of the shooting on King Street in Boston a year earlier, Gage had little desire to see another confrontation between soldiers and civilians in the colonies become a massacre, and Tryon considered the matter in the Piedmont an affair internal to North Carolina.

AMBUSKE: Tryon and his army began marching toward Hillsborough in early May. 

SCHULTZ: Tryon assembles this army, eight cannons, 1000 men. He's got cavalry from these gentlemen volunteers. He's got pioneers, he's got Rangers. He equips them in a military capacity with these leggings, echoing the French and Indian War. He gets to Hillsborough in May of 1771 and is trying to decide how exactly he's gonna disrupt this insurrection. 

KARS: He gets to Hillsboro, and he hears of a situation with a militia regiment in Rowan County that is being obstructed by large numbers of regulators. And so he decides that he should march West. 

SCHULTZ: He receives word from Hugh Wadell, that other group that was raised in the western part, that they had been turned back at the Yadkin River, by a group of regulators who blew up their gunpowder and their clothing, and Tryon is worried that he will get stuck on the other side of a river trying to cross it. While the regulators are there.

AMBUSKE: The provincial army headed for Alamance Creek, twenty miles west of Hillsborough.

KARS: After a couple of days, he encamps on Alamance Creek, and regulators begin to amass on the other bank. 

SCHULTZ: And it's over 2000 people, just regular farmers in the middle of nowhere, just 2000 people show up. And often criticism of the regulation is that they weren't organized. They were very organized to be able to assemble 2000 people in a not densely populated area, all in one place. And within that are people who show up armed with guns. All these people are in the militia, so they have militia training, and they're required to own a gun. Lot of people don't show up with guns. Some people show up with clubs. Some are Quakers who are pacifists. 

AMBUSKE: The board was set; the pieces were moving. 

SCHULTZ: May 15, 1771, into that night, into the 16th, riders begin to ride between the Regulator camp and Tryon’s camp, trying to negotiate, trying their absolute best to solve this peacefully. The regulators even assemble together write one last petition to Tryon, saying how they are loyal subjects of the king, but they do say that. His and His Majesty's subjects are not toys to be trifled with, very clear demand, but still trying to maintain peacefulness again, all they want is peaceful reform riders back and forth, Tryon rejects and ignores every overture. Only thing he has to say to them is, give up your arms, give up your leaders and surrender.

KARS: Regulators keep trying to negotiate with the governor. At some point, they sent a Presbyterian minister and two of their spokesmen to him to talk with him. He refuses to negotiate. He sends the minister back, he keeps the two spokesmen.

AMBUSKE: When dawn broke on the morning of May 16th, Tryon’s patience was wearing thin, and time was running out. 

 KARS: He gives his soldiers order to execute one of these men by firing in such a way that the regulators amassed on the other side can actually see this happening.

SCHULTZ: He orders the man shot in the back in front of 2,000 of his friend, neighbors and allies. And the regulars are pretty incensed by this yelling and screaming. And at the same time, some regulators are leaving Herman Husband, if he was there, left at about this point, seeing that violence is happening. Quakers not participating violence, he's leaving. 

AMBUSKE: Shortly after ordering Robert Thompson’s execution, Tyron made one last attempt to disperse the mob using the powers granted to him in the Johnston Riot Act.

SCHULTZ: He sends the Sheriff of Orange County, ahead, holding a letter. This letter effectively says, you are rebels. You are against His Majesty, give up your leaders, to prevent a great effusion of blood. Very clear demands. This letter read by the sheriff, constitutes the riot act. About 11 o'clock, May 16, this is read to groups of regulators. He probably then walked over to other groups, and this mob just assembled and read to these other bodies of people. We know the regulators yelled back at him. We're not happy about this situation. 

AMBUSKE: The riot act required Tryon to give notice before taking action. In the meantime, hef began moving his men and his artillery into position. 

SCHULTZ: And then they wait for about 45 minutes, just standing there, fully loaded, and the regulators do exactly what you'd expect. They start screaming and yelling at them, insulting them. And a little bit away the Boston Massacre, they say, you know, if it's battle, let it happen. Now. They start yelling, battle, battle. And the thing is, is some of these people knew each other, this is Orange County. You got the Orange County militia under Edmund Fanning with Tryon, and we know there was at least one group. William Butler and his brother were on opposite sides. So you have literal brothers that could see each other, probably across the field. And there's this kind of bizarre tense thing waiting for 45 minutes.

AMBUSKE: Despite their taunts:

KARS: Most of these men did not really expect there to be a battle. They can't really believe the governor would order his army to fire on his own citizens. So they only brought somebody says, enough bullets as they would have brought on a hunt.

SCHULTZ: 45 minutes expires, the sheriff goes over again, goes over to these people, says, What's your answer? And we know, from the accounts they yelled back at him, fire and be damned. Goes back to the safety of the lines, Tryon probably doesn't see much else to do. He turns to the commander of the artillery, guy named Robert Howe. Gives the order. He gives the order, and all eight of the cannons fire on the regulators. Some accounts say from about 50 to 100 yards away, very close with grapeshot sending small iron balls ripping through this crowd of people. Shortly after, the militia, the first line, 500 men, open up with muskets on them.

KARS: And initially it looks like the regulators are have the upper hand, because the soldiers have trouble aiming their cannon right. And they they are fighting in in in regiments, but the regulators are fighting what's called Indian style. They're hiding behind trees, sort of like guerrilla fighters, but pretty quickly the regulators begin to run out of ammunition.

SCHULTZ: Some archeological evidence and some other accounts [say] that during that cannonade, a group of Regulators from the far left flank of the army try to attack a cannon actually tried to run up on it, and are taken out before they get close or even reached it. But after this half hour of bombardment, Tryon orders his the militia to advance onto them, marching forward and clears them out from the woods, capturing as many as they can, and then pursues the remnants of the regulators that were left into their camp and to loot it, by all accounts, for the next hour and a half.

KARS: In the end, some 20 farmers are dead, nine militia men and some 150 men on both sides are wounded.

AMBUSKE: After Tryon cleared the field, he set out to ensure that the Regulators never rose again.

KARS: He begins to undertake a victorious march through the back country that is intended to intimidate the people. So he destroys the farms of men who he thinks are regulator leaders. He turns his horses out into people's fields. He requisitions food from local farmers for all his troops. And he demands that people come in and says, If you come in and you turn in your gun and you swear allegiance to the king, which, of course, regulators had never they had never undone their allegiance to the king, then I will pardon you, except a number of the leaders

KARS: Some 6400 men come forward, which is roughly three quarters of all the grown men in the Piedmont.

AMBUSKE: Leading Regulators like Herman Husband and James Hunter vanished, escaping Tryon’s grasp. Others were not so lucky. 

AMBUSKE: Empowered by the Johnston Riot Act, the governor convened a court of oyer and terminer in Hillsborough on Saturday, June 15, 1771, in the same courthouse the Regulators had laid siege to the previous September. Twelve men were convicted of treason and sentenced to be executed. Tryon commuted the sentences of six. The remaining six would serve as a warning. Tryon:

SCHULTZ: He goes to a hill that's right next to the town. He orders his army to clear the brush around it to make it clearly visible. And he constructs these gallows, and then surrounds it with the Army just to make sure people could watch it, and then, systematically execute six of these people. 

AMBUSKE: James Pugh, Herman Husband’s former brother-in-law, climbed atop a barrel and had the noose placed around his neck. With his final words, he repeated the Regulators’ grievances, prayed for an end to the corruption of this world, and prepared to meet God in the next. As Pugh spoke exacted one last measure of revenge. 

KARS: The story is that Edmund Fanning had the barrel upon which he was standing kicked out from under him mid sentence. 

AMBUSKE: Minutes later, Pugh was dead. Tryon departed for New York soon thereafter. Fanning went with him as his new private secretary. 

AMBUSKE: With the Regulators defeated, the provincial assembly and the colonial elite turned their attention back to confronting Parliament, to quarreling with Tryon’s successor, and to resisting the new imperial order. And as they did so, the Regulators confronted the reality that their reformation was a failed revolution. That memory endured for years, even as matters between the colonies and the Mother Country became much worse.

KARS: When the revolution comes, many people in the Piedmont are not willing to support it, in part because the leaders of the revolution were just five short years ago their opponents. And partly because they've already been burned and they don't want to be burned again. Some say, well, we took an oath to the king now we can't fight him, because we would be bringing our souls in mortal danger. But a great number of people, I think, are just sort of disaffected and are like, forget it. We're just not doing this anymore. We don't care who wins, let them battle it out.

CODA: 

AMBUSKE: More than three thousand miles away from the North Carolina Piedmont, British men and women began a march of their own on London. In May 1771, visitors flocked to the Royal Academy of Arts to see the latest work by Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania-born British American artist with a flair for the historical and the dramatic.

AMBUSKE: In a canvas measuring four feet high, and seven feet wide, West used oil paints to depict a tragedy at a moment of triumph in the recent history of the British Empire: The Death of General James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham at the Battle of Quebec on September 13, 1759. 

AMBUSKE: The painting’s unveiling at the Royal Academy Exhibition nearly twelve years after Wolfe’s demise came at an uncertain moment for the empire. New taxes called into question the colonies’ connection with the Mother Country; restrictions on westward expansion denied settlers access to Indigenous lands; the destruction of the final liberty pole on the commons in New York city; the shooting on King Street in Boston; the War of the Regulation.

AMBUSKE: West depicted Wolfe like Christ descending from a cross made of flags bearing British colors. Wolfe looks to heaven as he bleeds from a pierced wound on his side. The light is fading from his eyes as a messenger rushes from just off view bearing the news that Protestant British arms have won the day, that Catholic France has been defeated. 

AMBUSKE: As Christ was surrounded by his disciples in Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, so Wolfe is surrounded by the empire: Scottish Highlanders, English men, Irish soldiers, and British Americans. 

AMBUSKE: A tattooed Native warrior rests in the foreground, contemplating the scene before him as Wolfe’s men fear for their fallen general. 

AMBUSKE: In a moment of imperial crisis, West’s painting reminded Britons on both sides of the Atlantic that an empire of liberty was not without hardship, not without sacrifice. 

AMBUSKE: It is difficult to know whether Black Britons or Black British Americans – free or enslaved – gained admittance to see West’s history, a painting in which they could not see themselves. 

AMBUSKE: But not far from where West’s painting hung, in the months after its installation, in a courtroom in London, in a case that connected West Africa, Virginia, Boston, and England, enslaved Britons would argue for their place in Britain’s Empire of liberty. 

AMBUSKE: Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. 

AMBUSKE:  I’m your host, Dr. Jim Ambuske.

AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.   

AMBUSKE: ​Learn how you can support the series at r2studios.org, where you’ll also find a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading. ​

AMBUSKE: Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick. 

AMBUSKE: Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent. 

AMBUSKE:  Our lead audio editor for this episode is Patrick Long of Primary Source Media. 

 AMBUSKE:  Annabelle Spencer and Amber Pelham are our graduate assistants. 

AMBUSKE: Our thanks to Abby Chandler, Marjoleine Kars, Cynthia Kierner, and Nathan Schultz for sharing their expertise with us in this episode. 

AMBUSKE: Thanks also to our voice actors Sarah Donelson, Evan McCormick, Norman Rodger, John Terry, and Peter Walker. 

AMBUSKE:  Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.