North Carolina, Mobilization in

NORTH CAROLINA, MOBILIZATION IN. Of all the rebellious mainland colonies at the approach of conflict with Britain, North Carolina was arguably the least commercial, the most internally fractured, and the most diffusely settled. Each of these attributes contributed to North Carolina's difficulties mobilizing resources during the eight-year struggle, and so each merits some explanation at the outset.

Commercially speaking, North Carolina's extensive network of barrier islands severely hampered the development of good port facilities and discouraged shipping. The main exception was the lower Cape Fear River, and especially the hubs at Wilmington and Brunswick, from which North Carolinians exported rice and pine-based naval stores. North Carolina in the late 1760s and early 1770s was also racked by a serious internal rebellion, known as the Regulator movement, led primarily by farmers of the Piedmont region (between the coastal plain and the Blue Ridge mountains) against the authority of the royal governor and the colonial Assembly. Drawn out over several years, this crisis proved a major distraction from other political issues and ended only through a climactic battlefield confrontation between the militia and the assembled Regulators. The rebellion highlighted a serious split between the eastern and western portions of the colony, which in turn reflected North Carolina's history of settlement. Where the east had primarily been settled by English immigrants coming from overseas or from eastern Virginia, the western counties were filled with Scots-Irish, Germans, and some Englishmen who had come down the Great Wagon Road from the valley of Pennsylvania and Virginia. This settlement pattern limited familial connections between east and west, and although this did not cause the Regulator rebellion, it certainly did not help in easing the tensions the rebellion created. Furthermore, this pattern of settlement left wide expanses of the colony only sparsely settled, a factor that would prove significant in the recruiting and supplying of armies during the war.

IMPERIAL TENSION

North Carolina's history and its economic and demographic condition also shaped its approach to the imperial tensions developing with the mother country. North Carolinians reacted to the Stamp Act along lines very similar to most of the other colonies. While the first colonial riot took place in Boston on 14 August 1765, North Carolina remained quiet into the fall. The approach of the 1 November 1765 date for the enactment of the law and word of resistance in New England and elsewhere spurred North Carolinians to riot, especially in the main coastal towns of Wilmington and Brunswick. North Carolina's protestors borrowed from two traditions to structure their actions. One was the familiar crowd-based, festive burnings of symbolic effigies, at times expanding into an obstructionist riot. Significant to the later development of armed resistance, however, North Carolinians also responded militarily, calling out the armed militia to prevent the landing of the stamps and marching in soldierly fashion (possibly armed) to the governor's house to demand the resignation of the comptroller. Festive and military-style protests often overlapped, but the striking willingness to resort to the potent symbolism of armed resistance held ramifications for the future.

The repeal of the Stamp Act muted imperial tensions in North Carolina for years to come. The Townshend Act of 1767 caused fewer problems in the relatively less commercial colony, although the Assembly did prepare to adopt resolutions condemning the act. The governor then dissolved the Assembly, leading many of the legislators to meet extralegally and create a nonimportation association. Nonimportation never gained much purchase in North Carolina, and in part the crisis was overshadowed by the now burgeoning Regulator movement. The Assembly finally locked horns with the governor in 1773 when they could not agree on a bill to keep the county and superior courts in session. Without an agreement, the courts lapsed, affecting virtually everyone in the colony. Most easterners blamed the royal governor (now Josiah Martin), whereas many western residents, still embittered from the suppression of the Regulator movement, blamed the Assembly. When the Assembly convened again in December 1773 its members virtually refused to do business, passing only one act. At the urging of Virginia, however, the Assembly did create a Committee of Correspondence, composed of prominent easterners, to coordinate resistance efforts with those of other colonies.

The Committee kept abreast of developments in other colonies and guided the colony's response to Parliament's punitive laws passed to punish Boston for the Boston Tea Party (the so-called Intolerable Acts). North Carolina followed Virginia's lead in protesting the acts, and then called the first of five extralegal Provincial Congresses to determine their response. The Congress in turn created local Committees of Correspondence and Committees of Safety, designed to spread information and to enforce the resolutions of the Congress. Thus by the spring of 1775 a skeleton of an alternative government existed, particularly but not exclusively in the eastern port towns. It would take a major catalyst, however, for resistance to ignite and become general.

THE DECISION FOR WAR: LEXINGTON AND CONCORD, SLAVES, AND INDIANS

It seems clear, at least in North Carolina, that the catalyst for the crucial transition from resistance, to armed resistance, to revolution was initially the British march on Concord, and then the apparent threats to mobilize slaves and Indians against the colonists. The rhetoric in reaction to the Intolerable Acts had been heated and defiant, but the reaction to Lexington and Concord, and specifically to the reports of atrocities and unprovoked killings—however exaggerated—was explosive. Whig adherents rallied supporters with the oldest and most legitimate recruiting cry: self-defense. To "repel force by force" had always been acceptable. Blood had been shed, and that simple fact changed the game enormously.

Whigs in Craven and New Bern Counties immediately propagated an Association oath that promised resistance while still professing loyalty to the king. But other Whigs in North Carolina went much further. In the Piedmont county of Mecklenburg, word of the march on Concord led the committee there, led by Thomas Polk and affirmed by the mustered militia, to issue a much more radical document. The so-called Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, published on 16 June 1775, denied the authority of Parliament and even that of the king. These political responses to apparent British atrocities then fed into other colonial fears.

For eastern North Carolinians a major worry was that Governor Martin would incite a slave rebellion. Such a fear was all too vivid in the eastern counties, with their large population of slaves: in 1767 in the lower Cape Fear region the black population was 62 percent of the total. Accusing the British of seeking to inspire a slave rebellion was standard practice in the days immediately after Lexington, and in June the Whigs accused Governor Martin of planning to arm the slaves and of offering them freedom if they would fight for the king. On 15 July 1775 the Safety Committee of Pitt County reported that a slave in Beaufort County had confessed a projected insurrection. Forty slaves were quickly arrested, jailed, and interrogated. Other county committees quickly joined the chorus of connecting suspected slave conspiracies to the active encouragement of British officials. Finally, Governor Lord Dunmore of Virginia seemingly justified North Carolinians' suspicions of royal governors when he announced in November 1775 that he would arm the Indians and free those slaves who joined his force.

Whereas fears of slave rebellion agitated easterners, fears of a Cherokee invasion rallied the westerners. Whig publicists regularly served up the probable use of Indians against the colonies as proof of the essential corruption of Britain. The Cherokees did in fact launch raids in North and South Carolina in the early summer of 1776. As David Ramsay wrote immediately after the war, in his History of the Revolution in South-Carolina, those attacks "increased the unanimity of the inhabitants…. Several who called themselves Tories in 1775 became active Whigs in 1776, and cheerfully took arms in the first instance against Indians, and in the second against Great-Britain" (vol. 1, p. 160).

The development of imperial tensions in the 1760s and 1770s, followed by the striking reports of violence in Massachusetts and the apparent impending use of slaves and Indians, combined to strengthen the will to resist. These factors provided a powerful element of legitimacy to the resistance movement and pushed many fence sitters off the fence. Having mobilized the will to resist, it was still necessary to seize the reins of power, organize and equip that will, lend it shape, and prepare it to fight a war. Fortunately, the long development of colonial institutions and the drawn-out evolution of tensions with Britain had already created the necessary bureaucratic infrastructure and skills.

SEIZING CONTROL

Increasingly confident of popular support, the county committees and the Provincial Congress moved to seize control of government. Over the course of the summer of 1775, county after county established Revolutionary committees, who first identified their enemies and the waverers by requiring the Association oath, and then assumed a judicial role in enforcing their own edicts and those of the Continental Congress. Intimidation played a major role in this process, as armed militiamen served the committees as enforcers; in perhaps the most telling moment of all, in June 1775, John Ashe, who had recently resigned his colonelcy in the New Hanover militia regiment, marched into Wilmington leading several hundred militiamen and demanded that the merchants of the town subscribe to the Association oath. When asked his authority for making such a demand, Ashe merely pointed to the assembled troops.

Such a basis for government invited a certain level of anarchy, and in some cases the local committees, or individuals acting on their own initiative, pushed the limits of revolutionary propriety. Royal government also evaporated in July as Governor Martin took refuge aboard ship, from which he prorogued the Assembly and later refused to call it into session at all. Recognizing these problems, the Whig leadership in late summer called for a new Provincial Congress to take up the duties of a central government. The Congress momentarily adopted a moderate stance toward independence, but did create the political, economic, and military mechanisms that independence would require. Politically they established a provincial executive council of thirteen men to oversee district committees of safety, who in turn supervised the county and town committees. The council, and through them the committees, were given the operational control of the province's military and the right to draw on the provincial treasury. Congress proceeded to create both.

ESTABLISHING AN ARMY

In September 1775, as part of its other measures creating an alternative government, the Provincial Congress formally organized a military, creating two regiments of Continental troops and outlining a new framework for the state militia. The new militia law differed only slightly from its colonial antecedents, the most important differences being administrative. First, the new law divided the province into six districts, allowing for a brigadier general to organize and command the forces of each district. Each district would nominally comprise a brigade formed of the county-based regiments. Second, the local companies were divided into five classes or divisions. One consisted of the old and infirm; the other four served to spread the burden of service. When the militia were called up, in theory only one class, or division, from each company would be susceptible to service and then usually for only three months. The law also specified that musters be held monthly rather than at the more occasional intervals of the colonial era. Finally, the Congress created a separate organization known as the minutemen. The minutemen proved to be a short-lived institution, largely collapsing by the end of 1776.

In the course of forming its military North Carolina made a distinct effort to found them on European principles of discipline. North Carolina even requested copies of Thomas Simes's Military Guide from the Continental Congress, and duly received twelve dozen copies in August 1776, along with twenty-four copies of Simes's New System of Military Discipline. Unfortunately, the Congress was unwilling, and probably unable, to impose a strong centralized control over the militia. The Congress expressly left it to the individual companies to establish rules to cover misbehavior and disobedience.

The military also needed equipment, and the Congress sought to cover that problem by establishing a Committee of Secrecy to encourage the production of war materiel. To finance the new troops and pay for supplies, the Congress assumed the power to tax, creating a two-shilling poll tax that would begin in 1777, and on its strength issuing £125,000 in bills of credit.

THE CHALLENGES OF 1775 AND 1776

These basic structures of government and military organization would continue, with some modification and much expansion, throughout the war. But first they had to survive the major challenges of 1775 and 1776. In late 1775 North Carolina dispatched troops against threats to Norfolk and to the South Carolina backcountry even as it continued to struggle to pin down the loyalties of its own inhabitants and arrange for a stream of arms and supplies—a stream that would rarely ever exceed a trickle. At the same time Governor Martin convinced the British government that the Loyalists in the area awaited only a contingent of British regulars to spark a full-scale counter-revolution. Persuaded that such help was imminent, on 10 January 1776, Martin called on the Loyalists to rise. Some fourteen hundred, mostly recently arrived Highland Scots, did so, leading to a much larger mobilization of Whig forces, who decisively defeated the Loyalists at Moores Creek Bridge on 27 February.

In the end the victory at Moores Creek Bridge squashed any further effort by the British to reassert control over North Carolina until 1780. But in March and April of 1776 that was not yet apparent, and the decision for independence had not yet been made. The Fourth Provincial Congress convened in April and vastly expanded North Carolina's commitment to war at the same time as it put the province on a firm path to independence. The Congress increased North Carolina's Continental regiments from two to six (there would eventually be ten); called up eastern militiamen in response to a British fleet assembled at the mouth of the Cape Fear under Sir Peter Parker; issued £500,000 more in bills of credit; appointed county collectors of arms; and proposed measures to encourage the production of saltpeter, gun-powder, salt, iron, and weapons. On 12 April the Congress passed the Halifax Resolves, making North Carolina the first colony to urge the Continental Congress to proclaim independence.

There remained yet one further challenge to the Whigs in 1776, and it served to confirm for many their disgust with British rule: beginning with intermittent attacks in April, by July the Cherokees were moving against the western settlements on a large scale. Brigadier General Griffith Rutherford mustered the western militia, and in conjunction with Virginia and South Carolina forces, marched into and devastated the Cherokee towns in August and September.

THE DEMANDS OF A DISTANT WAR, 1777–1779

Although the war moved away from the South after the defeat of Parker's attempt on Charleston, South Carolina, in June 1778 (some fourteen hundred North Carolina troops participated in the defense), the demands on the resources of the state continued. Calls for men were nearly constant. Although it is impossible to accurately quantify the number of North Carolinians who actually served in the ranks of the Continentals and the militia over the course of the whole war, the sum of calls for troops announced in these years of relative quiet in the South give some sense of the squeeze on North Carolina's man-power. From 1777 to 1779 there were seven separate major calls for men totaling 11,348. All of these were for expeditionary forces and thus did not include numerous local militia musters for routine enforcement or in response to several local Tory risings. These numbers also do not include those who were already serving in North Carolina's Continental regiments in Washington's army to the north. Nowhere near 11,348 men actually responded to those requests, in part because that number was roughly 15 percent of the white male population of North Carolina; but it is indicative of the recruiting pressure on the state.

The constant demand for men was not always met with enthusiasm, and the actual process for selecting recruits varied widely. The legislature usually assigned a quota to each county, set a bounty for volunteers, and provided a lower bounty for those drafted to make up the quota. Theoretically, this system accommodated the division of the militia into the four classes specified in the militia law passed at the beginning of the war (the fifth division of the infirm and elderly had been eliminated). A draft supposedly would come from one of the four "classes," and that class would not be susceptible to another draft until the other three had had their turn. The class system was used, but not necessarily as strictly as intended. In practice at the county level a call for troops led to a muster, where the militia officers called for volunteers. When insufficient numbers came forward the officers would arrange some kind of draft. Those arrangements varied and aroused numerous protests. There are differing accounts of how men were selected for the draft. In some units names were "drawn," whereas other units, according to the law passed in April 1778, "elected" those who were to be drafted. Other, probably illegal, methods further inspired resistance to the draft. In an old and widespread tradition, drafted men could also hire substitutes (or persuade relatives to substitute).

The new Whig government had also embarked on an increasingly severe program of confiscating Loyalist property and requiring and actually enforcing the taking of the loyalty oath. These two measures, in combination with the unpopular demands for troops, generated resistance. In turn, the North Carolina government relied on the militia to enforce these measures, in what came to be called "scouring for Tories." Drafting, oath-taking, confiscating, and scouring all contributed to keeping a large portion of the countryside at a slow boil, in some cases creating "Tories" where none had been before. But if the Tories (and some wishful neutrals) were outraged, the Whigs were scared. Real and reported Tory conspiracies, violent draft resistance, Indian scares, and projected British landings all contributed to an environment of fear. Loyalist and neutral resistance and Whig fear mutually reinforced each other. Reports, for example, of a band of draft resisters would lead to a call for militia to hold them in check. To raise that militia, a draft might be required, and the militia would need to be supplied from local sources. Some of those militia units, once in the field, found it all too easy to commit acts of violence that further alienated the waverers.

The Provincial Congress had designed a supply system to avoid alienating the countryside, and through 1779 the system more or less worked. The state had a quartermaster-general who oversaw the quartermasters of each militia district. The law specified that no goods could be taken without a press warrant signed by two justices of the peace of that county. Furthermore, two "indifferent" people had to appraise the items pressed, and the owner would either be paid in North Carolina currency or be given a certificate. The system was far from perfect, and the ad hoc measures taken in 1776 to increase gunpowder or iron production had had only minimal effects. Furthermore, North Carolina's soldiers were rarely well-dressed; in 1778 the legislature conceded that they could not handle the load and delegated to the counties the task of supplying basic clothing. It was in 1779, however, that all the state and Continental currencies began to devalue at a terrific rate, and when the British invaded the state in 1780–1781, the system virtually collapsed.

NADIR AND TRIUMPH, 1780–1782

The problems of mobilization dramatically escalated as the British turned to a southern strategy and then successfully captured Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1780. More than two thousand North Carolina troops, militia and Continental, were captured at Charleston, and the state struggled to replace them. To make matters worse in North Carolina, in January 1781 a separate British expedition descended on Wilmington by sea and established a garrison there. Mobilization of the will to fight became crucial. Where initially despair had set in after the disaster at Charleston and then at Camden, British actions quickly supplied the necessary anger; and where official means of raising troops faltered, volunteer organizations often filled the gap.

We can never know all the reasons why men rallied as volunteers to the Whig cause in 1780 and 1781. It is clear that the official raising of militia troops continued, and militia brigades continued to take their place in the ranks of the American army re-formed after Camden by Continental Army General Nathanael Greene. Indeed, in the face of crisis, North Carolina virtually abandoned recruiting for its Continental regiments, focusing instead on the militia. There were now, however, additional units of volunteers, more or less formally acknowledged by the state. Some of the men in these units were motivated by the hope of plundering their neighbors; some were surely motivated by the cause itself; but many served in fear of British atrocity or in hopes of revenge. Whatever the case, the volunteers had a profound impact on the war, both in increasing the level of fratricidal violence between themselves and Loyalists, and in providing all of the manpower for the crucial victory at Kings Mountain, South Carolina.

Meanwhile the collapse of the American currencies and the locust-like eating habits of armies criss-crossing a sparsely settled backcountry caused the already tenuous supply system to disintegrate. Backcountry residents, especially along the much contested border with South Carolina, found themselves plagued by provisioning agents from both sides. In 1780 the state government had concluded that running the war with a legislative committee was inefficient and replaced it with the Board of War (composed of five commissioners elected by the legislature). In 1781 the Board was replaced by the Council Extraordinary (composed of three men advising the governor). In March 1781 this Council, in response to the logistical crisis, enacted a tax in kind for all those areas not already denuded by the competing armies. Under this plan each household would give up one-fifth of its bacon and salted meat for the army, but even this expedient suffered from a lack of transport to move supplies to the army.

In yet another move born of desperation, captured Loyalists were frequently forced to enlist in Continental or militia service to expiate their sins. For example, most of the nearly six hundred prisoners taken at Kings Mountain were paroled on the condition that they enlist for a three-month tour in the militia. This was not an isolated incident, and in fact such enlistments became virtually state policy in the last year of the war.

Even after General Cornwallis's army moved on to Virginia and ultimate defeat at Yorktown, North Carolina continued to contend with several active and successful Loyalist units, as well as with the British garrison in Wilmington (evacuated in November 1781)—all while attempting to support Greene's reconquest of South Carolina.

MAKING PEACE

Finally, in May 1782, David Fanning, the last major Loyalist guerrilla leader, fled the state for South Carolina. With his departure the internal war in the state quickly tapered off, and the rebel government could turn to the problems of peace. A year later the state finally declared an amnesty covering most Tories, although specifically excluding certain groups; it appears that North Carolina for the most part peacefully reintegrated the former Loyalists into a peacetime society, although not without economic cost. One telling statistic is that 57 percent of the surviving officers of Fanning's notorious guerrilla band were still living in the United States, the majority in North Carolina. Their fates speak well for reintegration. On the other hand, the state government felt compelled to protect Whig fighters who were occasionally brought to trial for their crimes in the years after the war. No comprehensive survey exists, but there were several notable cases of men tried for illegitimate violence in the 1780s to whom the legislature granted protection from prosecution.

CONCLUSION

The complexities and difficulties faced by the North Carolina revolutionary government in mobilizing men and materials to fight such a long war can hardly be fathomed. Relative to their available resources, the state did a remarkable job. The key to mobilizing men and materiel, however, rested in the mobilization of will. The will to fight was born in a sense of betrayal at the outset of the war, but sustaining it proved another matter. At times will almost faltered, but a complex combination of fear, desire for revenge, a commitment to independence, and a belief that the new state government would bring order kept men in the ranks. The flow of materiel, on the other hand, depended largely on the desperate perseverance of a few state leaders.

SEE ALSO African Americans in the Revolution; Ashe, John; Charleston Siege of 1780; Fanning, David; Indians in the Colonial Wars and the American Revolution; Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts; Kings Mountain, South Carolina; Lexington and Concord; Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence; Moores Creek Bridge; Nonimportation; Regulators; Rutherford, Griffith; Stamp Act; Townshend Acts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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