He soon began to have
neighbors.
Meanwhile the Regulation Movement stirred the Back Country of
both the Carolinas. In 1768, the year in which William Bean built
his cabin on the bank of the Watauga, five hundred armed
Regulators in North Carolina, aroused by irregularities in the
conduct of public office, gathered to assert their displeasure,
but dispersed peaceably on receipt of word from Governor Tryon
that he had ordered the prosecution of any officer found guilty
of extortion. Edmund Fanning, the most hated of Lord Granville's
agents, though convicted, escaped punishment. Enraged at this
miscarriage of justice, the Regulators began a system of
terrorization by taking possession of the court, presided over by
Richard Henderson. The judge himself was obliged to slip out by a
back way to avoid personal injury. The Regulators burned his
house and stable. They meted out mob treatment likewise to
William Hooper, later one of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence.
Two elements, with antithetical aims, had been at work in the
Regulation; and the unfortunate failure of justice in the case of
Fanning had given the corrupt element its opportunity to seize
control. In the petitions addressed to Governor Tryon by the
leaders of the movement in its earlier stages the aims of
liberty-loving thinkers are traceable.
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