University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XI

THE REGULATORS

IT is highly probable that even at the time
of his earlier explorations in behalf of
Richard Henderson and Company, Daniel
Boone anticipated speedy removal to the West.
Indeed, in the very year of his first tour in
their interest, Daniel and his wife Rebeckah
sold all their property in North Carolina, consisting
of their home and six hundred and forty

acres of land, and after several removals established
themselves upon the upper Yadkin.
This removal and the later western explorations
just outlined were due not merely to the
spirit of adventure and discovery. Three
other causes also were at work. In the first
place there was the scarcity of game. For
fifteen years the shipments of deerskins from
Bethabara to Charleston steadily increased;
and the number of skins bought by Gammern,
the Moravian storekeeper, ran so high that in
spite of the large purchases made at the store
by the hunters he would sometimes run entirely
out of money. Tireless in the chase, the far-roaming
Boone was among "the hunters, who
brought in their skins from as far away as the
Indian lands"; and the beautiful upland pastures
and mountain forests, still teeming with
deer and bear, doubtless lured him to the upper
Yadkin, where for a time in the immediate
neighborhood of his home abundance of game
fell before his unerring rifle. Certainly the
deer and other game, which were being killed
in enormous numbers to satisfy the insatiable
demand of the traders at Salisbury, the Forks,
and Bethabara, became scarcer and scarcer;
and the wild game that was left gradually fled
to the westward. Terrible indeed was the
havoc wrought among the elk; and it was reported
that the last elk was killed in western
North Carolina as early as 1781.

Another grave evil of the time with which
Boone had to cope in the back country of
North Carolina was the growth of undisguised
outlawry, similar to that found on the western
plains of a later era. This ruthless brigandage
arose as the result of the unsettled state
of the country and the exposed condition of
the settlements due to the Indian alarms.
When rude borderers, demoralized by the enforced
idleness attendant upon fort life during
the dark days of Indian invasion, sallied forth
upon forays against the Indians, they found
much valuable property—horses, cattle, and
stock—left by their owners when hurriedly
fleeing to the protection of the frontier stockades.
The temptations thus afforded were too
great to resist; and the wilder spirits of the

backwoods, with hazy notions of private rights,
seized the property which they found, slaughtered
the cattle, sold the horses, and appropriated
to their own use the temporarily abandoned
household goods and plantation tools.
The stealing of horses, which were needed for
the cultivation of the soil and useful for quickly
carrying unknown thieves beyond the reach of
the owner and the law, became a common practice;
and was carried on by bands of outlaws
living remote from one another and acting in
collusive concert.

Toward the end of July, 1755, when the
Indian outrages upon the New River settlements
in Virginia had frightened away all the
families at the Town Fork in the Yadkin country,
William Owen, a man of Welsh stock, who
had settled in the spring of 1752 in the upper
Yadkin near the Mulberry Fields, was suspected
of having robbed the storekeeper on the
Meho. Not long afterward a band of outlaws
who plundered the exposed cabins in their
owners' absence, erected a rude fort in the
mountain region in the rear of the Yadkin

settlements, where they stored their ill-gotten
plunder and made themselves secure from attack.
Other members of the band dwelt in
the settlements, where they concealed their
robber friends by day and aided them by night
in their nefarious projects of theft and rapine.

The entire community was finally aroused
by the bold depredations of the outlaws; and
the most worthy settlers of the Yadkin country
organized under the name of Regulators
to break up the outlaw band. When it was
discovered that Owen, who was well known
at Bethabara, had allied himself with the highwaymen,
one of the justices summoned one
hundred men; and seventy, who answered the
call, set forth on December 26, 1755, to seek
out the outlaws and to destroy their fortress.
Emboldened by their success, the latter upon
one occasion had carried off a young girl of the
settlements. Daniel Boone placed himself at
the head of one of the parties, which included
the young girl's father, to go to her rescue;
and they fortunately succeeded in effecting
the release of the frightened maiden. One of

the robbers was apprehended and brought to
Salisbury, where he was thrown into prison for
his crimes. Meanwhile a large amount of
plunder had been discovered at the house of
one Cornelius Howard; and the evidences of
his guilt so multiplied against him that he finally
confessed his connection with the outlaw
band and agreed to point out their fort in the
mountains.

Daniel Boone and George Boone joined the
party of seventy men, sent out by the colonial
authorities, under the guidance of Howard, to
attack the stronghold of the bandits. Boone
afterward related that the robbers' fort was
situated in the most fitly chosen place for such
a purpose that he could imagine—beneath an
overhanging cliff of rock, with a large natural
chimney, and a considerable area in front well
stockaded. The frontiersmen surrounded the
fort, captured five women and eleven children,
and then burned the fort to the ground. Owen
and his wife, Cumberland, and several others
were ultimately made prisoners; but Harman
and the remainder of the band escaped by

flight. Owen and his fellow captives were
then borne to Salisbury, incarcerated in the
prison there, and finally (May, 1756) condemned
to the gallows. Owen sent word to
the Moravians, petitioning them to adopt his
two boys and to apprentice one to a tailor, the
other to a carpenter. But so infuriated was
Owen's wife by Howard's treachery that she
branded him as a second Judas; and this at
once fixed upon him the sobriquet "Judas"
Howard—a sobriquet he did not live long to
bear, for about a year later he was ambushed
and shot from his horse at the crossing of a
stream. He thus paid the penalty of his betrayal
of the outlaw band. For a number of
years, the Regulators continued to wage war
against the remaining outlaws, who from time
to time committed murders as well as thefts.
As late as January, 1768, the Regulators
caught a horse thief in the Hollows of Surry
County and brought him to Bethabara, whence
Richter and Spach took him to the jail at
Salisbury. After this year, the outlaws were
heard of no more; and peace reigned in the
settlements.

Colonel Edmund Fanning—of whom more
anon—declared that the Regulation began in
Anson County which bordered upon South
Carolina.[1] Certain it is that the upper country
of that province was kept in an uproar
by civil disturbances during this early period.
Owing to the absence of courts in this section,
so remote from Charleston, the inhabitants
found it necessary, for the protection of property
and the punishment of outlaws, to form
an association called, like the North Carolina
society, the Regulation. Against this association
the horse thieves and other criminals made
common cause, and received tacit support from
certain more reputable persons who condemned
"the irregularity of the Regulators." The
Regulation which had been thus organized in
upper South Carolina as early as 1764 led to
tumultuous risings of the settlers; and finally
in the effort to suppress these disorders, the
governor, Lord Charles Montagu, appointed

one Scovil, an utterly unworthy representative,
to carry out his commands. After various
disorders, which became ever more unendurable
to the law-abiding, matters came to a
crisis (1769) as the result of the high-handed
proceedings of Scovil, who promiscuously
seized and flung into prison all the Regulators
he could lay hands on. In the month of
March the back country rose in revolt against
Scovil and a strong body of the settlers was on
the point of attacking the force under his command
when an eleventh-hour letter arrived
from Montagu, dismissing Scovil from office.
Thus was happily averted, by the narrowest
of margins, a threatened precursor of the fight
at Alamance in 1771 (see Chapter XII).
As the result of the petition of the Calhouns
and others, courts were established in 1760,
though not opened until four years later.
Many horse thieves were apprehended, tried,
and punished. Justice once more held full
sway.

Another important cause for Boone's removal
from the neighborhood of Salisbury into

the mountain fastnesses was the oppressive administration
of the law by corrupt sheriffs,
clerks, and tax-gatherers, and the dissatisfaction
of the frontier squatters with the owners
of the soil. At the close of the year 1764
reports reached the town of Wilmington, after
the adjournment of the assembly in November,
of serious disturbances in Orange County,
due, it was alleged, to the exorbitant exactions
of the clerks, registers, and some of the attorneys.[2]
As a result of this disturbing news,
Governor Dobbs issued a proclamation forbidding
any officer to take illegal fees. Troubles
had been brewing in the adjacent county
of Granville ever since the outbreak of the
citizens against Francis Corbin, Lord Granville's
agent (January 24, 1759), and the issuance
of the petition of Reuben Searcy and
others (March 23d) protesting against the
alleged excessive fees taken and injustices practised
by Robert (Robin) Jones, the famous
lawyer. These disturbances were cumulative
in their effect; and the people at last (1765)
found in George Sims, of Granville, a fit
spokesman of their cause and a doughty champion
of popular rights. In his "Serious Address
to the Inhabitants of Granville County,
containing an Account of our deplorable Situation
we suffer . . . and some necessary
Hints with Respect to a Reformation," recently
brought to light, he presents a crushing
indictment of the clerk of the county court,
Samuel Benton, the grandfather of Thomas
Hart Benton. After describing in detail the
system of semi-peonage created by the merciless
exactions of lawyers and petty court officials,
and the insatiable greed of "these cursed
hungry caterpillars," Sims with rude eloquence
calls upon the people to pull them down from
their nests for the salvation of the Commonwealth.[3]

Other abuses were also recorded. So exorbitant
was the charge for a marriage-license,
for instance, that an early chronicler records:
"The consequence was that some of the inhabitants
on the head-waters of the Yadkin took
a short cut. They took each other for better
or for worse; and considered themselves as

married without further ceremony." The extraordinary
scarcity of currency throughout
the colony, especially in the back country, was
another great hardship and a perpetual source
of vexation. All these conditions gradually
became intolerable to the uncultured but free-spirited
men of the back country. Events
were slowly converging toward a crisis in government
and society. Independent in spirit,
turbulent in action, the backwoodsmen revolted
not only against excessive taxes, dishonest
sheriffs, and extortionate fees, but also against
the rapacious practices of the agents of Lord
Granville. These agents industriously picked
flaws in the titles to the lands in Granville's
proprietary upon which the poorer settlers were
seated; and compelled them to pay for the land
if they had not already done so, or else to pay
the fees twice over and take out a new patent
as the only remedy of the alleged defect in
their titles. In Mecklenburg County the
spirit of backwoods revolt flamed out in protest
against the proprietary agents. Acting
under instructions to survey and close bargains
for the lands or else to eject those who held
them, Henry Eustace McCulloh, in February,
1765, went into the county to call a reckoning.
The settlers, many of whom had located without
deeds, indignantly retorted by offering to
buy only at their own prices, and forbade the
surveyors to lay out the holdings when this
smaller price was declined. They not only
terrorized into acquiescence those among them
who were willing to pay the amount charged
for the lands, but also openly declared that
they would resist by force any sheriff in ejectment
proceedings. On May 7th an outbreak
occurred; and a mob, led by Thomas Polk, set
upon John Frohock, Abraham Alexander, and
others, as they were about to survey a parcel
of land, and gave them a severe thrashing, even
threatening the young McCulloh with death.[4]

The choleric backwoodsmen, instinctively in
agreement with Francis Bacon, considered revenge
as a sort of wild justice. Especial objects
of their animosity were the brothers Frohock,
John and Thomas, the latter clerk of
the court at Salisbury, and Edmund Fanning,

a cultured gentleman-adventurer, associate
justice of the superior court. So rapacious
and extortionate were these vultures of the
courts who preyed upon the vitals of the
common people, that they were savagely lampooned
by Rednap Howell, the backwoods
poet-laureate of the Regulation. The temper
of the back country is well caught in Howell's
lines anent this early American "grafter," the
favorite of the royal governor:

The germs of the great westward migration
in the coming decade were thus working among
the people of the back country. If the tense
nervous energy of the American people is the
transmitted characteristic of the border settlers,
who often slept with loaded rifle in hand

in grim expectation of being awakened by the
hideous yells, the deadly tomahawk, and the
lurid firebrand of the savage, the very buoyancy
of the national character is in equal measure
"traceable to the free democracy founded
on a freehold inheritance of land." The desire
for free land was the fundamental factor
in the development of the American democracy.
No colony exhibited this tendency more
signally than did North Carolina in the turbulent
days of the Regulation. The North
Carolina frontiersmen resented the obligation
to pay quit-rents and firmly believed that the
first occupant of the soil had an indefeasible
right to the land which he had won with his
rifle and rendered productive by the implements
of toil. Preferring the dangers of the
free wilderness to the paying of tribute to absentee
landlords and officials of an intolerant
colonial government, the frontiersman found
title in his trusty rifle rather than in a piece of
parchment, and was prone to pay his obligations
to the owner of the soil in lead rather
than in gold.