CHAPTER XII. Watauga--Haven

of Liberty

The Regulators despaired of seeing better times and therefore quitted the Province. It is said 1,500 departed since the Battle of Alamance and to my knowledge a great many more are only waiting to dispose of their plantations in order to follow them.- -Reverend Morgan Edwards, 1772.

The five years (1766-1771) which saw the rise, development, and ultimate defeat of the popular movement known as the Regulation, constitute a period not only of extraordinary significance in North Carolina but also of fruitful consequences in the larger movements of westward expansion. With the resolute intention of having their rulers "give account of their stewardship," to employ their own words, the Sandy Creek Association of Baptists (organized in 1758), in a series of papers known as Regulators' Advertisements (1766-8) proceeded to mature, through popular gatherings, a rough form of initiative and referendum. At length, discouraged in its efforts, and particularly in the attempt to bring county officials to book for charging illegal fees, this association ceased actively to function. It was the precursor of a movement of much more drastic character and formidable proportions, chiefly directed against Colonel Edmund Fanning and his associates. This movement doubtless took its name, "the Regulation," from the bands of men already described who were organized first in North Carolina and later in South Carolina, to put down highwaymen and to correct many abuses in the back country, such as the tyrannies of Scovil and his henchmen. Failing to secure redress of their grievances through legal channels, the Regulators finally made such a powerful demonstration in support of their refusal to pay taxes that Governor William Tryon of North Carolina, in 1768, called out the provincial militia, and by marching with great show of force through the disaffected regions, succeeded temporarily in overawing the people and thus inducing them to pay their assessments.

The suits which had been brought by the Regulators against Edmund Fanning, register, and Francis Nash, clerk, of Orange County, resulted in

both being "found guilty of taking too high fees." Fanning immediately resigned his commission as register; while Nash, who in conjunction with Fanning had fairly offered in 1766 to refund to any one aggrieved any fee charged by him which the Superior Court might hold excessive, gave bond for his appearance at the next court. Similar suits for extortion against the three Froliocks in Rowan County in 1769 met with failure, however; and this outcome aroused the bitter resentment of the Regulators, as recorded by Herman Husband in his "Impartial Relation." During this whole period the insurrectionary spirit of the people, who felt themselves deeply aggrieved but recognized their inability to secure redress, took the form of driving local justices from the bench and threatening court officials with violence.

At the session of the Superior Court at Hillsborough, September 22, 1770, an elaborate petition prepared by the Regulators, demanding unprejudiced juries and the public accounting for taxes by the sheriffs, was handed to the presiding justice by James Hunter, a leading Regulator. This justice was our acquaintance, Judge Richard Henderson, of Granville County, the sole high officer in the provincial government from the entire western section of the colony. In this petition occur these trenchant words: "As we are serious and in good earnest and the cause respects the whole body of the people it would be loss of time to enter into arguments on particular points for though there are a few men who have the gift and art of reasoning, yet every man has a feeling and knows when he has justice done him as well as the most learned." On the following Monday (September 24th), upon convening of court, some one hundred and fifty Regulators, led by James Hunter, Herman Husband, Rednap Howell, and others, armed with clubs, whips, and cudgels, surged into the court-room and through their spokesman, Jeremiah Fields, presented a statement of their grievances. "I found myself," says Judge Henderson, "under a necessity of attempting to soften and turn away the fury of these mad people, in the best manner in my power, and as such could well be, pacify their rage and at the same time preserve the little remaining dignity of the court."

During an interim, in which the Regulators retired for consultation,

they fell without warning upon Fanning and gave him such rough treatment that he narrowly escaped with his life. The mob, now past control, horsewhipped a number of leading lawyers and citizens gathered there at court, and treated others, notably the courtly Mr. Hooper of Boston, "with every mark of contempt and insult." Judge Henderson was assured by Fields that no harm should come to him provided he would conduct the court in accordance with the behest of the Regulators: namely, that no lawyer, save the King's Attorney, should be admitted to the court, and that the Regulators' cases should be tried with new jurors chosen by the Regulators. With the entire little village terrorized by this campaign of "frightfulness," and the court wholly unprotected, Judge Henderson reluctantly acknowledged to himself that "the power of the judiciary was exhausted." Nevertheless, he says, "I made every effort in my power consistent with my office and the duty the public is entitled to claim to preserve peace and good order." Agreeing under duress to resume the session the following day, the judge ordered an adjournment. But being unwilling, on mature reflection, to permit a mockery of the court and a travesty of justice to be staged under threat and intimidation, he returned that night to his home in Granville and left the court adjourned in course. Enraged by the judge's escape, the Regulators took possession of the court room the following morning, called over the cases, and in futile protest against the conditions they were powerless to remedy, made profane entries which may still be seen on the record: "Damned rogues," "Fanning pays cost but loses nothing," "Negroes not worth a damn, Cost exceeds the whole," "Hogan pays and be damned," and, in a case of slander, "Nonsense, let them argue for Ferrell has gone hellward."

The uprising of these bold and resolute, simple and imperfectly educated people, which had begun as a constitutional struggle to secure justice and to prevent their own exploitation by dishonest lawyers of the county courts, now gave place to open anarchy and secret incendiarism. In the dead of night, November 12th and 14th, Judge Henderson's barn, stables, and dwelling house were fired by the Regulators and went up in flames. Glowing with a sense of wrong, these misguided people, led on by fanatical agitators, thus vented their indiscriminate rage, not only upon

their op pressors, but also upon men wholly innocent of injuring them-- men of the stamp of William Hooper, afterward signer of the Declaration of Independence, Alexander Martin, afterward governor and United States Senator,,and Richard Henderson, popular representative of the back country and a firm champion of due process of law. It is perhaps not surprising in view of these events that Governor Tryon and the ruling class, lacking a sympathy broad enough to ensure justice to the oppressed people, seemed to be chiefly impressed with the fact that a widespread insurrection was in progress, threatening not only life and property, but also civil government itself. The governor called out the militia of the province and led an army of well nigh one thousand men and officers against the Regulators, who had assembled at Alamance to the number of two thousand. Tryon stood firm upon the demands that the people should submit to government and disperse at a designated hour. The Regulators, on their side, hoped to secure the reforms they desired by intimidating the governor with a great display of force. The battle was a tragic fiasco for the Regulators, who fought bravely, but without adequate arms or real leadership. With the conclusion of this desultory action, a fight lasting about two hours (May 16, 1771), the power of the Regulators was completely broken."

Among these insurgents there was a remarkable element, an element whose influence upon the course of American history has been but imperfectly understood which now looms into prominence as the vanguard of the army of westward expansion. There were some of the Regulators who, though law-abiding and conservative, were deeply imbued with ideas of liberty, personal independence, and the freedom of the soil. Through the influence of Benjamin Franklin, with whom one of the leaders of the group, Herman Husband, was in constant correspondence, the patriotic ideas then rapidly maturing into revolutionary sentiments furnished the inspiration to action. As early as 1766, the Sandy Creek leaders, referred to earlier in this chapter, issued a call to each neighborhood to send delegates to a gathering for the purpose of investigating the question "whether the free men of this country labor under any abuses of power or not." The close connection between the Sandy Creek men and the Sons of

Liberty is amply demonstrated in this paper wherein the Sons of Liberty in connection with the "stamp law" are praised: for "redeeming us from Tyranny" and for having "withstood the lords in Parliament in behalf of true liberty." Upon the records of the Dutchman's Creek Church, of "regular" Baptists, at the Forks of the Yadkin, to which Daniel Boone's family belonged, may be found this memorable entry, recognizing the "American Cause" well-nigh a year before the declaration of independence at Philadelphia: "At the monthly meeting it was agreed upon concerning the American Cause, if any of the brethren see cause to join it they have the liberty to do it without being called to an account by the church. But whether they join or do not join they should be used with brotherly love.

The fundamental reasons underlying the approaching westward hegira are found in the remarkable petition of the Regulators of An son County (October 9, 1769), who request that "Benjamin Franklin or some other known PATRIOT" be appointed agent of the province in London to seek redress at the source. They exposed the basic evil in the situation by pointing out that, in violation of the law restricting the amount of land that might be granted to each person to six hundred and forty acres, much of the most fertile territory in the province had been distributed in large tracts to wealthy landlords. In consequence "great numbers of poor people are necessitated to toil in the cultivation of the bad Lands whereon they hardly can subsist." It was these poor people, "thereby deprived of His Majesties liberality and Bounty," who soon turned their gaze to the westward and crossed the mountains in search of the rich, free lands of the trans- Alleghany region.

This feverish popular longing for freedom, stimulated by the economic pressure of thousands of pioneers who were annually entering North Carolina, set in motion a wave of migration across the mountains in 1769. Long before Alamance, many of the true Americans, distraught by apparently irremediable injustices, plunged fearlessly into the wilderness, seeking beyond the mountains a new birth of liberty, lands of their own selection free of cost or quit-rents, and a government of their own choosing and control."' The glad news of the rich valleys beyond the mountains early lured such adventurous pioneers as Andrew Greer and

Julius Caesar Dugger to the Watauga country. The glowing stories, told by Boone, and disseminated in the back country by Henderson, Williams, and the Harts, seemed to give promise to men of this stamp that the West afforded relief from oppressions suffered in North Carolina. During the winter of 1768-9 there was also a great rush of settlers from Virginia into the valley of the Holston. A party from Augusta County, led by men who had been delighted with the country viewed seven years before when they were serving under Colonel William Byrd against the Cherokees, found that this region, a wilderness on their outward passage in 1768, was dotted with cabins on every spot where the grazing was good, upon their return the following year. Writing to Hillsborough on October 18, 1770, concerning the "many hundred families" in the region from Green River to the branches of the Holston, who refused to comply with the royal proclamation of 1763, Acting-Governor Nelson of Virginia reports that "very little if any Quit Rents have been received for His Majesty's use from that Quarter for some time past"--the people claiming that "His Majesty hath been pleased to withdraw his protection from them since 1763."

In the spring of 1770, with the express intention of discovering suitable locations for homes for himself and a number of others, who wished to escape the accumulating evils of the times, James Robertson of Orange County, North Carolina, made an arduous journey to the pleasing valley of the Watauga. Robertson, who was born in Brunswick County, Virginia, June 28, 1742, of excellent Scotch-Irish ancestry, was a noteworthy figure of a certain type- -quiet, reflective, conservative, wise, a firm believer in the basic principles of civil Liberty and the right of local self-government. Robertson spent some time with a man named Honeycut in the Watauga region, raised a crop of corn, and chose for himself and his friends suitable locations for settlement. Lost upon his return in seeking the mountain defiles traversed by him on the outward journey, Robertson probably escaped death from starvation only through the chance passing of two hunters who succored him and set him upon the right path. On arriving in Orange he found political and social conditions there much worse than before, many of the colonists declining to take the obligatory

oath of allegiance to the British Crown after the Battle of Alamance, preferring to carve out for themselves new homes along the western waters. Some sixteen families of this stamp, indignant at the injustices and oppressions of British rule, and stirred by Robertson's description of the richness and beauty of the western country, accompanied him to Watauga shortly after the battle.

This vanguard of the army of westward advance, independent Americans in spirit with a negligible sprinkling of Loyalists, now swept in a great tide into the northeastern section of Tennessee. The men of Sandy Creek, actuated by independent principles but out of sympathy with the anarchic side of the Regulation, left the colony almost to a man. "After the defeat of the Regulators," says the historian of the Sandy Creek Association, "thousands of the oppressed, seeing no hope of redress for their grievances, moved into and settled east Tennessee. A large proportion of these were of the Baptist population. Sandy Creek Church which some time previous to 1771, numbered 606, was afterward reduced to fourteen members!" This movement exerted powerful influence in stimulating westward expansion. Indeed, it was from men of Regulating principles- - Boone, Robertson, and the Searcys--who vehemently condemned the anarchy and incendiarism of 1770, that Judge Henderson received powerful cooperation in the opening up of Kentucky and Tennessee.

The several treaties concerning the western boundary of white settlement, concluded in close succession by North Carolina, Virginia, and the Crown with the Southern and Northern Indians, had an important bearing upon the settlement of Watauga. The Cherokee boundary line, as fixed by Governor Tryon (1767) and by John Stuart (1768), ran from Reedy River to Tryon Mountain, thence straight to Chiswell's Mine, and thence direct to the mouth of the Great Kanawha River. By the treaty at Fort Stanwix (November 5, 1768), in the negotiation of which Virginia was represented by Dr. Thomas Walker and Major Andrew Lewis, the Six Nations sold to the Crown their shadowy claim to a vast tract of western country, including in particular all the land between the Ohio and the Tennessee Rivers. The news of the cession resulted in a strong southwestward thrust of population, from the neighborhood of Abingdon,

in the direction of the Holston Valley. Recognizing that hundreds of these settlers were beyond the line negotiated by Stuart, but on lands not yet surveyed, Governor Botetourt instructed the Virginia commissioners to press for further negotiations, through Stuart, with the Cherokees. Accordingly, on October 18, 1770, a new treaty was made at Lochaber, South Carolina, by which a new line back of Virginia was established, beginning at the intersection of the North Carolina-Cherokee line (a point some seventy odd miles east of Long Island), running thence in a west course to a point six miles east of Long Island, and thence in a direct course to the confluence of the Great Kanawha and Ohio Rivers. At the time of the treaty, it was agreed that the Holston River, from its intersection with the North Carolina-Virginia line, and down the course of the same, should be a temporary southern boundary of Virginia until the line should be ascertained by actual survey. A strong influx of population into the immense new triangle thus released for settlement brought powerful pressure to bear upon northern Tennessee, the point of least resistance along the western barrier. Singularly enough, this advance was not opposed by the Cherokees, whose towns were strung across the extreme southeast corner of Tennessee.

When Colonel John Donelson ran the line in the latter part of 1771, The Little Carpenter, who with other Indian chiefs accompanied the surveying party, urged that the line agreed upon at Lochaber should break off at the head of the Louisa River, and should run thence to the mouth thereof, and thence up the Ohio to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. For this increase in the territory of Virginia they of course expected additional payment. As a representative of Virginia, Donelson agreed to the proposed alteration in the boundary line; and accordingly promised to send the Cherokees, in the following spring, a sum alleged by them to have been fixed at five hundred pounds, in compensation for the additional area. This informal agreement, it is believed, was never ratified by Virginia; nor was the promised compensation ever paid the Cherokees.

Under the belief that the land belonged to Virginia, Jacob Brown with one or two families from North Carolina settled in 1771 upon a tract of land on the northern bank of the Nonachunheh (corruption, Nolichucky)

River. During the same year, an experimental line run westward from Steep Rock and Beaver Creek by Anthony Bledsoe showed that upon the extension of the boundary line, these settlers would fall within the bounds of North Carolina. Although thus informally warned of the situation, the settlers made no move to vacate the lands. But in the following year, after the running of Donelson's line, Alexander Cameron, Stuart's deputy, required "all persons who had made settlements beyond the said line to relinquish them." Thus officially warned, Brown and his companions removed to Watauga. Cameron's order did not apply, however, to the settlement, to the settlement north of the Holston River, south and east of Long Island; and the settlement in Carter's Valley, although lying without the Virginia boundary, strangely enough remained unmolested. The order was directed at the Watauga settlers, who were seated south of the Holston River in the Watauga Valley.

The plight in which the Watauga settlers now found themselves was truly desperate; and the way in which they surmounted this apparently insuperable difficulty is one of the most striking and characteristic events in the pre-Revolutionary history of the Old Southwest. It exhibits the indomitable will and fertile resource of the American character at the margin of desperation. The momentous influence of the Watauga settlers, inadequately reckoned hitherto by historians, was soon to make itself powerfully felt in the first epochal movement of westward expansion.