The Boones and the Bryans, the Robertsons, the
Seviers, the Shelbys, the men who opened up the West and shaped
the destiny of its inhabitants, were genuine freemen, with a
sense of law and order as inseparable from liberty. They would
follow a Washington but not a Hermon Husband.
James Hunter, whose signature leads on all Regulation manifestoes
just prior to the Battle of Alamance, was a sycophant of Husband,
to whom he addressed fulsome letters; and in the real battle for
democracy--the War of Independence--he was a Tory. The Colonial
Records show that those who, "like the mammoth," shook from them
the ethical restraints which make man superior to the giant
beast, and who later bolted into the mountains, contributed
chiefly the lawlessness that harassed the new settlements. They
were the banditti and, in 1776, the Tories of the western hills;
they pillaged the homes of the men who were fighting for the
democratic ideal.
It was not the Regulation Movement which turned westward the
makers of the Old Southwest, but the free and enterprising spirit
of the age. It was emphatically an age of doers; and if men who
felt the constructive urge in them might not lay hold on
conditions where they were and reshape them, then they must go
forward seeking that environment which would give their genius
its opportunity.
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