During the late 1760s the South Carolina Regulation—an elite-led social reform movement employing vigilante methods—erupted on the southern frontier. This movement had its origin in the history of the southern backcoun-try. The defeat of powerful coastal Indians in the Yamasee War early in the 18th century allowed European-American hunters and Indian traders to move into the South Carolina backcountry. Colonists did not settle the region in large numbers until the 1740s, when they began pouring into the area from colonies to the north. Despite prolonged conflicts with the Cherokee that lasted until the mid-1760s, back-country settlers rapidly developed the region’s economy. Initially most farmers concentrated on feeding their families through hunting and growing a little corn, but many quickly began to take advantage of commercial crops such as grain, cotton, indigo, and tobacco. The most ambitious individuals invested in enslaved workers to help them expand production. Forced black laborers provided aspiring planters with wealth and status. The problem for these backcountry elites was the absence of government institutions and laws to deal with discontented Indians, rebellious slaves, greedy bandits, and squatters who lived from hunting and gathering. All of these people threatened the sanctity of property and the needs of a commercial economy based on slavery.
While the area expanded economically and the number of colonists grew exponentially, the infrastructure did not keep pace. Government institutions—civil and criminal courts, jails, even a land office—did not exist in the back-country. The lack of courts and jails made debts difficult to collect and attracted horse thieves and bandits. When planters wanted to collect debts, bring criminals to justice, or patent land, they had to travel to Charleston, which could take two weeks. The South Carolina assembly, overwhelmingly made up of easterners eager to protect their own interests, did little to rectify the situation.
Responding to a wave of crimes in the mid-1760s, property holders, led by slave owners, took the law into their own hands. Outraged over their lack of success in getting bandits and horse thieves convicted in the Charleston court, they began in the fall of 1767 to attack outlaw communities, burning houses, taking property, and flogging suspects. Adopting the name Regulators, they sent a petition to the governor and assembly calling for the establishment of courts in the backcountry, legal reforms, changes in the poor law, and the creation of new laws to force people without visible means of subsistence, such as hunters, to work. While the assembly set about obtaining the Crown’s approval of a circuit court act, it legitimated the vigilante actions of the Regulators by appointing two companies of Rangers, made up largely of Regulators, to suppress outlaw gangs. These Rangers tracked outlaws even in North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia. They killed large numbers of law breakers; others they took to Charleston to stand trial. By March 1768 the campaign was deemed a success.
But rather than end their activities, Regulators now turned their attention to such marginal people as squatters, vagrants, and hunters, who either could not, or would not, make AGRICULTURE and land ownership their main goals in life. Such people were flogged, expelled from their communities, or forced to work. Women who transgressed traditional sexual norms were whipped or dunked. Emboldened by their successes, the Regulators defied authorities by preventing them from serving all warrants or writs, except writs of debt, in the backcountry. The governor and the assembly, aware of how much they needed the support of Regulators in case of slave uprisings or renewed conflict with Native Americans, did little to suppress the vigilante movement which was soon in complete control of the backcountry. Yet opposition developed among backcountry inhabitants who abhorred the violence and the choice of victims. Their resistance, in some instances itself violent, and the eventual passage of a circuit court act, ended the movement in 1769. In late 1771 the governor issued pardons for Regulators facing damage suits brought by their victims. Unlike the North Carolina Regulators who demanded a more equitable economic system for free farmers, the South Carolina Regulators enabled elite men to consolidate their power and push the backcountry several steps closer to becoming a well-ordered slave society.
See also North Carolina Regulation; riots.
Further reading: Richard Maxwell Brown, The Carolina Regulators: The Story of the First American Vigilance Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Charles Woodmason, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution, ed. Richard J. Hooker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).
—Marjoleine Kars
Stamp Act (March 22, 1765)
Along with the SUGAR AcT (1764), the Stamp Act was intended to raise revenue in the colonies explicitly for paying part of “the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing” the colonies from Native American and foreign threats. Since Great Britain had accumulated a debt over ?135 million the British first minister, George Grenville, thought it only appropriate that the colonies contribute to their own defense. Maintaining an army in North America would cost about ?200,000 per year. The Sugar and Stamp Acts together were to raise about half that sum, with the rest of the money provided by Parliament. The British believed that Stamp duties were an innocuous tax and would be self-enforceable. Great Britain already had a stamp tax, and since the duty would be levied on all legal and commercial papers, liquor licenses, land instruments, indentures, cards, dice, newspapers, pamphlets, advertisements, academic degrees, and appointments to office, colonists could not undertake any business without the stamped paper. Anyone interested in any transaction— whether it was buying a piece of property, sailing a ship, or exchanging goods—would use the stamped paper to ensure the transaction was legal. To make the law more acceptable, the British government chose local politicians within the colonies as stamp agents.
The law, however, was not acceptable to most colonists. The Stamp Act created a crisis in the relationship between Great Britain and the colonies. The opposition took many forms, and established a pattern that would be followed throughout the RESISTANCE movement (1764-75). On one level was the reaction of the elite. The Virginia House of Burgesses and eight other colonial houses of assembly passed resolves asserting that only representatives elected by the colonists had the right to tax the colonies. Nine colonies also sent representatives to a Stamp Act Congress in New York in October 1765 that declared that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies. Men like Daniel Dulany wrote pamphlets exploring the constitutional issues. Dulany, for instance, denied the idea that colonial Americans were virtually represented in Parliament, and asserted the right of the colonists to be taxed only by their actual representatives that they voted into office. Other colonial Americans struggled to distinguish between internal taxation—to raise revenue within the colonies—and external taxation—to regulate the empire, declaring that Parliament had a right to the second form of taxation, but not the first. In addition, groups of merchants in several seaports passed agreements against importing goods from Great Britain in an effort to put economic pressure on their British counterparts to have the measure repealed.
On another level was the reaction of the people in the street. The Stamp Act lead to a wave of rioting that swept through the colonies. Mobs in Boston marched through
An angry mob protests against the Stamp Act by throwing stamped documents onto a bonfire in Boston, August 1765. (Hulton/Archive)
Town with an effigy of stamp distributor Andrew Oliver and tore down a building he had constructed on the waterfront on August 14, 1765. Twelve days later, another Boston mob gutted the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Similar disturbances occurred in several seaports, forcing stamp distributors to resign and making the law a dead letter. The mob seemed to rule the streets in community after community. The Stamp Act was to take effect on November 1, 1765. That day came and went with, after some coercion by the people in the streets, business continuing as usual. Crowds also added muscle to the nonimportation agreements by coercing those who imported goods from Great Britain. The mob made a self-enforceable law, unenforceable.
Local leaders formed a series of loose associations to coordinate the crowd action and the resolves of the elite. In Boston the group at first called itself the Loyal Nine, but they later took the name that was used elsewhere— Sons of Liberty. These groups strove to guide the mob, correspond between towns and colonies to coordinate their positions, and sought to enforce resolves against the use of stamped paper. In most colonies it was the Sons of Liberty, with mobs close by, that saw to it that ships sailed without stamped paper and that all judicial proceedings were stopped. They even sought to put additional pressures on merchants who did not comply with non-importation agreements.
All of these measures had some impact on Great Britain. British merchants, unable to collect debts in closed colonial courts and suffering a decline in trade, petitioned Parliament to repeal the law. Oddly, what made the most difference in Parliament was neither the colonial opposition nor the merchant’s petitions. Instead, the crucial factor in the repeal of the Stamp Act was the fact that there was a change in government. Grenville, who was never popular with King George III, was forced from office in the summer of 1765 over issues unrelated to colonial policy. In Grenville’s place the king appointed a new administration headed by Charles, Lord Rockingham who had opposed the Stamp Act in the first place. Given the colonial resistance, and the pressure of British merchants, Rockingham had the act repealed (March 18, 1766). However, to placate his political opposition, and so as not give in on the constitutional issues, he also had Parliament pass the Declaratory Act (1766), which stated that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever.
Further reading: Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972); Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).
World History
