May 16, 2026 • 37 mins
This 2019 episode covers the Regulator War, aka the War of the Regulation, aka the Regulator Movement. It was a North Carolina event which arose in response to unfair taxes, poor representation and corruption.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday Classic is on the Regulator War,
also called the Regulator Movement. It was inspired by the
TV show Outlander, although I did not choose it as
Today's Saturday Classic to align with last night's Outlander series finale.
It is because today is the two hundred and fifty
fifth anniversary of the Battle of Alimance, which took place
(00:24):
on May sixteenth, seventeen seventy one, and was the Regulator
War's final and by some descriptions, only battle, because some
people want to draw a distinction between battles and skirmishes.
This originally came out on January twenty eighth, twenty nineteen.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
(00:47):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. And if you
have been watching the fourth season of the TV show Outlander,
one of the things that keeps coming up is that
(01:07):
there are some rebellious people in colonial North Carolina who
are called the Regulators, and that they're mad about something
about unfair taxes and corruption. The show doesn't really make
it all that clear. This season of Outlander was roughly
based on the novel Drums of Autumn, which, to be clear,
I haven't read. I also haven't read the next novel
(01:28):
after that one, which is called The Fiery Cross. And
this episode is being recorded before the last episode of
this season of the TV show, but it's gonna come
out after, so I don't have any idea what's happening
in the season finale. But it seemed like with all
of this it would be a good time to do
an episode on the Regulator War also known as the
(01:49):
War of the Regulation, also known as the Regulator Movement,
which is something that people started asking us to do
all the way back during the last time we did
an Outlander themed episode, and that was twenty sixteen, with
our installment on the Jacobite Rising of seventeen forty five. Yeah,
I'll confess that part of me wanted this to be
some very weird steam punky because it does. The name
(02:13):
sounds so good. It does, and one of the things
that currently is a bit of a challenge this will
all be sorted out by the time this episode comes out,
is finding the artwork to go with it on our website,
because I keep getting these strange I mean, they're beautiful,
some of them, but they're definitely steampunk inspired watches and
(02:34):
not not anything to do with the actual historical event. No,
and I also do I do want to say right
up here at the top, there is really a lot
to unpack with this season of Outlander in terms of
its representation of a number of people's and that is
not what today's episode is about at all, But there's
a lot there, so I just wanted to acknowledge that
(02:56):
it exists. I have not been watching, so I have
no idea. But to make sense of this whole series
of events we're talking about, we first need to get
into some North Carolina geography. North Carolina is divided into
three geographical regions from west to east. They are the Mountains,
the Piedmont, and the coastal Plain. Sometimes the coastal Plain
(03:17):
is even further divided into the inner coastal Plain and
the Tidewater. Naturally, when Europeans started colonizing this part of
North America, they started out along the coastal plain, and
it's not just because that's where they landed. Aside from
the swampy bits, the coastal plains soil is really soft
and flat and rich. It's not particularly rocky. This part
(03:38):
of the continent has navigable rivers that are really good
for carrying things back and forth to the ocean. And
overall this was a lot of what would become North
Carolina's best farmland, and it was a place where wealthy
planters started establishing big plantations with enslaved workforces. The Coastal
Plain is separated from the adjacent Piedmont by a geological
(04:00):
boundary known as the fall line. This is basically a
dividing line between the harder, rockier, more clay like Piedmont
and the softer, sandy or coastal Plain. In addition to
the differences in the soil and farming conditions on either
side of the line, rivers crossing the line descend through
waterfalls and rapids, making them impractical to impossible to use
(04:20):
to transport people and goods. There are, of course fall
lines all over the world, and in terms of the
Atlantic Seaboard fall line, it runs from New York to Georgia. Yeah,
you could still certainly grow things in the Piedmont, but
it was harder, and then it was harder to get
them anywhere. It's a little bit of a disadvantage. It
makes me think of the various stories we've done on
(04:41):
things like I think Brook Farm had this problem the
Brock Farm community where they were like, we're going to
go start a thing where no one else is doing stuff,
and we're going to farm here, and it's like no
one else is farming here for a reason. It is
made of rocks. Also, just to clear up a little
geographical confusion or Outlander viewers who might be trying to
(05:02):
imagine where all of this is happening in relation to
the TV show, the fictional Fraser's Ridge is in the
Blue Ridge Mountains in northwest North Carolina, somewhere near the
real places of Boone and Blowing Rock, and that is
on the opposite end of the state from Wilmington, which
is out on the southeastern coast, roughly three hundred miles
or four hundred and eighty kilometers away. Fraser's Ridge also
(05:25):
would not be very close to Cross Creek or the
Cape Beer River, which is home to the show's fictional
plantation of River Run. That is roughly two hundred miles
or three hundred twenty kilometers Today, you would measure it
from roughly Boon to Fayetteville, which is what Cross Creek
is known as today. The show kind of makes it
look like these places are all next door to each other.
(05:46):
They are not. This geography might seem like a weird
thing to be spending all this much time on, but
in colonial North Carolina, the division between the Piedmont and
the coastal plain contributed to huge divisions among the colonists
and between the colonists and the government. At first, the
vast majority of colonial activity was happening out on the
(06:08):
coastal plain, with mostly English colonists, and they were arriving
by boat, either from Europe or from other colonies. But
in the seventeen hundreds that really started to change. The
western part of the colony experienced a huge population boom.
Newcomers were arriving in the mountains and the Piedmont along
the Great Wagon Road also known as the Great Philadelphia
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Wagon Road. This had started out as a trading route
that was being used by eastern North America's native peoples,
and it ran from Philadelphia down to Georgia. By the
eighteenth century, it had been widened to accommodate wagons, and
some places it had been shifted to Cross rivers and
to get around obstacles more easily. Many of these new
arrivals were Scot's, Irish or German, and while most of
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the English colonists out on the coast were Anglican, the Scots,
Irish and German people arriving in North Carolina included a
lot more Baptists, Byterians, Quakers, and Moravians. So from settlement
to settlement, or even within settlements, people often didn't speak
the same language or follow the same religious practices and observances,
and as a general trend, the Piedmont was much poorer
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than the coast, with most people scratching out a living
as subsistence farmers rather than running large plantations. This influx
of Europeans to the Piedmont was huge. North Carolina's population
more than doubled between seventeen thirty and seventeen fifty, and
then nearly tripled in the twenty years after that. Most
of these new arrivals were settling in what was known
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then as the back counties that was the Piedmont, which
is at the time considered the North Carolina Frontier. This
combination of geography and demographics led to many problems people
in the Piedmont and the mountains, but our focus for
this is really the Piedmont in this episode thought that
they were being unfairly taxed because various taxes were levied
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at the same rate there as they were out on
the coast, where people had more money. Settlers in the
Piedmont were also represented in the Assembly, but those Assembly
seats had not been reapportioned in light of the population boom,
so the Piedmont settlers also felt that they weren't really
being fairly represented in the Assembly either. A lot of
local political and court offices were being filled by appointment,
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either by the monarch or by the governor or by
the Assembly. A lot of these appointees were wealthy and
powerful people from the coast or friends of theirs, so
together with the tax issues, this really led to a
perception that the Piedmont did not matter to the Assembly
or to the governor except when it came to being taxed,
and even when there was some local control over who
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was in charge. The government and courts were very cliquish. Technically,
most officials were appointed by the governor, but in many
cases the governor made these appointments based on the recommendations
of the court itself, so those officers would recommend themselves
and their friends, ultimately creating a courthouse ring where the
same powerful people were always in control of local politics
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and the legal system. The existence of these courthouse rings
wasn't necessarily the biggest problem in people's minds. A bigger
issue in the Piedmont was that those legal and political
positions went from being held by farmers and planters to
being held by lawyers and merchants. So it seemed like
all the political power had increasingly moved toward these wealthy outsiders,
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a lot of them either from the coast or connected
to people from the coast, and all of them in
cahoots to stay in power, And it also seemed like
they were in cahoots to take advantage of people. There
were laws meant to keep officials from abusing their positions,
but they were not consistently enforced, and people had to
handle a lot of matters through the court, everything from
(09:48):
filing deeds to trying to collect debts. The widespread perception
was that everyone from lawyers to clerks, was making things
take longer and running up fees just to line their
own pockets. For example, if you were trying to file
something with the Register of deeds, he might tax you
three times, once for each of the forms necessary to
(10:08):
finish the transaction, rather than just once for the whole
transaction you were trying to do. As another example of
all this, people did not trust the sheriffs at all.
One of the sheriff's duties was to collect the taxes,
and here's how people thought this process generally went down.
It's clear that sometimes the process did go down this way,
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not clear whether it happened every time, but this was
how when somebody said the sheriff's coming to collect the tax,
people just sort of thought, Okay, this is how this
is going to happen. The sheriff would show up and
demand the tax, but the taxpayer would not have the
cash on hand to actually pay it, because people didn't
have a lot of need to carry cash, and there
was also a serious shortage of actual physical currency to
(10:50):
pay things with. But most communities did have somebody who
would keep cash and basically acted like a banker. So
the taxpayer would ask to go see that person to
get some money, and the sheriff would refuse and seize
some of their property instead. I love that people just
presume this is how the process works, like there's a
horrible flow chart that ends with property seized. People though,
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did not want to pay their taxes in property arbitrarily
seized by the sheriff. If it had to be paid,
they wanted to pay it with something of known value,
like money. So then taxpayers would try to negotiate, asking
if they could get their property back if they went
and got some money and then caught up to the
sheriff down the road, and the sheriff might even agree
to this, but then disappear. Later on, the taxpayer might
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hear that his property had been sold off for much
less than it was worth, so he would still owe money.
But it was not just the taxpayers who thought that
they were being ripped off by crooked sheriffs. And all this.
In seventeen sixty seven, North Carolina Governor William Tryon said
that he thought the sheriffs had embezzled half of the
money that they had been charged with collecting. Another thing,
(12:00):
Piedmont settlers were unhappy with Governor Tryon, And we're going
to get to that after we first paused for a
little sponsor break. So before the break, we talked about
a lot of stresses happening in North Carolina. We did
(12:21):
not even get into the tensions between the colonists and
the native people already living there, or the tensions with
the enslaved people that were also in North Carolina. Like
there was really a lot going on. One of the
biggest things, though, in the minds of the regulators, was
the Governor William Tryon. He had been appointed Lieutenant Governor
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of North Carolina in seventeen sixty four under Governor Arthur Dobbs,
but Dobbs retired really soon after that and then died
in seventeen sixty five. When Tryon became governor, he represented
the royal prerogative in the colony of North Carolina, and
soon he established North Carolina's first permanent capital in Newbern,
which is near the coast and connected to the Atlantic
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by the NEOs River. Tryon planned to build an extravagant
seat of the government and governor's residence in Newbern. To
that end, even before leaving England to become Lieutenant governor,
he had convinced architect John Hawks to join him. Tryon
made his first request for funding for this project, nicknamed
Tryon's Palace, on November eight, seventeen sixty six, not long
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after the Assembly allotted five thousand pounds to both buy
the land and get started on the building. A lot
of people in the Piedmont thought this was extravagant, and then,
to make things worse than just the fact that it
was five thousand pounds to build something that was nicknamed
a palace, the money to do it was taken from
a fund that had been established for public schools, and
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then to restore the money back to that fund, the
Assembly imposed a poll tax and, more importantly, in the
minds of some people, a levy on alcoholic beverages. That
was just the beginning, though another ten thousand pounds was
earmarked for the project two years later, and then when
it was finally time to open the palace in seventeen seventy,
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Governor Tryon planned a huge gala to celebrate. Tryon's palace
wasn't the governor's only extravagance. In seventeen sixty seven, he
mounted an expensive expedition that he personally went on to
survey and negotiate a new border between North Carolina and
the Cherokee Nation, and as had happened with Tryon's palace
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taxes were used to pay for this. Settlers who were
on the wrong side of the line were required to
move the following January, and the general perception among the
people of the Piedmont was that Tryon had made this
a whole lavish production just to draw attention to himself.
It was described as quote making a splendid exhibition of
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himself to the Indians. The regulators also had a particular
problem with one of the governor's friends. Edmund Fanning, was
a great example of the way a small group of
people were holding a huge amount of power, which we
touched on before we had our commercial break. And born
in New York, he was a lawyer, an assemblyman, the
Register of Deeds of Orange County, and a colonel in
(15:15):
the militia. He was not at all the only person
who had multiple titles like this. That crossover among the
Assembly and the courts and the militia was huge and
was contributing to the perception that the Piedmont was being
controlled by a few wealthy people. Fanning was just the
one who raised the most iyro. There was even a
song about him, more than one. This is the one
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we're going to read when fanning first to Orange came
he looked both pale and wan, an old patched coat
upon his back, an old mare, he wrote on Both
man and mayor want worth five pounds, as I've been
often told, but by his civil robberies, he's laced his
coat with gold. On top of all of this, the
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geography and the taxes, and the representation, and the governor
and the governor's friend, the colonists and settlers of North
Carolina were just fractious. The colony went through numerous uprisings
and rebellions in the decades leading up to this. In
sixteen seventy seven, Culpeper's Rebellion was an armed uprising, largely
in response to the Navigation Acts that restricted colonial trade.
(16:21):
In sixteen eighty nine, colonists arrested corrupt Governor Cess Sothel,
who was then put on trial and banished by the Assembly.
The next year, John Gibbs, who replaced Governor Sothel, led
an armed uprising against his successor and vowed to fight
him to the death. Then there was Carrie's Rebellion in
seventeen eleven, which is a lot harder to sum up
(16:41):
in one sentence. It is named for former Governor Thomas Carey,
who led an armed rebellion against his successor that was
rooted in both religion and politics. The first seeds of
the Regulator movement had started back before Governor Tryon asked
for that five thousand pounds for his palace. It was
August seventeen sixty six a group of Quakers met in
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Orange County to talk about all their various grievances, all
those issues that were connected to taxation and corruption. One
of them was a man named Hermann husband who's often
described as one of the leaders of the Regulator movement,
but it's a little more complicated than that. As a Quaker,
he could not get behind some of the more violent
acts that they took, and he really distanced himself from
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the movement as it became more violent. The people that
met in August of seventeen sixty six called themselves the
Sandy Creek Association, and they planned to go through the
more typical, non violent means of trying to get things changed.
They were going to file petitions, they were going to
try to get representation in the Assembly, things like that.
The Sandy Creek Association didn't make a lot of headway
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and escalated to things like refusing to pay taxes. And
then a law was passed in seventeen sixty eight that
required sheriffs to be at specific places on specific days
to collect taxes is rather than just showing up in
the Piedmont. This made things worse instead of better. Taxpayers
felt like now the burden was on them to travel
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somewhere to pay taxes, and because the counties then were
much larger than they are now, this could be a
very time consuming and expensive inconvenience. The new law also
didn't do anything to address the many other concerns with
embezzlement and corruption. Yeah, it seems like having a person
take their taxes to the sheriff at a specific time
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and place rather than having the sheriff show up and
demand money, Like it seems like that would be an
improvement was not really read as an improvement. In the
early spring of seventeen sixty eight, the Orange County sheriff
posted a list of all the places that he would
be to collect the tax along with a fine for
the people who did not make it to those places
at the right time, and taxpayers were really angry about this,
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and they thought it might be illegal. By this point
they had also heard about that additional money that had
been allotted to build Triumphs Palace. So a group of
Orange County residents got together. They drafted a letter which
they sent to all of their various officials. And here
is what it said. Whereas the taxes in the county
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are larger according to the number of taxables than adjacent counties,
and continue so year after year, and as the jealousy
still prevails among us that we are wronged, and having
the more reason to think so, as we have been
at the trouble of choosing men and sending them after
the civilist manner, that we could to know what we
paid our levee for, but could receive no satisfaction, we
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are obliged to seek redress by denying paying any more
until we have a full settlement for what is passed
and have a true regulation with our officers. As our
grievances are too many to notify in a small piece
of writing, we desire that you are assemblymen and vestrymen,
may appoint a time before next court at the courthouse,
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and let us know by the bearer, and we will
choose men to act for us. We desire that the
sheriffs will not come this way to collect the levee,
for we will pay none before there is a settlement
to our satisfaction. And as the nature of an officer
is a servant to the public, we are determined to
have the officers of this county under a better and
honester regulation than they have been for some time past.
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Think not to frighten us with rebellion in this case,
For if the inhabitants of this province have not as
good a right to inquire into the nature of our
constitution and disbursement of our funds as those of our
mother country, we think it is by arbitrary proceedings that
we are debarred of that right. Therefore, to be plain
with you, it is our intent to have a full
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settlement of yawn in every particular point that is matter
of doubt with us. So fail not to send an
answer by the bearer. They're basically refusing to pay any
taxes until these things are settled. Some cooler headed people
decided that the language in this initial letter was much
too aggressive, so they are to have a second meeting,
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And at that second meeting they adopted this set of
articles that I find to just be delightfully conciliatory. Here's
what it says. We, the subscribers, do voluntarily agree to
form ourselves into an association to assemble ourselves for conference
for regulating public a grievances and abuses of power in
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the following particulars, with others of a like nature that
may occur. One we will pay no more taxes until
we are satisfied that they are agreeable to law and
applied to the purposes therein mentioned, unless we cannot help
it or are forced. Two we will pay no officer
any more fees than the law allows, unless we are
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obliged to do it, and then to show our dislike
and bear open testimony against it. Three we will attend
all our meetings of conferences as often as we conveniently can,
et cetera. Four we will contribute to collecs for defraying
necessary expenses attending the work according to our abilities. Five
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in case of the difference in judgment, we will submit
to the judgment of the majority of our body. So
this is a lot more like we're not going to
pay our taxes unless we have to, but then we
will complain about it. Both of these documents talked about regulating,
but the term regulators, as these men came to be known,
was likely picked up from a similar movement in South
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Carolina that started the year before, although that particular movement
was more about combating lawlessness than tax reform and government corruption.
Even though the regulators had tried to walk back that
first more aggressive statement, it was really too late. That
statement had already been sent to Orange County's officers, who
were affronted. But soon things really started to escalate, and
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we will get to that. After another quick sponsor break
on April fourth, seventeen sixty eight, the regulators called for
another meeting, this time to ask the sheriff to meet
with the committee to talk about their grievances. But before
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that meeting could actually happen, one of the regulators Saddle
and Bridle were seized to pay off a levy. A
group of regulators went to try to get them back.
That led to weapons being drawn, but apparently no physical violence.
Authorities tried to deploy a militia to re seize the
reclaimed Saddle and Bridle, but not enough people reported for
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duty to go and do this, presumably because they were
sympathetic to the regulators and didn't want to go take
up arms against them. Edmund Fanning, having read only that
first Angrier document, wrote to the governor saying that these
regulators were going to burn down the Orange County seat
of Hillsborough. At first, the governor was at least somewhat conciliatory,
and on April thirtieth, the regulators selected thirteen delegates to
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attend a meeting to discuss their grievances. But before that
meeting could happen, Fanning had herman husband and a regulator
named William Butler arrested and jailed, and this just inflamed
tensions even further. What followed was months and a lot
of confusion and miscommunication, which is not really surprising considering
that now there have been two meetings that were thwarted
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by some other action. Local authorities were trying to prosecute
the regulators, and the regulators were refusing to pay taxes
and also trying to bring charges against the officials who
they thought were corrupt. In July, Husband and Butler were
tried and acquitted for inciting the populace to rebellion. In
that same court session, Fanning was indicted for taking excessive fees.
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Tryon also traveled to Hillsborough himself during all this, hoping
that his presence would calm things down, and one of
the things he had to do was to dispel rumors
that he was recruiting a Native American fighting force to
go after the regulators. By August, a new sheriff had
been appointed in Orange County, and he came bearing a
letter from the governor condemning the regulators and calling their
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actions illegal. The next month, thirty seven hundred regulators, all
of them farmers, sent a proposal to the governor. Quote
desiring to know the terms on which their submission would
be accepted, they were told that if they surrendered nine
of their leaders from three counties, laid down their arms,
and paid all their taxes, they would be pardoned. Only
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about thirty people accepted this agreement, and Tryon sent troops
to try to track down and arrest some of the
biggest ring leaders. After all of this, several people were
put on trial for their involvement with the regulators, and
those who were convicted paid fines and spent some time
in prison. But later on the governor pardoned everybody who
had been found guilty. That summer, he also dissolved the
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assembly and called for a new election with new representatives,
at which point several men who had sympathies to the
regulators or had been really involved in the movement were
all to the assembly. The regulators had little success bringing
corrupt officials to trial, though Edmund Fanning and another official
named Francis Nash were both charged with taking illegal fees.
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Nash was ultimately acquitted, while Fanning was convicted but fined
only one penny for each of the five offenses and
resigned his post as register of deeds. That Register of
deeds example we gave earlier in the show where he
was collecting multiple fees on one transaction, was essentially what
he was convicted of doing. Convicted, not really punished in
(26:34):
a very meaningful way. Why penny Yeah, His argument was
was misconstruction of the law, basically that he had misunderstood
that this was not allowed, and for punishment he can
join the Columbia Records Club. That one penny thing is
a little too much. In November of seventeen sixty nine,
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regulators from multiple counties brought petitions before the Assembly in
New bern A petition from Anson County called for changes
to voting rights and taxation, for paper money to be
issued and loaned on land, or the ability to sue
for small debts without involving a lawyer. That was important
to that whole idea that the courts were running up fees.
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If you could just handle small debts without getting a
lawyer involved, there would be less of that. Reportedly, also
some changes to how court officials were paid, in particular
paying them salaries rather than having them paid out of
the fees. This petition also called for all of the
religious denominations to have the rights to conduct legal marriages.
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For a long time, only Anglican clergy had been able
to legally perform marriages in North Carolina, and once Presbyterians
were also allowed to do it, part of their fees
were still going to the Anglican Church. The Anson County
regulators also called for Benjamin Franklin or some other patriot
to act as the colony's representative in life. London. Regulators
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from Orange and Rowan Counties submitted a very similar petition
asking for a lot of the same reforms, along with
calling for the assemblies yea and nay votes to be recorded.
In response, the Assembly introduced a number of bills meant
to do several of these very things, although the lower
House did also pass a resolution that anyone who didn't
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pay taxes was an enemy of the country. But on
November sixth, seventeen sixty nine, Governor Tryon got back to
the Assembly after having been ill, he saw these bills
that had been introduced. He dissolved the Assembly again and
called for another new election. Once again, though several pro
regulator people were either elected or reelected. This included Herman
(28:44):
husband and John Pryor. But back in the Piedmont, many
of the regulators were incredibly frustrated by this point. They
had been trying to get issues with taxation and corruption
resolved for roughly four years. They had no confidence that
the Assembly was actually going to get new laws passed,
and it felt like everything that they had tried to
accomplish so far had been thwarted. So on Saturday September twentieth,
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seventeen seventy, a group of regulators took a petition to
the Superior Court in Hillsborough. They felt that the juries
were prejudiced. They wanted the corrupt officers fairly tried, and
they wanted all these ongoing tax issues to be cleared
up and fairly settled. They were told to come back
on Monday, and when they did it was with one
hundred and fifty regulators armed with switches and sticks. They
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took over the courtroom and disrupted the court proceedings, and
then they surrounded the courthouse, whipping a lawyer in the
assistant district attorney when they tried to enter the building.
Then they whipped Edmund Fanning until he finally convinced them
to let him go home if he promised to come
back in the morning. He did return in the morning,
and the regulators ran him out of town and then
(29:53):
tore down his house. But the judge did not return
to the courthouse, having fled in the middle of the night.
So the regulators broke into the courtroom and started trying
cases on the docket themselves. In the words of John
Spencer Bassett, who wrote a history of all of this
in eighteen ninety five, quote, whatever we may think of
the justness of the cause of the regulators, we must
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readily agree that their conduct on this occasion was illegal.
After these incidents in Hillsborough, Governor Tryon became understandably alarmed
He asked whether the regulator's actions constituted treason and was
told that no, they had not. Even so he started
considering whether he could raise a militia to fight them. Then,
on November twelfth, Judge Richard Henderson's barn was burned down,
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presumably by regulators. Governor Tryon convened the Assembly to determine
a course of action. The Assembly expelled herman husband from
his seat in the Assembly, and he was then put
in jail. Even though he claimed he had no involvement
with the regulators at this point and disabout all their actions.
Regulators in the Piedmont started planning a march to New
(30:59):
Bern Soon. Johnston's Riot Act was introduced to the Assembly
and it passed on January fifteenth, seventeen seventy one. It
was an act for preventing tumultuous and riotous assemblies, and
for the more speedy and effectually punishing the rioters, and
for restoring and preserving the public peace of this province.
(31:19):
It made rioting a felony punishable by death, and it
authorized the governor to raise a militia to deal with it.
At the same time, the Assembly also passed several other
bills relating to things like sheriff's appointments and attorney fees,
and faster collections of small debts and salaries for the
Chief Justice. They also divided several of the counties into smaller,
(31:42):
more manageable ones. All of these reforms related to the
things that the regulators had been advocating for for so long,
but rather than waiting to see whether they resolved the situation,
Governor Tryon took advantage of the Johnson's Riot Act and
raised a militia. The regulators were outraged at this. The
existence of the Johnston Riot Act had inflamed tensions even further,
(32:04):
and the idea that the governor was actually raising a
militia to come after them raised numerous questions about civil
liberties and whether the governor was just going to resort
to violence anytime someone disagreed with them. This militia left
Newborn in April of seventeen seventy one and arrived in
Hillsboro on May ninth to find that it was vastly
(32:24):
outnumbered by the regulators. The militia was also short on ammunition.
After a powder raid that had been undertaken by nine
young men dressed as Native Americans. They were later nicknamed
the Black Boys of Cabaris. Reinforcements arrived on May eleventh,
which gave the militia a force of about one thousand men.
(32:45):
They were still outnumbered by the regulators two to one,
but the militia were much better trained and also better armed.
On May sixteenth, the regulators were told to disarm themselves
near Alamance Creek, but before the deadline given to do so,
the Governor's militia opened fire. This came to be known
as the Battle of Alimance, and it lasted a couple
(33:05):
of hours before the regulators ran out of ammunition. Nine
were killed on each side, although many more regulators were
wounded than militiamen. This effectively ended the regulator movement, although
Tryon's militia continued moving through the Piedmont rounding people up
for some time afterward. One regulator named James Few was
(33:26):
executed on the spot at the Battle of Alimance to
set an example, twelve more people were arrested and put
on trial. The six who were convicted were executed for
treason on June nineteenth, seventeen seventy one. Here is the
sentencing of one of them. A man named Benjamin Merrill. Quote.
I must now close by afflicting duty by pronouncing upon
(33:47):
you the awful sentence of law, which is that you,
Benjamin Merrill, be carried to the place from whence you came.
That you be drawn from thence to the place of execution,
where you are to be hanged by the neck. That
you be cut down, while yet alive, That your bowels
be taken out and burnt before your face, That your
head be cut off, that your body be divided into
(34:08):
four quarters. And this to be at His Majesty's disposal.
And the Lord have mercy on your soul. After all this,
nearly sixty five hundred settlers in the Piedmont were made
to swear allegiance to the government. This was about three
quarters of the white men in the more remote parts
of the colony, and afterward many former regulators left North Carolina,
(34:30):
many of them settling near the Watauga River in what
would become East Tennessee. Tryon got back to newbern in
June of seventeen seventy one, but then he left the
colony not long after that to become Governor of New York.
Fanning went with him to be his personal secretary. Both
Tryon and Fanning were on the Loyalist side in the
Revolutionary War. Tryon died in London in seventeen eighty eight,
(34:53):
and Fanning died in eighteen eighteen. Herman husband fled to Pennsylvania,
where he was part of the Wor Whiskey Rebellion, for
which he was convicted and condemned to death, but then
later freed. He died in seventeen ninety five. As for
Tryon's palace, his successor, Josiah Martin, furnished it really extravagantly,
but then he fled the capitol in May of seventeen
(35:16):
seventy six out of fear of the Revolutionary War. The
state government took control of the building in seventeen seventy seven,
although it was again abandoned as the war went on.
The building was also damaged when large amounts of lead
that had been used in its construction were torn out
of it and made it to musket balls. The state
capitol was moved to Raleigh in seventeen ninety two, at
(35:38):
which point Tryon's Palace had been damaged by vandals and squatters.
It burned down on February twenty seventh, seventeen ninety eight.
It was restored and rebuilt in the nineteen fifties and
is now just known as Tryon Palace without the s.
Some historians argue that the regulator movement was a precursor
to the Revolutionary War, especially given in how much of
(36:00):
the dispute was between ordinary farmers and the royal governor,
and how many of the same or similar grievances were
shared between the regulators and the patriots. In addition to
taxation and representation and other issues that we discussed, Tryon
supported the British government when it came to the Stamp
Act of seventeen sixty five, and had refused to allow
(36:21):
a delegation from North Carolina to attend the Stamp Act
Congress that October. And this whole incident does seem to
have inspired some of the patriots in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts,
but it does not appear that most of the regulators
became involved in the revolution themselves. None of this is
anything that I would have gleaned from watching Outlander, because
(36:43):
as we all know, Outlander is not really a source
of historical accuracy. That is not its mission. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday if you'd like
to send us a note, Our email addresses History Podcast
(37:04):
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the
show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday Classic is on the Regulator War,
also called the Regulator Movement. It was inspired by the
TV show Outlander, although I did not choose it as
Today's Saturday Classic to align with last night's Outlander series finale.
It is because today is the two hundred and fifty
fifth anniversary of the Battle of Alimance, which took place
(00:24):
on May sixteenth, seventeen seventy one, and was the Regulator
War's final and by some descriptions, only battle, because some
people want to draw a distinction between battles and skirmishes.
This originally came out on January twenty eighth, twenty nineteen.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
(00:47):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. And if you
have been watching the fourth season of the TV show Outlander,
one of the things that keeps coming up is that
(01:07):
there are some rebellious people in colonial North Carolina who
are called the Regulators, and that they're mad about something
about unfair taxes and corruption. The show doesn't really make
it all that clear. This season of Outlander was roughly
based on the novel Drums of Autumn, which, to be clear,
I haven't read. I also haven't read the next novel
(01:28):
after that one, which is called The Fiery Cross. And
this episode is being recorded before the last episode of
this season of the TV show, but it's gonna come
out after, so I don't have any idea what's happening
in the season finale. But it seemed like with all
of this it would be a good time to do
an episode on the Regulator War also known as the
(01:49):
War of the Regulation, also known as the Regulator Movement,
which is something that people started asking us to do
all the way back during the last time we did
an Outlander themed episode, and that was twenty sixteen, with
our installment on the Jacobite Rising of seventeen forty five. Yeah,
I'll confess that part of me wanted this to be
some very weird steam punky because it does. The name
(02:13):
sounds so good. It does, and one of the things
that currently is a bit of a challenge this will
all be sorted out by the time this episode comes out,
is finding the artwork to go with it on our website,
because I keep getting these strange I mean, they're beautiful,
some of them, but they're definitely steampunk inspired watches and
(02:34):
not not anything to do with the actual historical event. No,
and I also do I do want to say right
up here at the top, there is really a lot
to unpack with this season of Outlander in terms of
its representation of a number of people's and that is
not what today's episode is about at all, But there's
a lot there, so I just wanted to acknowledge that
(02:56):
it exists. I have not been watching, so I have
no idea. But to make sense of this whole series
of events we're talking about, we first need to get
into some North Carolina geography. North Carolina is divided into
three geographical regions from west to east. They are the Mountains,
the Piedmont, and the coastal Plain. Sometimes the coastal Plain
(03:17):
is even further divided into the inner coastal Plain and
the Tidewater. Naturally, when Europeans started colonizing this part of
North America, they started out along the coastal plain, and
it's not just because that's where they landed. Aside from
the swampy bits, the coastal plains soil is really soft
and flat and rich. It's not particularly rocky. This part
(03:38):
of the continent has navigable rivers that are really good
for carrying things back and forth to the ocean. And
overall this was a lot of what would become North
Carolina's best farmland, and it was a place where wealthy
planters started establishing big plantations with enslaved workforces. The Coastal
Plain is separated from the adjacent Piedmont by a geological
(04:00):
boundary known as the fall line. This is basically a
dividing line between the harder, rockier, more clay like Piedmont
and the softer, sandy or coastal Plain. In addition to
the differences in the soil and farming conditions on either
side of the line, rivers crossing the line descend through
waterfalls and rapids, making them impractical to impossible to use
(04:20):
to transport people and goods. There are, of course fall
lines all over the world, and in terms of the
Atlantic Seaboard fall line, it runs from New York to Georgia. Yeah,
you could still certainly grow things in the Piedmont, but
it was harder, and then it was harder to get
them anywhere. It's a little bit of a disadvantage. It
makes me think of the various stories we've done on
(04:41):
things like I think Brook Farm had this problem the
Brock Farm community where they were like, we're going to
go start a thing where no one else is doing stuff,
and we're going to farm here, and it's like no
one else is farming here for a reason. It is
made of rocks. Also, just to clear up a little
geographical confusion or Outlander viewers who might be trying to
(05:02):
imagine where all of this is happening in relation to
the TV show, the fictional Fraser's Ridge is in the
Blue Ridge Mountains in northwest North Carolina, somewhere near the
real places of Boone and Blowing Rock, and that is
on the opposite end of the state from Wilmington, which
is out on the southeastern coast, roughly three hundred miles
or four hundred and eighty kilometers away. Fraser's Ridge also
(05:25):
would not be very close to Cross Creek or the
Cape Beer River, which is home to the show's fictional
plantation of River Run. That is roughly two hundred miles
or three hundred twenty kilometers Today, you would measure it
from roughly Boon to Fayetteville, which is what Cross Creek
is known as today. The show kind of makes it
look like these places are all next door to each other.
(05:46):
They are not. This geography might seem like a weird
thing to be spending all this much time on, but
in colonial North Carolina, the division between the Piedmont and
the coastal plain contributed to huge divisions among the colonists
and between the colonists and the government. At first, the
vast majority of colonial activity was happening out on the
(06:08):
coastal plain, with mostly English colonists, and they were arriving
by boat, either from Europe or from other colonies. But
in the seventeen hundreds that really started to change. The
western part of the colony experienced a huge population boom.
Newcomers were arriving in the mountains and the Piedmont along
the Great Wagon Road also known as the Great Philadelphia
(06:30):
Wagon Road. This had started out as a trading route
that was being used by eastern North America's native peoples,
and it ran from Philadelphia down to Georgia. By the
eighteenth century, it had been widened to accommodate wagons, and
some places it had been shifted to Cross rivers and
to get around obstacles more easily. Many of these new
arrivals were Scot's, Irish or German, and while most of
(06:52):
the English colonists out on the coast were Anglican, the Scots,
Irish and German people arriving in North Carolina included a
lot more Baptists, Byterians, Quakers, and Moravians. So from settlement
to settlement, or even within settlements, people often didn't speak
the same language or follow the same religious practices and observances,
and as a general trend, the Piedmont was much poorer
(07:14):
than the coast, with most people scratching out a living
as subsistence farmers rather than running large plantations. This influx
of Europeans to the Piedmont was huge. North Carolina's population
more than doubled between seventeen thirty and seventeen fifty, and
then nearly tripled in the twenty years after that. Most
of these new arrivals were settling in what was known
(07:37):
then as the back counties that was the Piedmont, which
is at the time considered the North Carolina Frontier. This
combination of geography and demographics led to many problems people
in the Piedmont and the mountains, but our focus for
this is really the Piedmont in this episode thought that
they were being unfairly taxed because various taxes were levied
(07:58):
at the same rate there as they were out on
the coast, where people had more money. Settlers in the
Piedmont were also represented in the Assembly, but those Assembly
seats had not been reapportioned in light of the population boom,
so the Piedmont settlers also felt that they weren't really
being fairly represented in the Assembly either. A lot of
local political and court offices were being filled by appointment,
(08:22):
either by the monarch or by the governor or by
the Assembly. A lot of these appointees were wealthy and
powerful people from the coast or friends of theirs, so
together with the tax issues, this really led to a
perception that the Piedmont did not matter to the Assembly
or to the governor except when it came to being taxed,
and even when there was some local control over who
(08:44):
was in charge. The government and courts were very cliquish. Technically,
most officials were appointed by the governor, but in many
cases the governor made these appointments based on the recommendations
of the court itself, so those officers would recommend themselves
and their friends, ultimately creating a courthouse ring where the
same powerful people were always in control of local politics
(09:07):
and the legal system. The existence of these courthouse rings
wasn't necessarily the biggest problem in people's minds. A bigger
issue in the Piedmont was that those legal and political
positions went from being held by farmers and planters to
being held by lawyers and merchants. So it seemed like
all the political power had increasingly moved toward these wealthy outsiders,
(09:28):
a lot of them either from the coast or connected
to people from the coast, and all of them in
cahoots to stay in power, And it also seemed like
they were in cahoots to take advantage of people. There
were laws meant to keep officials from abusing their positions,
but they were not consistently enforced, and people had to
handle a lot of matters through the court, everything from
(09:48):
filing deeds to trying to collect debts. The widespread perception
was that everyone from lawyers to clerks, was making things
take longer and running up fees just to line their
own pockets. For example, if you were trying to file
something with the Register of deeds, he might tax you
three times, once for each of the forms necessary to
(10:08):
finish the transaction, rather than just once for the whole
transaction you were trying to do. As another example of
all this, people did not trust the sheriffs at all.
One of the sheriff's duties was to collect the taxes,
and here's how people thought this process generally went down.
It's clear that sometimes the process did go down this way,
(10:29):
not clear whether it happened every time, but this was
how when somebody said the sheriff's coming to collect the tax,
people just sort of thought, Okay, this is how this
is going to happen. The sheriff would show up and
demand the tax, but the taxpayer would not have the
cash on hand to actually pay it, because people didn't
have a lot of need to carry cash, and there
was also a serious shortage of actual physical currency to
(10:50):
pay things with. But most communities did have somebody who
would keep cash and basically acted like a banker. So
the taxpayer would ask to go see that person to
get some money, and the sheriff would refuse and seize
some of their property instead. I love that people just
presume this is how the process works, like there's a
horrible flow chart that ends with property seized. People though,
(11:14):
did not want to pay their taxes in property arbitrarily
seized by the sheriff. If it had to be paid,
they wanted to pay it with something of known value,
like money. So then taxpayers would try to negotiate, asking
if they could get their property back if they went
and got some money and then caught up to the
sheriff down the road, and the sheriff might even agree
to this, but then disappear. Later on, the taxpayer might
(11:37):
hear that his property had been sold off for much
less than it was worth, so he would still owe money.
But it was not just the taxpayers who thought that
they were being ripped off by crooked sheriffs. And all this.
In seventeen sixty seven, North Carolina Governor William Tryon said
that he thought the sheriffs had embezzled half of the
money that they had been charged with collecting. Another thing,
(12:00):
Piedmont settlers were unhappy with Governor Tryon, And we're going
to get to that after we first paused for a
little sponsor break. So before the break, we talked about
a lot of stresses happening in North Carolina. We did
(12:21):
not even get into the tensions between the colonists and
the native people already living there, or the tensions with
the enslaved people that were also in North Carolina. Like
there was really a lot going on. One of the
biggest things, though, in the minds of the regulators, was
the Governor William Tryon. He had been appointed Lieutenant Governor
(12:41):
of North Carolina in seventeen sixty four under Governor Arthur Dobbs,
but Dobbs retired really soon after that and then died
in seventeen sixty five. When Tryon became governor, he represented
the royal prerogative in the colony of North Carolina, and
soon he established North Carolina's first permanent capital in Newbern,
which is near the coast and connected to the Atlantic
(13:03):
by the NEOs River. Tryon planned to build an extravagant
seat of the government and governor's residence in Newbern. To
that end, even before leaving England to become Lieutenant governor,
he had convinced architect John Hawks to join him. Tryon
made his first request for funding for this project, nicknamed
Tryon's Palace, on November eight, seventeen sixty six, not long
(13:26):
after the Assembly allotted five thousand pounds to both buy
the land and get started on the building. A lot
of people in the Piedmont thought this was extravagant, and then,
to make things worse than just the fact that it
was five thousand pounds to build something that was nicknamed
a palace, the money to do it was taken from
a fund that had been established for public schools, and
(13:48):
then to restore the money back to that fund, the
Assembly imposed a poll tax and, more importantly, in the
minds of some people, a levy on alcoholic beverages. That
was just the beginning, though another ten thousand pounds was
earmarked for the project two years later, and then when
it was finally time to open the palace in seventeen seventy,
(14:11):
Governor Tryon planned a huge gala to celebrate. Tryon's palace
wasn't the governor's only extravagance. In seventeen sixty seven, he
mounted an expensive expedition that he personally went on to
survey and negotiate a new border between North Carolina and
the Cherokee Nation, and as had happened with Tryon's palace
(14:32):
taxes were used to pay for this. Settlers who were
on the wrong side of the line were required to
move the following January, and the general perception among the
people of the Piedmont was that Tryon had made this
a whole lavish production just to draw attention to himself.
It was described as quote making a splendid exhibition of
(14:53):
himself to the Indians. The regulators also had a particular
problem with one of the governor's friends. Edmund Fanning, was
a great example of the way a small group of
people were holding a huge amount of power, which we
touched on before we had our commercial break. And born
in New York, he was a lawyer, an assemblyman, the
Register of Deeds of Orange County, and a colonel in
(15:15):
the militia. He was not at all the only person
who had multiple titles like this. That crossover among the
Assembly and the courts and the militia was huge and
was contributing to the perception that the Piedmont was being
controlled by a few wealthy people. Fanning was just the
one who raised the most iyro. There was even a
song about him, more than one. This is the one
(15:37):
we're going to read when fanning first to Orange came
he looked both pale and wan, an old patched coat
upon his back, an old mare, he wrote on Both
man and mayor want worth five pounds, as I've been
often told, but by his civil robberies, he's laced his
coat with gold. On top of all of this, the
(15:58):
geography and the taxes, and the representation, and the governor
and the governor's friend, the colonists and settlers of North
Carolina were just fractious. The colony went through numerous uprisings
and rebellions in the decades leading up to this. In
sixteen seventy seven, Culpeper's Rebellion was an armed uprising, largely
in response to the Navigation Acts that restricted colonial trade.
(16:21):
In sixteen eighty nine, colonists arrested corrupt Governor Cess Sothel,
who was then put on trial and banished by the Assembly.
The next year, John Gibbs, who replaced Governor Sothel, led
an armed uprising against his successor and vowed to fight
him to the death. Then there was Carrie's Rebellion in
seventeen eleven, which is a lot harder to sum up
(16:41):
in one sentence. It is named for former Governor Thomas Carey,
who led an armed rebellion against his successor that was
rooted in both religion and politics. The first seeds of
the Regulator movement had started back before Governor Tryon asked
for that five thousand pounds for his palace. It was
August seventeen sixty six a group of Quakers met in
(17:03):
Orange County to talk about all their various grievances, all
those issues that were connected to taxation and corruption. One
of them was a man named Hermann husband who's often
described as one of the leaders of the Regulator movement,
but it's a little more complicated than that. As a Quaker,
he could not get behind some of the more violent
acts that they took, and he really distanced himself from
(17:25):
the movement as it became more violent. The people that
met in August of seventeen sixty six called themselves the
Sandy Creek Association, and they planned to go through the
more typical, non violent means of trying to get things changed.
They were going to file petitions, they were going to
try to get representation in the Assembly, things like that.
The Sandy Creek Association didn't make a lot of headway
(17:48):
and escalated to things like refusing to pay taxes. And
then a law was passed in seventeen sixty eight that
required sheriffs to be at specific places on specific days
to collect taxes is rather than just showing up in
the Piedmont. This made things worse instead of better. Taxpayers
felt like now the burden was on them to travel
(18:09):
somewhere to pay taxes, and because the counties then were
much larger than they are now, this could be a
very time consuming and expensive inconvenience. The new law also
didn't do anything to address the many other concerns with
embezzlement and corruption. Yeah, it seems like having a person
take their taxes to the sheriff at a specific time
(18:30):
and place rather than having the sheriff show up and
demand money, Like it seems like that would be an
improvement was not really read as an improvement. In the
early spring of seventeen sixty eight, the Orange County sheriff
posted a list of all the places that he would
be to collect the tax along with a fine for
the people who did not make it to those places
at the right time, and taxpayers were really angry about this,
(18:53):
and they thought it might be illegal. By this point
they had also heard about that additional money that had
been allotted to build Triumphs Palace. So a group of
Orange County residents got together. They drafted a letter which
they sent to all of their various officials. And here
is what it said. Whereas the taxes in the county
(19:13):
are larger according to the number of taxables than adjacent counties,
and continue so year after year, and as the jealousy
still prevails among us that we are wronged, and having
the more reason to think so, as we have been
at the trouble of choosing men and sending them after
the civilist manner, that we could to know what we
paid our levee for, but could receive no satisfaction, we
(19:36):
are obliged to seek redress by denying paying any more
until we have a full settlement for what is passed
and have a true regulation with our officers. As our
grievances are too many to notify in a small piece
of writing, we desire that you are assemblymen and vestrymen,
may appoint a time before next court at the courthouse,
(19:56):
and let us know by the bearer, and we will
choose men to act for us. We desire that the
sheriffs will not come this way to collect the levee,
for we will pay none before there is a settlement
to our satisfaction. And as the nature of an officer
is a servant to the public, we are determined to
have the officers of this county under a better and
honester regulation than they have been for some time past.
(20:20):
Think not to frighten us with rebellion in this case,
For if the inhabitants of this province have not as
good a right to inquire into the nature of our
constitution and disbursement of our funds as those of our
mother country, we think it is by arbitrary proceedings that
we are debarred of that right. Therefore, to be plain
with you, it is our intent to have a full
(20:40):
settlement of yawn in every particular point that is matter
of doubt with us. So fail not to send an
answer by the bearer. They're basically refusing to pay any
taxes until these things are settled. Some cooler headed people
decided that the language in this initial letter was much
too aggressive, so they are to have a second meeting,
(21:01):
And at that second meeting they adopted this set of
articles that I find to just be delightfully conciliatory. Here's
what it says. We, the subscribers, do voluntarily agree to
form ourselves into an association to assemble ourselves for conference
for regulating public a grievances and abuses of power in
(21:24):
the following particulars, with others of a like nature that
may occur. One we will pay no more taxes until
we are satisfied that they are agreeable to law and
applied to the purposes therein mentioned, unless we cannot help
it or are forced. Two we will pay no officer
any more fees than the law allows, unless we are
(21:45):
obliged to do it, and then to show our dislike
and bear open testimony against it. Three we will attend
all our meetings of conferences as often as we conveniently can,
et cetera. Four we will contribute to collecs for defraying
necessary expenses attending the work according to our abilities. Five
(22:06):
in case of the difference in judgment, we will submit
to the judgment of the majority of our body. So
this is a lot more like we're not going to
pay our taxes unless we have to, but then we
will complain about it. Both of these documents talked about regulating,
but the term regulators, as these men came to be known,
was likely picked up from a similar movement in South
(22:27):
Carolina that started the year before, although that particular movement
was more about combating lawlessness than tax reform and government corruption.
Even though the regulators had tried to walk back that
first more aggressive statement, it was really too late. That
statement had already been sent to Orange County's officers, who
were affronted. But soon things really started to escalate, and
(22:50):
we will get to that. After another quick sponsor break
on April fourth, seventeen sixty eight, the regulators called for
another meeting, this time to ask the sheriff to meet
with the committee to talk about their grievances. But before
(23:12):
that meeting could actually happen, one of the regulators Saddle
and Bridle were seized to pay off a levy. A
group of regulators went to try to get them back.
That led to weapons being drawn, but apparently no physical violence.
Authorities tried to deploy a militia to re seize the
reclaimed Saddle and Bridle, but not enough people reported for
(23:33):
duty to go and do this, presumably because they were
sympathetic to the regulators and didn't want to go take
up arms against them. Edmund Fanning, having read only that
first Angrier document, wrote to the governor saying that these
regulators were going to burn down the Orange County seat
of Hillsborough. At first, the governor was at least somewhat conciliatory,
and on April thirtieth, the regulators selected thirteen delegates to
(23:57):
attend a meeting to discuss their grievances. But before that
meeting could happen, Fanning had herman husband and a regulator
named William Butler arrested and jailed, and this just inflamed
tensions even further. What followed was months and a lot
of confusion and miscommunication, which is not really surprising considering
that now there have been two meetings that were thwarted
(24:18):
by some other action. Local authorities were trying to prosecute
the regulators, and the regulators were refusing to pay taxes
and also trying to bring charges against the officials who
they thought were corrupt. In July, Husband and Butler were
tried and acquitted for inciting the populace to rebellion. In
that same court session, Fanning was indicted for taking excessive fees.
(24:43):
Tryon also traveled to Hillsborough himself during all this, hoping
that his presence would calm things down, and one of
the things he had to do was to dispel rumors
that he was recruiting a Native American fighting force to
go after the regulators. By August, a new sheriff had
been appointed in Orange County, and he came bearing a
letter from the governor condemning the regulators and calling their
(25:06):
actions illegal. The next month, thirty seven hundred regulators, all
of them farmers, sent a proposal to the governor. Quote
desiring to know the terms on which their submission would
be accepted, they were told that if they surrendered nine
of their leaders from three counties, laid down their arms,
and paid all their taxes, they would be pardoned. Only
(25:28):
about thirty people accepted this agreement, and Tryon sent troops
to try to track down and arrest some of the
biggest ring leaders. After all of this, several people were
put on trial for their involvement with the regulators, and
those who were convicted paid fines and spent some time
in prison. But later on the governor pardoned everybody who
had been found guilty. That summer, he also dissolved the
(25:50):
assembly and called for a new election with new representatives,
at which point several men who had sympathies to the
regulators or had been really involved in the movement were
all to the assembly. The regulators had little success bringing
corrupt officials to trial, though Edmund Fanning and another official
named Francis Nash were both charged with taking illegal fees.
(26:12):
Nash was ultimately acquitted, while Fanning was convicted but fined
only one penny for each of the five offenses and
resigned his post as register of deeds. That Register of
deeds example we gave earlier in the show where he
was collecting multiple fees on one transaction, was essentially what
he was convicted of doing. Convicted, not really punished in
(26:34):
a very meaningful way. Why penny Yeah, His argument was
was misconstruction of the law, basically that he had misunderstood
that this was not allowed, and for punishment he can
join the Columbia Records Club. That one penny thing is
a little too much. In November of seventeen sixty nine,
(26:57):
regulators from multiple counties brought petitions before the Assembly in
New bern A petition from Anson County called for changes
to voting rights and taxation, for paper money to be
issued and loaned on land, or the ability to sue
for small debts without involving a lawyer. That was important
to that whole idea that the courts were running up fees.
(27:19):
If you could just handle small debts without getting a
lawyer involved, there would be less of that. Reportedly, also
some changes to how court officials were paid, in particular
paying them salaries rather than having them paid out of
the fees. This petition also called for all of the
religious denominations to have the rights to conduct legal marriages.
(27:40):
For a long time, only Anglican clergy had been able
to legally perform marriages in North Carolina, and once Presbyterians
were also allowed to do it, part of their fees
were still going to the Anglican Church. The Anson County
regulators also called for Benjamin Franklin or some other patriot
to act as the colony's representative in life. London. Regulators
(28:01):
from Orange and Rowan Counties submitted a very similar petition
asking for a lot of the same reforms, along with
calling for the assemblies yea and nay votes to be recorded.
In response, the Assembly introduced a number of bills meant
to do several of these very things, although the lower
House did also pass a resolution that anyone who didn't
(28:21):
pay taxes was an enemy of the country. But on
November sixth, seventeen sixty nine, Governor Tryon got back to
the Assembly after having been ill, he saw these bills
that had been introduced. He dissolved the Assembly again and
called for another new election. Once again, though several pro
regulator people were either elected or reelected. This included Herman
(28:44):
husband and John Pryor. But back in the Piedmont, many
of the regulators were incredibly frustrated by this point. They
had been trying to get issues with taxation and corruption
resolved for roughly four years. They had no confidence that
the Assembly was actually going to get new laws passed,
and it felt like everything that they had tried to
accomplish so far had been thwarted. So on Saturday September twentieth,
(29:08):
seventeen seventy, a group of regulators took a petition to
the Superior Court in Hillsborough. They felt that the juries
were prejudiced. They wanted the corrupt officers fairly tried, and
they wanted all these ongoing tax issues to be cleared
up and fairly settled. They were told to come back
on Monday, and when they did it was with one
hundred and fifty regulators armed with switches and sticks. They
(29:32):
took over the courtroom and disrupted the court proceedings, and
then they surrounded the courthouse, whipping a lawyer in the
assistant district attorney when they tried to enter the building.
Then they whipped Edmund Fanning until he finally convinced them
to let him go home if he promised to come
back in the morning. He did return in the morning,
and the regulators ran him out of town and then
(29:53):
tore down his house. But the judge did not return
to the courthouse, having fled in the middle of the night.
So the regulators broke into the courtroom and started trying
cases on the docket themselves. In the words of John
Spencer Bassett, who wrote a history of all of this
in eighteen ninety five, quote, whatever we may think of
the justness of the cause of the regulators, we must
(30:15):
readily agree that their conduct on this occasion was illegal.
After these incidents in Hillsborough, Governor Tryon became understandably alarmed
He asked whether the regulator's actions constituted treason and was
told that no, they had not. Even so he started
considering whether he could raise a militia to fight them. Then,
on November twelfth, Judge Richard Henderson's barn was burned down,
(30:38):
presumably by regulators. Governor Tryon convened the Assembly to determine
a course of action. The Assembly expelled herman husband from
his seat in the Assembly, and he was then put
in jail. Even though he claimed he had no involvement
with the regulators at this point and disabout all their actions.
Regulators in the Piedmont started planning a march to New
(30:59):
Bern Soon. Johnston's Riot Act was introduced to the Assembly
and it passed on January fifteenth, seventeen seventy one. It
was an act for preventing tumultuous and riotous assemblies, and
for the more speedy and effectually punishing the rioters, and
for restoring and preserving the public peace of this province.
(31:19):
It made rioting a felony punishable by death, and it
authorized the governor to raise a militia to deal with it.
At the same time, the Assembly also passed several other
bills relating to things like sheriff's appointments and attorney fees,
and faster collections of small debts and salaries for the
Chief Justice. They also divided several of the counties into smaller,
(31:42):
more manageable ones. All of these reforms related to the
things that the regulators had been advocating for for so long,
but rather than waiting to see whether they resolved the situation,
Governor Tryon took advantage of the Johnson's Riot Act and
raised a militia. The regulators were outraged at this. The
existence of the Johnston Riot Act had inflamed tensions even further,
(32:04):
and the idea that the governor was actually raising a
militia to come after them raised numerous questions about civil
liberties and whether the governor was just going to resort
to violence anytime someone disagreed with them. This militia left
Newborn in April of seventeen seventy one and arrived in
Hillsboro on May ninth to find that it was vastly
(32:24):
outnumbered by the regulators. The militia was also short on ammunition.
After a powder raid that had been undertaken by nine
young men dressed as Native Americans. They were later nicknamed
the Black Boys of Cabaris. Reinforcements arrived on May eleventh,
which gave the militia a force of about one thousand men.
(32:45):
They were still outnumbered by the regulators two to one,
but the militia were much better trained and also better armed.
On May sixteenth, the regulators were told to disarm themselves
near Alamance Creek, but before the deadline given to do so,
the Governor's militia opened fire. This came to be known
as the Battle of Alimance, and it lasted a couple
(33:05):
of hours before the regulators ran out of ammunition. Nine
were killed on each side, although many more regulators were
wounded than militiamen. This effectively ended the regulator movement, although
Tryon's militia continued moving through the Piedmont rounding people up
for some time afterward. One regulator named James Few was
(33:26):
executed on the spot at the Battle of Alimance to
set an example, twelve more people were arrested and put
on trial. The six who were convicted were executed for
treason on June nineteenth, seventeen seventy one. Here is the
sentencing of one of them. A man named Benjamin Merrill. Quote.
I must now close by afflicting duty by pronouncing upon
(33:47):
you the awful sentence of law, which is that you,
Benjamin Merrill, be carried to the place from whence you came.
That you be drawn from thence to the place of execution,
where you are to be hanged by the neck. That
you be cut down, while yet alive, That your bowels
be taken out and burnt before your face, That your
head be cut off, that your body be divided into
(34:08):
four quarters. And this to be at His Majesty's disposal.
And the Lord have mercy on your soul. After all this,
nearly sixty five hundred settlers in the Piedmont were made
to swear allegiance to the government. This was about three
quarters of the white men in the more remote parts
of the colony, and afterward many former regulators left North Carolina,
(34:30):
many of them settling near the Watauga River in what
would become East Tennessee. Tryon got back to newbern in
June of seventeen seventy one, but then he left the
colony not long after that to become Governor of New York.
Fanning went with him to be his personal secretary. Both
Tryon and Fanning were on the Loyalist side in the
Revolutionary War. Tryon died in London in seventeen eighty eight,
(34:53):
and Fanning died in eighteen eighteen. Herman husband fled to Pennsylvania,
where he was part of the Wor Whiskey Rebellion, for
which he was convicted and condemned to death, but then
later freed. He died in seventeen ninety five. As for
Tryon's palace, his successor, Josiah Martin, furnished it really extravagantly,
but then he fled the capitol in May of seventeen
(35:16):
seventy six out of fear of the Revolutionary War. The
state government took control of the building in seventeen seventy seven,
although it was again abandoned as the war went on.
The building was also damaged when large amounts of lead
that had been used in its construction were torn out
of it and made it to musket balls. The state
capitol was moved to Raleigh in seventeen ninety two, at
(35:38):
which point Tryon's Palace had been damaged by vandals and squatters.
It burned down on February twenty seventh, seventeen ninety eight.
It was restored and rebuilt in the nineteen fifties and
is now just known as Tryon Palace without the s.
Some historians argue that the regulator movement was a precursor
to the Revolutionary War, especially given in how much of
(36:00):
the dispute was between ordinary farmers and the royal governor,
and how many of the same or similar grievances were
shared between the regulators and the patriots. In addition to
taxation and representation and other issues that we discussed, Tryon
supported the British government when it came to the Stamp
Act of seventeen sixty five, and had refused to allow
(36:21):
a delegation from North Carolina to attend the Stamp Act
Congress that October. And this whole incident does seem to
have inspired some of the patriots in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts,
but it does not appear that most of the regulators
became involved in the revolution themselves. None of this is
anything that I would have gleaned from watching Outlander, because
(36:43):
as we all know, Outlander is not really a source
of historical accuracy. That is not its mission. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday if you'd like
to send us a note, Our email addresses History Podcast
(37:04):
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the
show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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