The Regulators, When the Piedmont Rose Against Its Own Government

In the seventeen sixties, the western Piedmont of colonial North Carolina was a long, rough ride from the coast. Government was a thing that happened to you, not for you. County sheriffs collected taxes and simply kept whatever they pleased.

Land surveyors faked their measurements. Lawyers charged fees no written law had ever authorized. The men who farmed the red clay of Orange and Rowan and Mecklenburg counties had no practical way to fight back.

Around seventeen sixty-six a loose association began calling itself the Regulators. The name was deliberate: they intended to regulate their own affairs when the colonial government would not. They were farmers and small craftsmen, mostly Scots-Irish and German immigrants who had crossed the mountains or pushed up from the coast seeking land and a government light enough to let them breathe.

They sent petitions to the colonial assembly. The petitions went nowhere. They refused to pay taxes.

The courts threatened them. The standoffs grew uglier. By May of seventeen seventy-one, Royal Governor William Tryon had assembled a militia of roughly one thousand men and marched west to break the movement.

About two thousand Regulators gathered on a field near Great Alamance Creek in what is now Alamance County. The battle lasted less than two hours. Tryon's men won.

Casualty counts are disputed, but Tryon reported nine of his own men killed and far heavier losses among the Regulators. One captured Regulator was hanged the next day without trial. Six more were executed at Hillsborough in June.

The movement collapsed, and roughly three-quarters of free men in the Piedmont were required to take an oath of allegiance. Many who would not simply left, crossing the mountains to Tennessee and beyond, carrying a particular distrust of government that echoed loudly when, less than five years later, colonists further north began talking about revolution.