The first real trouble broke out in 1768 when a group of about seventy Regulators stormed Hillsborough to retrieve a horse and saddle that were taken and sold for unpaid taxes. Two years later a group of 150 Regulators, showing up at a court proceeding to defend one of their own, took over the courtroom and “set upon the officials and lawyers with sticks and switches. The judge fled in fear of his life to his home in Granville County.”21 A hated corrupt official, Edward Fanning, was “grabbed by his heals and pulled down the stairs, banging his head on each step.”22
At that point, the colonial governor, William Tryon, had had enough. He mustered over one thousand militiamen and, in the spring of 1771, they followed him to Hillsborough. In response the Regulators assembled a force of about two thousand men at Alamance Creek just west of town. The battle lasted a mere two hours. Even with superior numbers the untrained and poorly armed Regulators were no match for Tryon's disciplined troops and superior weaponry. Most of the Regulators were able to escape but Tryon took fifteen prisoners. One was hanged on the battlefield and after a trial six more were hanged on a hill overlooking the town. A small fenced-off area, close to the Hillsborough Courthouse, marks the site of the hangings.
The significance of the Regulator Rebellion has been hotly debated among historians. Some have argued that it was “an opening salvo” in the American Revolution, with its emphasis on unfair taxation and lack of local representation and control. Others have downplayed it as a regional conflict unconnected to the opening battles of the Revolution that would take place in Lexington and Concord four years later. What is clear, however, is that this uprising brought attention to the issues of inequitable representation and taxation for the citizens of the Piedmont of North Carolina. It also led to the partition of Orange County into new counties as a means of “dividing the disaffected citizenry into separate areas under tighter governmental control.”23 The creation of additional counties resulted in an increase in the area's representation in the General Assembly, thus at least partially addressing one of the issues that contributed to the rebellion. This competition between the eastern and Piedmont regions of the state lives on today, as the two differ in both their economic bases and population characteristics while vying for influence and state largess. Today's Research Triangle area straddles this divide, creating one of the social schisms discussed in Chapter 4.
ORANGE COUNTY DURING THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR
Although no major battle was fought in Orange County, Hillsborugh played an important role in the struggle for North Carolina's independence. In the summer of 1774 and spring of 1775, ignoring the wishes of the colonial governor, two provincial congresses were held in the capital city of New Bern, to select delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, approve boycotts of British goods, and plan other actions designed to fill gaps left by a weakened colonial government. Many delegates to these congresses still hoped to avoid a war with the “mother country,” but those hopes were dashed when a Patriot militia marched on New Bern, causing the governor, under the cover of darkness, to flee the city and take refuge on a British warship. The militia proceeded to burn Fort Johnson, the “first act of war in the North Carolina Colony.”24
Under the clouds of the impending war, the third Provincial Congress, with representatives from most of the towns and counties of the state, met in Hillsborough in August 1776, deciding to form a new government and to raise an army. More specifically, the representatives established a thirteen-person Provincial Council to make decisions when the Congress was not in session, they authorized bills of credit to fund defense and other governmental responsibilities, and they authorized the organization of two regiments of Continental troops.
During the war, Hillsborough was both a political and military center. After North Carolina's representatives signed the Declaration of Independence, the state's General Assembly met in Hillsborough five times, including the two years in which Hillsborough was officially designated as the state's first postcolonial capital. (A Loyalist raid on the town led the legislature to decide that it was not a safe location for the capital.) Manufacturing industries were also established in the town for the production of shoes, paper, and arms for the war effort.25
In 1781 the town was briefly occupied by British troops under the command of General Lord Cornwallis, who was attempting to reassert British control over the southern colonies. After landing his army at Savannah and subduing much of Georgia and coastal South Carolina, he marched with his troops into North Carolina, where he began to encounter stiffer resistance. “On February 20, 1781, the general and his army entered the little village of Hillsborough, raised the royal standard, and prepared to receive the crowds of Loyalists he believed awaited his arrival.”26 Unfortunately for Cornwallis those Loyalists never materialized. After one week, the lack of provisions in the area caused him to leave town and march west, where he hoped to find more local support and provisions. Instead, he found a Patriot force headed by Nathanael Greene. In the fateful Battle of Guilford Court House, Greene's troops killed or injured over five hundred of Cornwallis's troops, causing him to withdraw to Wilmington, North Carolina, and eventually to Yorktown, Virginia, where he surrendered to General Washington, effectively ending the war.
The Revolutionary War had a profound impact on the population of the area. Virtually all the inhabitants suffered “shortages of money, manpower, food and supplies of all kinds, and the immeasurable toll of worry and heartache.”27 Beyond these typical deprivations of war, the divisions between local Loyalists and Patriots meant that this conflict had many of the characteristics and consequences of a civil war.
With neighbor against neighbor, even brother against brother, the intricate social fabric was violently torn apart. The loyalists either were forced to leave their homes and property to begin lives all over again in a strange place or stayed and took the consequences, often personal attack and the destruction of property by their own militiamen. Hundreds of refugees were set adrift by the armies of the Americans or British as they alternated possession of the terrain. On all sides families lost fathers, sons, or brothers who had been their sole economic support. Hundreds of thousands of acres changed ownership, and new settlers came to replace those who left.28
A CAPITAL CITY IS FOUNDED
After the war, Hillsborough was the site of the state's first constitutional convention to consider ratification of the U.S. Constitution drawn up by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. North Carolina's convention delegates were concerned about a lack of explicit protections of citizen rights in the Constitution, and voted against its ratification. The following year ratification was reconsidered at a second constitutional convention held in Fayetteville. This time the delegates ratified the Constitution, but only after receiving assurances that Congress would quickly enact a bill of rights. Some historians believe that much of the credit for the bill of rights goes to those delegates meeting in Hillsborough in 1788.29
Another item of business at the Hillsborough constitutional convention established a process for selecting a permanent state capital. Since the end of the war the General Assembly had met in several locations, but it grew tired of moving around, and transporting state documents from place to place. Delegates to the convention were instructed to select an “unalterable seat of government of this state.”30 The convention established a committee to take on that task. That committee called for nominations, receiving seven for its consideration. Among them were Hillsborough, Fayetteville—an important commercial center on the Cape Fear River—and “Mr. Isaac Hunter's in Wake County.”31
After considerable