He was afterwards apprehended in
Pennsylvania for complicity in the Whisky Insurrection.
Four of the leading Presbyterian ministers of the Back Country
issued a letter in condemnation of the Regulators. One of these
ministers was the famous David Caldwell, son-in-law of the
Reverend Alexander Craighead, and a man who knew the difference
between liberty and license and who proved himself the bravest of
patriots in the War of Independence. The records of the time
contain sworn testimony against the Regulators by Waightstill
Avery, a signer of the Mecklenburg Resolves, who later presided
honorably over courts in the western circuit of Tennessee; and
there is evidence indicating Jacobite and French intrigue. That
Governor Tryon recognized a hidden hand at work seems clearly
revealed in his proclamation addressed to those "whose
understandings have been run away with and whose passions have
been led in captivity by some evil designing men who, actuated by
cowardice and a sense of that Publick Justice which is due to
their Crimes, have obscured themselves from Publick view." What
the Assembly thought of the Regulators was expressed in 1770 in a
drastic bill which so shocked the authorities in England that
instructions were sent forbidding any Governor to approve such a
bill in future, declaring it "a disgrace to the British Statute
Books.
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