This weekend I finished reading and taking copious notes from an excellent new nonfiction book, The Regulator Movement in North Carolina: Prelude to the Revolution, by Marcia D. Phillips.
Today is National Tell a Story Day, and this nonfiction book tells quite a story!
by Marcia D. Phillips
If you want to know some of the little-known background leading up to the American Revolution, I highly recommend this book. As a native North Carolinian, I learned about the Regulators in North Carolina History classes; however, to read the details of it as an adult is to better grasp the terror that many residents of my state were living under in the late 1760s and early 1770s.
The author did an amazing job, like no one else I’ve read, of giving hundreds of years of history leading up to the Regulator Movement in North Carolina. She wrote about how the feudal system in Europe and even the Magna Carta laid the groundwork for what happened here in the mid-1700s!
I had never connected some of the dots that Ms. Phillips connected, but it all fits together now in my mind.
The book also does a great job of explaining the differences between the Regulator Movement in North Carolina and the Regulator Movement in South Carolina. That’s something important for me to keep in mind as I write my historical novels in progress.
Quoting from The Regulator Movement in North Carolina: Prelude to the Revolution, by Marcia D. Phillips,
“In a nutshell, the North Carolina Regulators were not attempting to overthrow the colonial government, just convince it to be the same one they had for years and true to British common law. Their actions were not intended to disrupt the law but to ensure the government’s actions were regulated, to promote uniformity and fairness. The issues of the day – excessive taxation and fees with limited recourse in the assembly, lack of justice in court rulings, and forced taxation for the Anglican Church, which none of the Regulators attended – were the sticking points but also indicative of underlying principles being violated. These discontented farmers were even willing to self-regulate if the colonial government would allow it.”
The Regulators signed petitions in an effort to get Governor Tryon to address their grievances. His appointed officials in the North Carolina Piedmont – particularly in the northern Piedmont part of the province owned by Lord Granville – were robbing the citizens blind and pocketing the money they collected.
They were sick and tired of paying tax to support the Anglican Church. They were Presbyterians and Baptists, and they wanted the right to pay their own clergy. Their clergy were not allowed to officiate over marriages or funerals. For people who had left Europe for religious freedom, this was unacceptable.
The Regulator Movement in North Carolina came to a head in Alamance County on May 16, 1771, when Governor Tryon ordered eight cannons to fire upon a group of Regulators who had asked to be heard. Under the Johnston Riot Act, Tryon gave them until noon to disperse; however, instead of arresting them at noon when they did not disperse, he turned eight cannons on them. It is called the Battle of Alamance, but it was really an ambush.
As the book gives in detail, that was not the end of Tryon’s reign of terror. He had a number of Regulators hanged and had many of their farms burned to the ground.
The book includes an extensive bibliography for readers wanting to do additional research. Thank you, Ms. Phillips, for giving us such a concise and well-researched account of the Regulator Movement in North Carolina.
Perhaps it is partly because of our current political environment that, but while reading this book, it struck me how similar Governor William Tryon of North Carolina was to Donald Trump. I’m not just referring to the fact that he built an extravagant palace for himself while in office.
Some leaders build palaces. Others build ballrooms and triumphal arches.
But it is the pattern of retribution demonstrated by Tryon and by Trump that hit me as an undeniable and frightening similarity between the two men.
Janet
The government should be afraid of its citizens, not the other way around.
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