Ordering the Backcountry: The South Carolina Regulation
1981; Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Volume: 38; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1918909
ISSN1933-7698
Autores Tópico(s)Cuban History and Society
ResumoI N I769 a group of South Carolina frontiersmen chained John Harvey to a tree and took turns administering five hundred lashes while members of the party beat drums and played a fiddle. Harvey, a roguish and man, was believed to have stolen a horse.' He was one of many such troublesome persons brought under the lash by men who called themselves Regulators. Supported by thousands of inland settlers, Regulators acted from I767 through I769 as the primary enforcers of order in the backcountry. The leaders were ambitious, commercially oriented slaveowners who struggled to assume control of their own region by suppressing threatening groups. Their actions and their demands open a window onto the values, fears, and early experience of an emerging planter class. Regulators banded together in response to a wave of crime that swept the backcountry during the mid-I76os. Newspapers abounded with accounts of violent robberies perpetrated by groups of wandering bandits, and settlers feared for their lives and property. Lacking local courts and jails, and frustrated by the leniency of the Charleston criminal justice system, they took the law into their own hands. Regulators punished suspected robbers by whipping or houseburning. Some they drove from the colony, and others they carried to the Charleston jail. Gradually broadening their activities, they whipped whores and forced the idle to
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