University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XII

WATAUGA—HAVEN OF LIBERTY

THE five years (1766-1771) which saw the
rise, development, and ultimate defeat of
the popular movement known as the Regulation,
constitute a period not only of extraordinary
significance in North Carolina but also
of fruitful consequences in the larger movements
of westward expansion. With the resolute
intention of having their rulers "give account
of their stewardship," to employ their
own words, the Sandy Creek Association of
Baptists (organized in 1758), in a series of
papers known as Regulators' Advertisements
(1766-8) proceeded to mature, through popular

gatherings, a rough form of initiative and
referendum. At length, discouraged in its efforts,
and particularly in the attempt to bring
county officials to book for charging illegal
fees, this association ceased actively to function.
It was the precursor of a movement
of much more drastic character and formidable
proportions, chiefly directed against Colonel
Edmund Fanning and his associates. This
movement doubtless took its name, "the Regulation,"
from the bands of men already described
who were organized first in North
Carolina and later in South Carolina, to put
down highwaymen and to correct many abuses
in the back country, such as the tyrannies of
Scovil and his henchmen. Failing to secure
redress of their grievances through legal channels,
the Regulators finally made such a powerful
demonstration in support of their refusal
to pay taxes that Governor William Tryon
of North Carolina, in 1768, called out the provincial
militia, and by marching with great
show of force through the disaffected regions,
succeeded temporarily in overawing the people
and thus inducing them to pay their assessments.[1]

The suits which had been brought by the
Regulators against Edmund Fanning, register,
and Francis Nash, clerk, of Orange
County, resulted in both being "found guilty
of taking too high fees."[2] Fanning immediately
resigned his commission as register;
while Nash, who in conjunction with Fanning
had fairly offered in 1766 to refund to any
one aggrieved any fee charged by him which
the Superior Court might hold excessive, gave
bond for his appearance at the next court.
Similar suits for extortion against the three
Frohocks in Rowan County in 1769 met with
failure, however; and this outcome aroused the
bitter resentment of the Regulators, as recorded
by Herman Husband in his "Impartial
Relation." During this whole period the insurrectionary
spirit of the people, who felt
themselves deeply aggrieved but recognized
their inability to secure redress, took the form
of driving local justices from the bench and
threatening court officials with violence.

[ILLUSTRATION]

At the session of the Superior Court at
Hillsborough, September 22, 1770, an elaborate
petition prepared by the Regulators, demanding
unprejudiced juries and the public
accounting for taxes by the sheriffs, was
handed to the presiding justice by James
Hunter, a leading Regulator. This justice
was our acquaintance, Judge Richard Henderson,
of Granville County, the sole high officer
in the provincial government from the entire
western section of the colony. In this petition
occur these trenchant words: "As we are
serious and in good earnest and the cause respects
the whole body of the people it would
be loss of time to enter into arguments on particular
points for though there are a few men
who have the gift and art of reasoning, yet
every man has a feeling and knows when he
has justice done him as well as the most
learned."[3] On the following Monday (September
24th), upon convening of court, some
one hundred and fifty Regulators, led by
James Hunter, Herman Husband, Rednap
Howell, and others, armed with clubs, whips,

and cudgels, surged into the court-room and
through their spokesman, Jeremiah Fields,
presented a statement of their grievances. "I
found myself," says Judge Henderson, "under
a necessity of attempting to soften and turn
away the fury of these mad people, in the best
manner in my power, and as such could well
be, pacify their rage and at the same time preserve
the little remaining dignity of the
court."[4]

During an interim, in which the Regulators
retired for consultation, they fell without warning
upon Fanning and gave him such rough
treatment that he narrowly escaped with his
life. The mob, now past control, horsewhipped
a number of leading lawyers and citizens
gathered there at court, and treated others,
notably the courtly Mr. Hooper of Boston,
"with every mark of contempt and insult."
Judge Henderson was assured by Fields that
no harm should come to him provided he would
conduct the court in accordance with the behest
of the Regulators: namely, that no lawyer,
save the King's Attorney, should be admitted

to the court, and that the Regulators' cases
should be tried with new jurors chosen by the
Regulators. With the entire little village terrorized
by this campaign of "frightfulness,"
and the court wholly unprotected, Judge Henderson
reluctantly acknowledged to himself
that "the power of the judiciary was exhausted."
Nevertheless, he says, "I made
every effort in my power consistent with my
office and the duty the public is entitled to claim
to preserve peace and good order."[5] Agreeing
under duress to resume the session the following
day, the judge ordered an adjournment.
But being unwilling, on mature reflection,
to permit a mockery of the court and a
travesty of justice to be staged under threat
and intimidation, he returned that night to his
home in Granville and left the court adjourned
in course. Enraged by the judge's escape,
the Regulators took possession of the courtroom
the following morning, called over the
cases, and in futile protest against the conditions
they were powerless to remedy, made
profane entries which may still be seen on the
record: "Damned rogues," "Fanning pays
cost but loses nothing," "Negroes not worth a
damn, Cost exceeds the whole," "Hogan pays
and be damned," and, in a case of slander,
"Nonsense, let them argue for Ferrell has gone
hellward."[6]

The uprising of these bold and resolute, simple
and imperfectly educated people, which
had begun as a constitutional struggle to secure
justice and to prevent their own exploitation
by dishonest lawyers of the county courts,
now gave place to open anarchy and secret
incendiarism.[7] In the dead of night, November
12th and 14th, Judge Henderson's barn,
stables, and dwelling house were fired by the
Regulators and went up in flames. Glowing
with a sense of wrong, these misguided people,
led on by fanatical agitators, thus vented their
indiscriminate rage, not only upon their oppressors,
but also upon men wholly innocent
of injuring them—men of the stamp of William
Hooper, afterward signer of the Declaration
of Independence, Alexander Martin,
afterward governor and United States Senator,

ALEXANDER MARTIN

From the original portrait by John Sharpless

WILLIAM LENOIR

From the original portrait by I. H. Oertel

and Richard Henderson, popular representative
of the back country and a firm champion
of due process of law. It is perhaps not
surprising in view of these events that Governor
Tryon and the ruling class, lacking a
sympathy broad enough to ensure justice to
the oppressed people, seemed to be chiefly impressed
with the fact that a widespread insurrection
was in progress, threatening not
only life and property, but also civil government
itself. The governor called out the militia
of the province and led an army of well-nigh
one thousand men and officers against
the Regulators, who had assembled at Alamance
to the number of two thousand. Tryon
stood firm upon the demands that the people
should submit to government and disperse at
a designated hour. The Regulators, on their
side, hoped to secure the reforms they desired
by intimidating the governor with a great display
of force. The battle was a tragic fiasco
for the Regulators, who fought bravely, but
without adequate arms or real leadership.
With the conclusion of this desultory action, a
fight lasting about two hours (May 16, 1771),
the power of the Regulators was completely
broken.[8]

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

close connection between the Sandy Creek men
and the Sons of Liberty is amply demonstrated
in this paper wherein the Sons of Liberty in
connection with the "stamp law" are praised
for "redeeming us from Tyranny" and for having
"withstood the lords in Parliament in behalf
of true liberty."[9] Upon the records of
the Dutchman's Creek Church, of "regular"
Baptists, at the Forks of the Yadkin, to which
Daniel Boone's family belonged, may be found
this memorable entry, recognizing the "American
Cause" well-nigh a year before the declaration
of independence at Philadelphia: "At
the monthly meeting it was agreed upon concerning
the American Cause, if any of the
brethren see cause to join it they have the liberty
to do it without being called to an account
by the church. But whether they join or do
not join they should be used with brotherly
love."[10]

The fundamental reasons underlying the
approaching westward hegira are found in the
remarkable petition of the Regulators of Anson
County (October 9, 1769), who request

that "Benjamin Franklin or some other known
patriot" be appointed agent of the province
in London to seek redress at the source. They
exposed the basic evil in the situation by pointing
out that, in violation of the law restricting
the amount of land that might be granted to
each person to six hundred and forty acres,
much of the most fertile territory in the province
had been distributed in large tracts to
wealthy landlords. In consequence "great
numbers of poor people are necessitated to toil
in the cultivation of the bad Lands whereon
they hardly can subsist."[11] It was these poor
people, "thereby deprived of His Majesties
liberality and Bounty," who soon turned their
gaze to the westward and crossed the mountains
in search of the rich, free lands of the
trans-Alleghany region.

This feverish popular longing for freedom,
stimulated by the economic pressure of thousands
of pioneers who were annually entering
North Carolina, set in motion a wave of migration
across the mountains in 1769. Long before
Alamance, many of the true Americans,

distraught by apparently irremediable injustices,
plunged fearlessly into the wilderness,
seeking beyond the mountains a new birth of
liberty, lands of their own selection free of
cost or quit-rents, and a government of their
own choosing and control.[12] The glad news
of the rich valleys beyond the mountains early
lured such adventurous pioneers as Andrew
Greer and Julius Cæsar Dugger to the Watauga
country. The glowing stories, told by
Boone, and disseminated in the back country
by Henderson, Williams, and the Harts,
seemed to give promise to men of this stamp
that the West afforded relief from oppressions
suffered in North Carolina. During the
winter of 1768-9 there was also a great rush
of settlers from Virginia into the valley of the
Holston. A party from Augusta County, led
by men who had been delighted with the country
viewed seven years before when they were
serving under Colonel William Byrd against
the Cherokees, found that this region, a wilderness
on their outward passage in 1768, was
dotted with cabins on every spot where the
grazing was good, upon their return the following
year. Writing to Hillsborough on
October 18, 1770, concerning the "many hundred
families" in the region from Green River
to the branches of the Holston, who refused
to comply with the royal proclamation of
1763, Acting-Governor Nelson of Virginia
reports that "very little if any Quit Rents
have been received for His Majesty's use from
that Quarter for some time past"—the people
claiming that "His Majesty hath been pleased
to withdraw his protection from them since
1763."[13]

In the spring of 1770, with the express intention
of discovering suitable locations for
homes for himself and a number of others, who
wished to escape the accumulating evils of the
times, James Robertson of Orange County,
North Carolina, made an arduous journey to
the pleasing valley of the Watauga. Robertson,
who was born in Brunswick County, Virginia,
June 28, 1742, of excellent Scotch-Irish
ancestry, was a noteworthy figure of a certain
type—quiet, reflective, conservative, wise, a

JAMES ROBERTSON

From the composite portrait by Washington B. Cooper.
Courtesy Tennessee Historical Society.

firm believer in the basic principles of civil
liberty and the right of local self-government.
Robertson spent some time with a man named
Honeycut in the Watauga region, raised a
crop of corn, and chose for himself and his
friends suitable locations for settlement. Lost
upon his return in seeking the mountain defiles
traversed by him on the outward journey, Robertson
probably escaped death from starvation
only through the chance passing of two
hunters who succored him and set him upon
the right path. On arriving in Orange he
found political and social conditions there
much worse than before, many of the colonists
declining to take the obligatory oath of allegiance
to the British Crown after the Battle
of Alamance, preferring to carve out for themselves
new homes along the western waters.
Some sixteen families of this stamp, indignant
at the injustices and oppressions of British
rule, and stirred by Robertson's description
of the richness and beauty of the western country,
accompanied him to Watauga shortly
after the battle.

This vanguard of the army of westward advance,
independent Americans in spirit with
a negligible sprinkling of Loyalists, now
swept in a great tide into the northeastern section
of Tennessee. The men of Sandy Creek,
actuated by independent principles but out of
sympathy with the anarchic side of the Regulation,
left the colony almost to a man.
"After the defeat of the Regulators," says the
historian of the Sandy Creek Association,
"thousands of the oppressed, seeing no hope
of redress for their grievances, moved into
and settled east Tennessee. A large proportion
of these were of the Baptist population.
Sandy Creek Church which some time
previous to 1771, numbered 606, was afterward
reduced to fourteen members!"[14] This
movement exerted powerful influence in
stimulating westward expansion. Indeed,
it was from men of Regulating principles
—Boone, Robertson, and the Searcys—who
vehemently condemned the anarchy and
incendiarism of 1770, that Judge Henderson
received powerful coöperation in

the opening up of Kentucky and Tennessee.[15]

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

Valley.[16] Recognizing that hundreds of
these settlers were beyond the line negotiated
by Stuart, but on lands not yet surveyed, Governor
Botetourt instructed the Virginia commissioners
to press for further negotiations,
through Stuart, with the Cherokees. Accordingly,
on October 18, 1770, a new treaty was
made at Lochaber, South Carolina, by which
a new line back of Virginia was established,
beginning at the intersection of the North
Carolina-Cherokee line (a point some seventy-odd
miles east of Long Island), running
thence in a west course to a point six miles
east of Long Island, and thence in a direct
course to the confluence of the Great Kanawha
and Ohio Rivers. At the time of the treaty,
it was agreed that the Holston River, from its
intersection with the North Carolina-Virginia
line, and down the course of the same, should
be a temporary southern boundary of Virginia
until the line should be ascertained by actual
survey.[17] A strong influx of population into
the immense new triangle thus released for settlement
brought powerful pressure to bear
upon northern Tennessee, the point of least resistance
along the western barrier. Singularly
enough, this advance was not opposed by the
Cherokees, whose towns were strung across the
extreme southeast corner of Tennessee.

When Colonel John Donelson ran the line
in the latter part of 1771, The Little Carpenter,
who with other Indian chiefs accompanied
the surveying party, urged that the line
agreed upon at Lochaber should break off at
the head of the Louisa River, and should run
thence to the mouth thereof, and thence up
the Ohio to the mouth of the Great Kanawha.
For this increase in the territory of Virginia
they of course expected additional payment.
As a representative of Virginia, Donelson
agreed to the proposed alteration in the boundary
line; and accordingly promised to send the
Cherokees, in the following spring, a sum alleged
by them to have been fixed at five hundred
pounds, in compensation for the additional
area. This informal agreement, it is

ston River, south and east of Long Island;
believed, was never ratified by Virginia; nor
was the promised compensation ever paid the
Cherokees.[18]

Under the belief that the land belonged to
Virginia, Jacob Brown with one or two families
from North Carolina settled in 1771 upon
a tract of land on the northern bank of the
Nonachunheh (corruption, Nolichucky) River.
During the same year, an experimental line
run westward from Steep Rock and Beaver
Creek by Anthony Bledsoe showed that upon
the extension of the boundary line, these settlers
would fall within the bounds of North
Carolina. Although thus informally warned
of the situation, the settlers made no move to
vacate the lands. But in the following year,
after the running of Donelson's line, Alexander
Cameron, Stuart's deputy, required "all
persons who had made settlements beyond the
said line to relinquish them." Thus officially
warned, Brown and his companions removed to
Watauga.[19] Cameron's order did not apply,
however, to the settlement north of the Holand

the settlement in Carter's Valley, north
of the Holston and west of the Long Island,
although lying without the Virginia boundary,
strangely enough remained unmolested.
The order was directed at the Watauga settlers,
who were seated south of the Holston
River in the Watauga Valley. (See map for
settlements and treaty lines.)

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