Volume 3, Part 6, The Regulator Uprising
Chapter 50, The South Carolina Regulation
While the quarrel with Great Britain was by far the main conflict in the American colonies
from the mid-1760s on, internal conflict occasionally took center stage, as we have seen with the
New York Tenants Uprising of 1766.
The first of the great regulator conflicts broke out in the back country of South Carolina
in 1767. The dominant group in the back country was the small and medium-sized planters, who
had expanded rapidly into the upcountry after the Cherokee Indians had been driven out in
1761. The expansion of settlement naturally outran sluggishly moving governmental institutions,
One important grievance was inherent in representative government, a tendency for new population
centers to be underrepresented and older centers to be overrepresented.
In short, a tendency for formerly equitable structure of representation to cease reflecting
social realities.
Greatly reinforcing this natural tendency was a decree of the Crown forbidding South
Carolina from expanding the membership of the Assembly, or even from creating new parishes,
the units of representation.
A second grievance stemmed from the peculiar tax system of South Carolina.
Property outside Charleston was taxed per acre, rather than in proportion to valuation.
This was especially burdensome, too, and discriminatory against the lower-valued land of the back
country.
But the most urgent grievance of the back country was the rampant crime induced by the
lack of organs of law enforcement.
There were no courts, county or circuit, and no sheriffs in the backcountry.
Hence, the whole burden of law enforcement fell on a few constables and justices of the
peace who could make arrests but could not conduct trials, which had to take place in
remote Charleston.
The virtual absence of police or judicial protection for person and property led numerous
Outlaw Gangs to plunder and ravage the back country at will. Some went so far as to settle
down in their own frankly outlaw communities. The few existing constables were generally
in the pay of the outlaw gangs. By the summer of 1767, the criminal gangs had so ravaged
the country that economic effort in the back country was in danger of withering away. As
As one settler reported, the lowest state of poverty was to be preferred to riches and
affluence which would only attract the criminals.
As crime reached a peak of intensity that summer, the people of the back country, disgusted
with the government that had abandoned them, decided to protect themselves.
Led by the major settlers and planters of the area, the back country men rose in a body
and systematically attacked and raised the outlaw communities.
Criminals were apprehended and speedily and effectively punished.
Governor Charles Montague, who had done nothing to protect innocent settlers, had the gall
to order these riots and disturbances to cease.
No one, however, paid any attention to his degree.
The outlaws responded by fighting back, burning houses, and abducting justices of the peace.
The back country men now saw that haphazard pursuit and law enforcement against criminals
could not work in the long run. That more systematic organization was necessary.
And so, in the latter part of October 1767, the people chose a thousand men to execute
the laws against all villains and harbors of villains and called them the regulators.
The regulators also took oaths to support one another in their illegal but vital activities.
The regulators swung quickly and effectively into action, whipping criminals and burning
down outlaw villages.
Again, Governor Montague acted against the regulators fighting in self-defense rather
than against the criminal gangs.
The governor asked the assembly to suppress the regulator movement.
In reply, four regulator leaders presented their case to the assembly in a statement
signed by 4,000 men of the back country.
The petition explained why, thus distressed, thus situated and unrelieved by government,
many among us have been obliged to punish some of these banditi and their accomplices
in a proper manner.
The regulators were unfortunate, however, in having their petition written for them
by their sympathizer, the well-known literature and Anglican clergyman, Charles Wood Mason.
Wood Mason was generally unpopular for having supported the Stamp Act and now angered the
assembly further with barbed remarks and attacks on the class of lawyers. The offended assembly
tabled the petition, but the regulator leaders quickly apologized for the Wood Mason invective
and appraisement of the facts made the government sympathetic to the regulator cause.
The assembly solved this dilemma during November, in effect by legalizing the regulators. Two
companies of paid rangers were created for a three-month period to ride against the outlaws
and were led and manned by leading regulators. The ranger regulators did a yeoman job. At
the end of the three-month campaign in March 1768, the back country had been cleansed of
of Outlaws, The Criminals Had Been Killed, Arrested or Driven Away, Many Stolen Horses
and Kidnapped Girls Had Been Rescued, and Not One Ranger Regulator Had Lost His Life.
The Regulator Campaign Had Ended in Notable Success. If Matters Had Ended There, All Would
Have Been Well, and Professor Richard M. Brown would have been correct in lauding the regulators
Regulators as the most zealous champions of good order. They believed in the rule of law.
By taking the law into their own hands, the regulators did defy the government, but they
acted in the interest of true justice. But power is a two-edged tool. Power also corrupts.
No sooner had the regulators successfully wielded power and strict self-defense against
predatory outlaws, then they found that they enjoyed the taste of power and proposed to
wield it for aggression instead of self-defense. Specifically, there existed in the back country
numerous lower class people, individuals who were self-employed in unrespectable and often
and Low-Paying Occupations. A few were petty thieves. Most were honest but despised. Some
were prostitutes. Some gamblers. Some squatters on unused land. Some were vagabonds living
by their wits. Others were hunters selling furs and skins. All were hated by the respectable
Respectable and middling planters of the backcountry, and for several reasons.
One was aesthetic.
The lower strata were not pleasing to the eye of the respectable set.
More important, perhaps, was economic dislike.
These self-employed poor, a, competed with the respectables, for example in hunting,
and b, seemed annoyingly idle when they could be supplying needed labor for the planters
The Respectables were also distressed that the ancient and modern device for exploiting
the self-employed poor by coercing them into the labor market, vagrancy laws, was peculiarly
absent in South Carolina.
Vagrancy laws are a method of dragooning people who prefer being outside the labor market
into laboring for their supposed betters.
The vagrant is supposedly to be punished for being of no use to society, but since society,
as Frank Kortaroff has written, is people, this really means that the vagrant is of little
or no use to potential employers and to those above him on the social scale.
One does not have to be a Marxist to conclude that vagrancy laws are class exploitation.
The respectable classes in South Carolina could have tolerated the aesthetic qualities of the
lower set had they at least been supplying the upper classes with needed labor. The lower
classes, failing to be laborers, there seemed to the solid citizens of the back country
no excuse whatever for their continued existence. Typical of upper class back country sentiment
toward the Low People was the complaint of the Reverend Charles Wood Mason that the country
swarms with vagrants, idlers, gamblers, but if you want to hire a fellow for work, you'll
not raise one for money. And so the regulators moved from self-defense to aggression against
In June 1768, a large congress of regulators adopted the Plan of Regulation, which was
frankly designed to purge the country of all idle persons, all that have not a visible
way of getting an honest living.
Flogging and scourging or banishment were to be meted out to the baser sort of people
who did not work at what the respectables thought an honest occupation.
The plan was carried out with enthusiasm throughout the back country.
Those not engaged in work regarded as respectable were systematically flogged by the regulators
and if not banished were forced to work a certain number of acres of land.
From forced labor, the regulators proceeded on their heady course to coercive supervision
of Everyone's Personal Morals
Immoral women were publicly shamed and beaten, and two women were given five hundred lashes
each. Wives began to use the regulators as a convenient way of flogging husbands who
did not support them in the style to which they wanted to become accustomed. Now that
the regulators had seized complete governmental power in the back country, they moved to exclude
any judicial or police service, any execution of writs or warrants emanating from Charleston.
In short, they sealed off the back country from any governmental influence from the coast
and seceded de facto from South Carolina.
Only writs of debt were allowed to be served.
The back country was now a separate land ruled at drumhead by regulator militia.
One reason that regulators were anxious to keep South Carolina law out of the back country
is that they themselves had become aggressors and criminals. And they knew that they were
subject to prosecution in the South Carolina courts. Indeed, victims of the plan of regulation
soon brought charges in the court at Charleston. When the province tried to arrest leading
Regulators, the latter captured and roughed up the law officers and even a troop of militia.
Bodies of militia deserted to the regulators.
Lieutenant Governor William Bull reacted to these armed clashes in early August by decreeing
the suppression of the regulators, combined with an amnesty for almost all existing regulator
lawbreakers.
The back country ignored the proclamation, and the South Carolina government simply did
In the face of a clear challenge to its authority, why did the South Carolina government virtually
abdicate its rule over the back regions without a fight, principally because the low country
of South Carolina had the greatest concentration of Negro slaves in the colony, and hence
the whites of this region were ever in fear of a slave revolt. Fighting against the regulators
would have stripped the white forces, weakened the strength of armed white rule over the
Negroes and permitted a slave revolt against a weakened low country. When faced with the
The choice of protecting citizens against regulator violence or wreaking continued violence upon the slaves, the South Carolina government unhesitatingly chose the latter course.
As Boehm put it, a military force against the numerous and respectable regulators would have to be raised in the low country where white inhabitants are few and a numerous domestic enemy, the slaves, had to be attended to.
The State of South Carolina abandoned the people of the backcountry to the violence
and intimidation of the regulators.
Just as the State had previously abandoned that tortured region to the violence and intimidation
of the Outlaw Gangs, and just as private groups had to fill the function of defense against
and suppression of the outlaws, so now a private group had to arise in the back country to
defend the people against the regulators. As the regulators tightened their control
in the latter half of 1768, the oppressed lower people, as well as many conscientious
The two of the most vigorous planters began to unite against the New Despotism. The latter, especially the justices of the peace, had also felt personally the violence of the Plan of Regulation.
The concrete incident that sparked a vigorous reaction to the plan was the regulator beating and pursuing of John Musgrove, a leading planter and major of the militia.
Along with his friend, Jonathan Gilbert, a Justice of the Peace, Musgrove traveled to Charleston in late February 1769 to convince the Governor and Council of the crimes and misdeeds of the Plan of Regulation.
The Council was persuaded to deprive eleven leading regulators of their commissions as Justices of the Peace or Officers of the Militia.
Having secured at least the sympathy of the governor and council, Mosgrove and Gilbert
set about organizing a private armed force against the regulators. By early March, they
had formed the moderator movement. Fire, they realized, had to be fought with fire, and
force with force. The moderators had several hundred followers in the back country. To
To organize them, the leaders found the tough, brash mercenary Joseph Koffel, who proved
an effective head of the moderator military force.
A Charleston judge proceeded to give legal coloration to the moderators by authorizing
them to execute warrants against some of the regulators.
The moderators arrested the leaders, but obviously were not able to travel through regulator
Charleston was reluctant to come to the aid of the beleaguered moderators who managed
with no small effort to slip through the countryside and bring in the prisoners.
Charleston's vacillation increased when news arrived of the criminal excesses of Colonel
Coffel, who thought nothing of seizing provisions at will and imprisoning women and children
as well as actual regulators.
Charleston simply withdrew its legal coloration for Koffel, and with it, any support whatever
in the developing conflict. The moderators remained undaunted, however. Charleston's
support at best had never been more than perfunctory. On March 25, 1769, six or seven hundred armed
regulators and an equal number of moderators assembled for a showdown conflict near the
Junction of the Saluda and Bush Rivers. Just as the great conflict was beginning, a miraculous
intercession appeared in the person of three notable emissaries of peace from Charleston.
The three, large planters of the back country and led by the eminent, Colonel Richard Richardson,
had remained more or less aloof from the dispute and were thus uniquely qualified to serve
The peace agreement was in reality a total and bloodless victory for the moderators,
for in return for the moderators' agreement to disperse, the regulators agreed to dissolve
and let the law take its normal course.
The regulator movement had effectively ended under the pressure of a moderator counterforce.
The regulators, however, could not have dissolved so quickly had they not been assured that
their main grievance and the main grievance of the entire back country would be removed
shortly.
Accordingly, the Assembly and the Council at the end of July enacted the Circuit Court
Act, which brought the approval of the Governor and the Crown.
The Act established a regular system of circuit courts in the back country, as well as sheriffs
for each of the four newly created judicial districts.
Two years later, the governor decided to liquidate the remnants of the controversy by pardoning
1775 Regulator Wrongdoers