Crime, Justice, and Order in the North Carolina Piedmont, 1760-1806

STROUD, JASON MICHAEL, Ph.D. Crime, Justice, and Order in the North Carolina Piedmont, 1760-1806. (2019) Directed by Dr. Greg O’Brien. 345 pp. This dissertation examines crime and disorder in the North Carolina Piedmont between 1760 and 1806, exploring the ways that criminal justice and the law were enforced in the region. It is rooted in an analysis of the colonial and state Superior Court records from Salisbury and Hillsborough and traces the process by which authorities— first the colonial government and then the revolutionary state—attempted to establish and maintain order in the region. This most basic function of criminal justice necessarily involved the identification of individuals and groups of people as criminals by the state. I argue that understanding this legal and juridical process, which marked many of the people of the region as unfit subjects and citizens, helps provide a framework for understanding the turmoil and disorder that characterized the Revolutionary era in the region. As the North Carolina government sought to assert its legitimacy through imposing order, it marked presumptively disorderly men and women including horse thieves, land squatters, “Regulators,” Loyalists, and, significantly, the enslaved, as outlaws. Faced with alienation from legal and political legitimacy, these people resisted, articulating in the process a different conception of justice, one rooted in the social, political, and cultural realities of the region. This dissertation, then, traces a pattern of conflict and turmoil that reveals very different, and at times diametrically opposed, understandings of justice between governing elites and local men and women in the Piedmont. Moreover, by focusing on the interrelated issues of criminality, justice, and order, this work attempts to deepen scholarly understanding of the Revolution in the North Carolina backcountry, in particular the ways it affected the relationship between individuals and the state. It stresses the coercive character of the revolutionary experience in the region and argues that the Revolution was a turning point in the process of state consolidation that began with the Regulator revolt of the 1760s. Emphasizing the experiences of those criminalized by the state sheds light on a process by which conflicting conceptions of justice, inflected by factors including wartime exigencies, racial attitudes, religious values, and the lex talonis, established the boundaries of an emerging republican society. CRIME, JUSTICE, AND ORDER IN THE NORTH CAROLINA PIEDMONT, 1760-1806 by Jason Michael Stroud A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2019 Approved by Committee Chair APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation, written by Jason Michael Stroud, has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair Greg O’Brien Committee Members Mark Elliott Watson Jennison Paul Mazgaj October 25, 2019 Date of Acceptance by Committee October 25, 2019 Date of Final Oral Examination ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The list of friends, colleagues, and mentors who have made this work possible is far too long to list in this limited space. But I wish to thank my committee, particularly Dr. Greg O’Brien, whose patient counsel has sustained this project in particular and my time in the doctoral program at UNCG in general. I am grateful to Dr. Paul Mazgaj, who has generously allowed this dissertation to intrude on his well-earned retirement. Long ago, I asked Dr. Mark Elliott and Dr. Watson Jennison to serve on my committee because I admired their scholarship and their teaching. That this work met with the approval of such scholars means far more to me than fulfilling a degree requirement. Along the way, I received crucial financial support from the Archie K. Davis Fellowship from the North Caroliniana Society and the Allen W. Trelease Graduate Fellowship in History from UNCG. More important, however, I owe thanks to my family. My parents have provided constant and endless support, in every way, throughout my many years in school. My parents-in-law have also been a constant source of support and help. Of course, the sacrifices of this work have fallen heaviest on our household. My sons Noah and Lucas cannot remember a time when I was not in school. Neither, perhaps, can my wife, Jamie, but her love, patience, and support have sustained this work. I hope, whatever the four of us do in the years to come, that I can provide them with a fraction of the support and inspiration that each of them, in their own way, has given me. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................1 II. “THE CIVIL POLICE IS HARDLY YET ESTABLISH’D”: CRIME AND JUSTICE IN THE PIEDMONT ...........................................................26 III. “A HOST OF SCOUNDRELS…MADE INTREPID BY ABUSE”: CRIME, JUSTICE, AND THE REGULATORS ...........................................78 IV. “WICKED CONTRIVERS AND PROMOTERS OF VIOLENCE”: JUSTICE, ORDER, AND THE REVOLUTION IN NORTH CAROLINA ................................................................................................132 V. “OFFENCES OCCASIONED BY THE LATE WAR”: CRIME, CONFLICT, AND RECONCILIATION IN THE PIEDMONT, 1781- 1785 ..............................................................................................................184 VI. “AN EVIL AND PERNICIOUS PRACTICE”: SLAVERY, JUSTICE, ORDER, AND THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY PIEDMONT .................249 VII. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................316 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................325 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Thomas More observed in Utopia that his society’s approach to criminals could be described in no other way than “making them into thieves and then punishing them for it.” More wrote amid a perceived epidemic of crime and urban poverty stemming from the enclosure of common lands in the English countryside. He meant, essentially, that a society that denied a basic living to its poorest members practically condemned these unfortunate people to a life of crime, setting in motion a cycle that led them inexorably to the London gallows, where, according to More, “as many as twenty at a time” died on execution days.1 But More’s strikingly modern critique of sixteenth-century English society holds truths for criminal justice more generally. The proposition that criminality is a sociopolitical construction, one shaped by political power along with society’s priorities, anxieties, and prejudice, has been fundamental to many important histories of crime. Indeed, if there is a leitmotif of criminal justice historiography, at least in Western societies, it is that criminal justice systems have historically been structured to reinforce and perpetuate oppressive class, racial, and gender systems.2 In early America, no less 1 Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 25. This passage is also paraphrased and briefly analyzed in Michael Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 1. 2 Important works that have focused on class include Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2006); Edward P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law,” in Hay, Linebaugh, John G. Rule, Thompson, Calvin Winslow, eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (New York: 1 than More’s Tudor England, the administration of criminal justice targeted individuals whose criminality was the direct result of government policies and of their own social isolation. Religious dissenters in New England, “wanton and lascivious” women in Philadelphia, and restive enslaved men and women from New York to Georgia, among many others, were targeted by authorities for the threat they supposedly posed—albeit for very different reasons—to public order.3 As one legal scholar has observed, criminal justice and other law was a “mirror of what elites, magistrates, and leaders thought about the good, the true, and the right, about justice and order.”4 Promoting justice and order were, and remain, central to the legitimacy of government, but exactly who was perceived as a threat to justice and order was highly politicized and historically contingent, and the attitudes of elites and leaders, while crucial, were not the only ones Pantheon Books, 1975): 17-63; Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); and Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). For the relationship between slavery, race, and criminal justice, see Michael S. Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge:

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