SYMHC Classics: Regulator War

It is because today is the two hundred and fifty fifth anniversary of the Battle of Alimance, which took place 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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.

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

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, 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. 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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, 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 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. 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,

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, 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

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. 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 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 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 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

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, 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,

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

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 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 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 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 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 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.