The Exercise of Imperial Authority in the Province of North Carolina and the Governorate of Astrakhan, 1730-1775

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Citation Pickering, Jared. 2020. The Exercise of Imperial Authority in the Province of North Carolina and the Governorate of Astrakhan, 1730-1775. Master's thesis, Harvard Extension School.

Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37365030

Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Exercise of Imperial Authority in the Province of North Carolina and the Governorate of

Astrakhan, 1730 – 1775

Jared F. Pickering

A Thesis in the Field of History

for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

Harvard University

March 2020 Copyright 2020 Jared F. Pickering Abstract

Historians have long segregated Russian colonialism from the European practice because of the dichotomy between Russia’s contiguous continental expansion and

Western European nations’ noncontiguous maritime expansion, as well as Russia’s ostensibly less liberal society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis explores the utility of differentiating Russian colonialism on such grounds, examining institutions of imperial control and peripheral resistance in Russian Astrakhan and British

North Carolina between 1730 and 1775. It seeks to establish a commonality of administration that the empires of Russia and Great Britain shared during the eighteenth century, as well as to identify concrete differences. Scrutinizing sources documenting the establishment and development of colonial government, as well as the writings of participants on both sides of the greatest challenges to imperial control during the period in question, it finds that the forces of physical and social control exercised in each possession were remarkably similar in composition and execution. In the same way, because both empires approached their possessions with essentially identical geopolitical philosophies, the threats to imperial control that the Governorate of Astrakhan and the

Province of North Carolina faced – whether internal, at the periphery, or from without – were largely identical. Accordingly, it establishes a degree of commonality in colonialism, challenging the notion of universal Russian exceptionalism.

3 Table of Contents

List of Figures...... vi

Chapter I. Introduction...... 1

Chapter II. Definition of Terms ...... 9

Chapter III. Eighteenth Century European Colonialism...... 12

Chapter IV. Colonial Governance...... 22

Imperial Government...... 22

Bodies Advising the Monarch...... 24

Imperial Government Executive Departments and Peripheral Control. ....28

Additional Central Government Influence on Peripheral Control...... 36

Official Religion and Government...... 41

Provincial Government ...... 43

The Provincial Governor...... 43

The Provincial Government Executive...... 48

Provincial Judiciaries...... 53

Local Government ...... 57

North Carolina: The County, its Officials, and Inferior Courts...... 58

Astrakhan: Municipal Administration and Differentiated Government. ...63

Chapter V. Armed Institutions of Imperial Control...... 71

Provincial Military Forces ...... 72

Imperial Military Forces: Imperatives of the Center and Peripheral Resistance...89

iv Challenges to Imperial Control in North Carolina: The War of Regulation...... 98

Challenges to Imperial Control in North Carolina: The Stamp Act Crisis...... 115

Challenges to Imperial Control in Astrakhan ...... 121

Chapter VI. Conflict between Provincial and Imperial Institutions ...... 130

Chapter VII. Conclusions...... 137

Chapter VIII. Bibliography...... 145

v List of Figures

Figure 1. The Province of North Carolina among Britain’s North American possessions..5

Figure 2. The Province of North Carolina in 1755...... 6

Figure 3. The process of Russian imperial expansion from 1300 until 1796...... 7

Figure 4. The Governorate of Astrakhan, especially the North Caucasus, and surrounds. .8

vi

Chapter I.

Introduction

In his classic examination of the methodologies and motivations underlying

European colonial expansion, Imperialism: A Study, John Atkinson Hobson is careful to set Russia aside from other imperialist nations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cataloguing the ways in which it “stands alone” from other empire-builders. Echoing sentiments reflected in much of the prevailing scholarly discussion of European colonialism, Atkinson divides Russia from the subject by way of its “more normal and natural” process of accretion, emphasizing the progressive “direct extension of imperial boundaries”1 that characterized Russian growth. In contrast to concepts of colonialism and imperialism commonly attached to Western European nations like Great Britain, which usually encompass the seizure or influencing of overseas territories and the establishment of a regime of remote control, Russian empire-building is often explained as a “process of unification and consolidation.”2

In the same way, discussion of the nature of provincial Russian society during the eighteenth century is almost invariably couched in terms of its differences from Western

European norms. Like many scholars, Aleksandr Kamensky charts the course of Russian cultural currents during the eighteenth century as a struggle between those who continued

1 John Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: James Pott, 1902), 22.

2 Steven Sabol, The Touch of Civilization (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017), 3.

to embrace traditional Russian influences and those who sought to implement reform along Western lines. For Kamensky – and many others – conditions in Russia’s colonies were distinguished from those prevailing in Britain’s possessions by far more than their geographical distance from the imperial center; arguing that Russia’s history demonstrates “another set of values, developed along a different path”3 than Western

Europe, Kamensky postulates a far smaller degree of democratic participation, as well as religious and social freedom, within Russia’s possessions, and a generally less vibrant and far-reaching pattern of commerce than in Great Britain’s own colonies of the time.

Although eighteenth century Russian colonialism can quite obviously be differentiated from British expansion by the continental, contiguous accretion of territory which largely characterized it, as well as by the rigid definition in fundamental law of

Russia’s social estates (soslovie), do those differences alone constitute adequate grounds with which to segregate Russia’s entire program of colonization from Britain’s own efforts – to proclaim Russian imperialism an exceptional phenomenon? Regardless of the methodology of acquisition, were the basic social and political power structures maintaining control in Russia’s acquired territories very much different to those employed by Great Britain? Were the political, economic and social dynamics between imperial metropole and peripheral possession any different? Between imperial government and local administration? Was Russian control of its periphery not threatened by the same internal and external factors as Great Britain’s overseas colonies? This thesis compares the administration of the Governorate of Astrakhan in the Russian Empire and

3 Aleksandr Kamensky, The Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Century: Searching for a Place in the World (New York: Routledge, 1997), 7.

2

the Province of North Carolina in the British Empire during the eighteenth century in order to answer these questions, relying primarily on the thousands of primary source documents from the time contained in the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, as well as documents translated and excerpted or cited by other scholars in the case of

Astrakhan.

Beginning with an examination of the particular concepts in imperialism and colonialism that provide the lens through which the research is focused, this thesis investigates the mechanisms emplaced by each empire to control its respective possession and local efforts to debilitate that imperial control. It first compares imperial, provincial, and local government, before scrutinizing the social forces that undermined government efficacy and the armed institutions that ultimately maintained local domination. Finally, it considers the most significant instances of outright colonial defiance. The period of time from 1730 until 1775 has been chosen to ensure the closest possible comparison, as North

Carolina was not administered directly as a royal colony until 1729 and effectively became independent of British control in 1776, while the nature and composition of the administration of Astrakhan began to be greatly altered following Catherine II’s decree of

November, 1775.

Most of all, this thesis seeks to examine the truth inherent to prevailing images of

Russian exceptionalism. As will be shown below, despite oft-cited differences in the social and geographical underpinnings of British North America and Russia’s Eastern

European possessions at the middle of the eighteenth century, the basic social and political structures maintaining imperial control in Astrakhan and North Carolina were very similar. While differences in the degree of political participation and social freedom

3

of the kind postulated by Kamensky do indeed appear to have induced important differences in social topography, hence the precise nature of peripheral resistance, the social dynamics and the lines of control and resistance between metropole and periphery remained substantively undifferentiated. The relationships between imperial government and provincial administration, as well as between provincial administration and local populace were largely identical, predicating internal challenges to control that were similarly motivated, and each colony faced external threats from indigenous peoples displaced by colonialism, as well as imperial rivals. Accordingly, in the realm of administrative imperialism at least, concepts already attached to European colonialism may be extended to include Russia, establishing another dimension of commonality and further debilitating the notion of national exceptionalism.

4

Figure 1. The Province of North Carolina among Britain’s North American possessions.

Samuel Dunn and Robert Sayer. A map of the British Empire in North America. London, 1774. https://www.loc.gov/item/74694152/.

5

Figure 2. The Province of North Carolina in 1755.

Richard Baldwin, A Map of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland with part of New Jersey etc. London Magazine, XXIV, 1755, 312. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ncmaps/id/123.

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Figure 3. The process of Russian imperial expansion from 1300 until 1796.

A chronological-graphical representation of the contiguous process of expansion that grew the Russian Empire, including the incorporation of territory which would become the Governorate of Astrakhan. William Shepherd, The Growth of Russia in Europe, 1300- 1796, Historical Atlas, 1926. https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/shepherd/russian_growth_1300_1796.jpg.

7

Figure 4. The Governorate of Astrakhan, especially the North Caucasus, and surrounds.

William Shepherd, The Growth of Russia in Europe, 1300-1796, Historical Atlas, 1926. https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/shepherd/russian_growth_1300_1796.jpg.

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Chapter II.

Definition of Terms

Ataman: The highest official of a Cossack host.

Colony: A constituent polity of the British and Russian empires at the time without its own responsible government.

College: An individual central government ministry in imperial Russia.

Collegia: The name given to imperial Russia’s central government ministries collectively.

Cultural periphery: Areas removed from (and denied unfettered participation in) the central government organs, and economic and social institutions through which they are governed.

Embody: To mobilize militia members of the British Empire for active military service.

Freeholder: An individual holding an inalienable, absolute tenure over a parcel of land, able to dispose of it without restriction.

Governorate: The largest territorial subdivision of the Russian Empire between

1730 and 1775, begun in 1708 and further subdivided into provinces.

Great Russia: The region of the Russian Empire that historically constituted

Muscovy, native to ethnic-Russians.

Hegemonic center: The site of the central government organs of an empire, and the economic and social institutions through which hegemonic peoples dominate subaltern peoples.

Hegemonic peoples: Members of groups within a polity that exercise unrestricted agency with regard to the political structures, and economic and social orders of that polity, restricting the agency of members of other groups.

Hetman: Alternate spelling of Ataman.

Irregular Forces: Military elements not part of the active, full-time military establishment of a state, comprised primarily of individuals who usually are largely occupied with civilian pursuits.

Magistrat: A council serving as the lowest level of (local) government in the

Russian Empire’s urban agglomerations.

Mercantilism: The economic theory often argued to underpin imperialism and colonialism, in which trade deficits were to be avoided and colonies therefore served as sources of raw materials for export and as captive markets for finished goods.

Paramilitary Forces: See irregular forces above.

Proprietary Colony: A British North American possession owned directly by individuals. These individuals were empowered to legislate conditions within the possession, as well as to appoint officials therein.

Province: Synonymous with Colony – used at the time to denote the colonies of

British North America, particularly Royal Colonies (see below).

Quit-rents: The taxes paid by freeholders in lieu of performing state service in consequence of their land.

Rada: The name given to Cossack legislative assemblies.

Ratusha: The local government council prevailing in rural villages of the Russian

Empire, equivalent to the magistrat of more populous localities.

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Royal Colony: A British territorial possession held in direct title to the monarch

(in comparison to proprietary colonies).

Soslovie: The term denoting social estates officially recognized in imperial

Russian law.

Stanitsa: A village belonging to a Cossack host.

Starshyna: The ruling class of Cossack society, comprised of the leaders and administrators of a Cossack host.

Subaltern peoples: Members of groups excluded from participation (or full participation) in the political structures, and economic and social orders of their states by a dominating (hegemonic) people.

Table of Ranks: The system delineating social position among imperial Russia’s nobility, dividing military officers, civil servants, clergyman and courtiers into 14 levels, progression through which was intended to be commensurate with service to the state.

Voevoda: The highest official presiding over imperial Russian provinces, the territorial subdivision below the governorate.

Votchina: The estate of a member of imperial Russia’s ruling noble social class.

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Chapter III.

Eighteenth Century European Colonialism

Astrakhan had come into the Russian Empire’s possession during the sixteenth century as part of a long process of contiguous south and eastward expansion. As

Moscow’s influence encroached upon the territory of the Khanate of Astrakhan around the middle of the sixteenth century, its leaders first negotiated relations with Russia, before eventually moving diplomatically against Moscow. This precipitated a Russian military response, leading to the installation of a pro-Russian regime, and ultimately to complete occupation and subjugation. With the territory of the former khanate effectively colonized, Russian officials and settlers then began to drive further, ensuring that the territory of the Governorate of Astrakhan would come to dwarf the original Turkic polity by 1730.4

While the Governorate of Astrakhan was centered on a city less than one- thousand miles southeast of the Russian Empire’s capital, the provincial seat of North

Carolina sat an ocean away from London, the almost four-thousand-mile sea voyage often reported as taking more than two months to accomplish. England had established a presence in North Carolina late in the sixteenth century in the form of isolated and tenuous coastal settlements. Although early English efforts in North Carolina lacked the strong military component and the centralized control that marked Russian colonization

4 For a discussion of pre-seventeenth century Russian expansion in Eastern Europe, see Janet Martin, Medieval Russia, 980-1584 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

in Astrakhan – in fact, the entire colony was a private concern until it was finally made a royal province in the 1720s – an identical process of territorial expansion was unfolding in 1730; as a growing stream of immigrants arrived in North Carolina, the colony continued to drive westward, displacing ever-greater numbers of Native Americans.5 To begin to understand the systemic political domination under which North Carolina and

Astrakhan both fell between 1730 and 1775, one must first define the concepts of imperialism and colonialism.

In its modern European context, imperialism is explained as “political relationships that held groups of people together in an extended system,” that system being territorial, wherein formerly independent geographical areas came to be incorporated politically into an outside polity.6 This notion accords with John

Armstrong’s idea of empire as a “compound polity that has incorporated lesser ones,”7 as well as Michael Doyle’s definition of imperialism as “a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society.”8 The terms “metropole” and “periphery” are central to Doyle’s concept of imperialism, each of which are understood to be political units, with the dominating

5 For discussion of the early development of the Province of Carolina, its division into North and South Carolina, and the transition from propriety rule to royal rule, see William Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

6 Ronald Suny, A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Soviet Union, 1917- 1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2.

7 John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 131.

8 Michael Doyle, Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 45.

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metropole controlling the political affairs – the “effective sovereignty” – of the subordinated peripheral society. Synthesizing the ideas of Doyle, Armstrong, and others,

Ronald Suny conceives of imperialism as a “form of domination…between two units set apart in a hierarchical, inequitable relationship, more precisely a composite state in which a metropole dominates a periphery.”9 We can conclude, then, that imperialism features a political power differential, where the metropole utilizes its greater power to control a weaker political unit, as well as a “transnational connection”10 that serves as a conduit for the differential to flow along.

If imperialism is a political relationship in which a dominating metropole exerts political control over a subordinate territorial periphery, colonialism can be considered a physical manifestation of imperialism – the transnational connection. In colonialism, rather than employing economic or diplomatic means to control nominally independent governments, the imperial metropole assumes physical control of territory, integrating peripheral local government into its own structures of governance. This form of imperialism is described by Ronald Horvath as “administrative imperialism,” where the dominating imperium establishes “formal (direct) control over the affairs of the colony…through a resident, imperial, administrative apparatus.”11 Horvath explains colonialism as “a form of domination − the control by individuals or groups over the

9 Suny, A State of Nations, 3-4.

10 Suny, A State of Nations, 12.

11 Ronald Horvath, “A Definition of Colonialism,” Current Anthropology 13, no. 1 (1972): 49.

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territory and/or behavior of other individuals or groups,”12 but he emphasizes the role that settlers and additional local agents play in colonization, as opposed to other manifestations of imperialism; for Horvath, colonialism is characterized by the arrival of large numbers of settlers in the periphery, hence direct physical and cultural domination.13

Colonialism can therefore best be understood as “both physical occupation of the land [and] a more comprehensive process in which outsiders and their institutions take over, develop, and incorporate a territory not originally their own.”14 Accordingly, the features of colonialism primarily include the absorption of territorial gains into an existing political system via the establishment of local manifestations of imperial government, the development or incorporation of existing local government institutions into the metropole’s system of governance, the large-scale peopling of newly absorbed territory, and the establishment of exploitative economic control, meaning the extension of revenue gathering measures like tax collection into colonized areas.

In discussion of Russian colonialism, the phrase “internal colonization” has long been prominent and is viewed by many historians as a process distinct from the overseas colonialism practiced by Great Britain. It is argued that internal colonization consisted of

“contiguous, continental expansion…that incorporated indigenous lands and peoples,”15

12 Horvath, “A Definition of Colonialism,” 46.

13 Horvath, “A Definition of Colonialism,” 47.

14 Julia Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule: Colonists and Marriage in the Nineteenth Century Black Sea Steppe (Stockholm: Elanders, 2017), 35.

15 Steven Sabol, The Touch of Civilization (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017), 3.

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as opposed to the colonization of non-contiguous territories. More recently, however, some historians have come to challenge the idea that Russian imperialism is a distinct phenomenon, and this thesis explores that strand with regard to administrative imperialism. As will be discussed below, other than the contiguous/non-contiguous dimension and the precise nature of social structure, colonial government in Astrakhan and North Carolina shared many common principles and structures. At the most fundamental level, because provincial government in both colonies found itself constricted between commands from the imperial center and demands from the peripheral population, each territory experienced significant practical undermining of imperial lines of control.

During the eighteenth century, when imperial peripheries were sometimes weeks or months of travelling time from the metropole and local representatives of imperial government were few on the ground, the ostensibly clear dichotomy between controlling metropole and controlled periphery was far from concrete. Local society was inevitably a fusion of hegemonic and peripheral culture, especially as peripheral territory often quickly came to be settled by groups exhibiting widely divergent political, religious and social values. In such circumstances, effective local control was achieved where imperial government commands and the needs of the local populace largely coincided. Regardless of its subordinate political position, whenever damage done by central government policies exceeded the threshold of tolerance for the peripheral population, resistance would arise.

Consequently, studying eighteenth century colonial society in North Carolina and

Astrakhan involves understanding “the reciprocal interrelations between imperial

16

authorities and local societies,” where the “mutual influences of center and periphery are at the very core,” and “open channels of influence…emanate not only from the center, but also from the periphery.”16 Imperial control in the eighteenth century Russian and

British context is not simply a description of how London and Saint Petersburg, or ethnic

Russians and ethnic Britons ruled non-Russians and non-Britons. Rather, it is an examination of the ways in which government institutions interacted with the society of the colonial periphery to garner useful cooperation; it defines the disparity between

“colonization by decree [from the imperial center] and colonization on the ground.”17

Chief amongst the forces shaping local responses to government actions in

Astrakhan and North Carolina were the group dynamics of social stratification. The influence of stratified social castes was an all-pervading presence in both Great Britain and Russia, where the top social stratum governed lower strata in a form of intragroup domination that mirrored the intergroup domination each metropole exercised over its colonial periphery.18 This predicated a symbiotic relationship between the ruling social class and the institutions of state, whereby the ruling class maintained a monopoly over political processes while simultaneously relying on support from state institutions to maintain its social position. As John LeDonne contends in Ruling Russia, in the manner of society that then pervaded Russia, “the state is simply synonymous with the leadership of the ruling class and the network of institutions by which this class transforms its

16 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 50.

17 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 101.

18 For an explanation of intergroup and intragroup domination in the colonial context, see Horvath, “A Definition of Colonialism,” 50.

17

political power into administrative directives.”19 The ruling class – the Russian nobility – continued to exercise its “exclusive privilege in the ownership of peasant labor to turn into wealth the possession of land”20 in eighteenth century Russia, while at the same time the British ruling class, especially the members of the peerage and the gentry, enjoyed both legal differentiation and an exclusivity defined and protected in law. Consequently, the modern concept of a large and powerful professional civil service – a bureaucratic class – was absent from both Russian and British society at the time. Although numbers of government functionaries were present, they existed primarily to facilitate the work of the members of the ruling classes who occupied executive positions, and they exercised neither great latitude of decision-making, nor independence from other organs of government.

Both Russia and Britain were “societies of privilege,”21 but while the British socio-political order was slowly liberalizing even by the middle of the eighteenth century,

Russian society was being made consciously more restrictive. Late in the eighteenth century the concept of soslovie had become entrenched, separating townspeople from the peasantry and entrenching the positions of the nobility and clergy.22 As tax schedules began to proliferate, and the Table of Ranks definitively fixed social positions, social

19John Ledonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762-1796 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 16.

20Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 7.

21 Donald Ostrowski, “The Façade of Legitimacy: Exchange of Power and Authority in Early Modern Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 3 (2002): 559.

22 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 56.

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estates became even more pivotal in Russian society. Through them, the vast majority of

Russian subjects were precisely defined in terms of “service obligations, taxation status, place of residence, community of association, and mobility.”23 While Britain’s poor were relatively free to emigrate to its colonies, the largest part of Russia’s poor were legally tied to noble estates and government preserves, with runaways being returned to their masters by government enforcers.24

During the eighteenth century, just over 0.5% of the Russian population controlled not only the ship of state but also the personal lives of the vast majority of the rest of the empire’s inhabitants.25 By 1762, slightly less than 50,000 members of the noble class owned 5.6 million serfs living on their votchiny, and some of the most powerful noble clans – such as the Sheremetev family – owned as many as 140,000 souls.26 By virtue of their monopoly over government control, the noble class also controlled the affairs of the majority of the empire’s 2.8 million state peasants, although certain classes of state peasant were differentiated, enjoying special autonomies.

Similarly, in Great Britain’s ostensibly democratic, representative system of government, still less than 200,000 subjects were allowed to participate politically from among a

23 Nancy Kollman, The Russian Empire 1450-1801 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 355.

24 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 96.

25 Ostrowski, “The Façade of Legitimacy,” 558.

26 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 52.

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general population of 16 million, and powerful nobles personally controlled the electoral process throughout large swathes of territory.27

Because social stratification in Great Russia translated formally into law, any examination of Russian control of its periphery during the eighteenth century must consider not only vertical, or regional government structure, but also the differing manifestations of control applied to enforce social differentiation. While social stratification was just as all-pervading in Great Britain and its colonies, the attendant lack of institutional differentiation allows a simpler overall examination, but the conflict that social castes produced is just as evident.

In both North Carolina and Astrakhan, society was far more diverse than at the metropole, as representatives of the ruling classes and members of other social groups within hegemonic cultures lived beside newly naturalized subjects originating elsewhere in Europe, as well as next to members of preexisting cultures that had been displaced or marginalized by colonization itself. This social dynamic is a characteristic of the frontier environment permeating extensive portions of both Astrakhan and North Carolina, and its ability to shape socio-political interactions along the frontier is heavily emphasized within scholarly discussion of frontier history.28 The interrelationships between government, settler society, and preexisting peoples would produce much of the conflict undermining imperial control considered below, in a pattern acknowledged to often

27 John Phillips and Charles Wetherell, “The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 413.

28 Marvin Mikesell, “Comparative Studies in Frontier History,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 50, no. 1 (1960): 62-74.

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permeate frontier borderlands.29 That conflict was demonstrably more significant at the frontier of each colony, where new settlers and displaced peoples lived under the influence of more established colonists and officials. All of these social factors contributed greatly to the interaction between imperial government and local populace that shaped imperial control and colonial resistance at the periphery.

29 Evelyn Glenn, “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of US Race and Gender Formation,” Journal of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 54-74.

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Chapter IV.

Colonial Governance

Armed as we now are with a basic conceptual frame of reference through which to view colonial Astrakhan and North Carolina, we may proceed to evaluating the mechanisms of control that the Russian and British empires imposed upon their respective colonies, namely the government institutions that comprised the colonial

“transnational connection,” before turning to examine the peripheral societies they were grafted atop and the interaction between these two elements. The foundations of imperial control in Astrakhan and North Carolina were the structures of government that incorporated the colonies into the imperial polities. These structures may be divided into three distinct levels, beginning at the imperial center with the central government organs that were arranged to rule the empire as a whole and to oversee colonial relations. Below the central government apparatus came the provincial government frameworks that represented empire colonially, ruling each individual colony, and below these sat the local government bodies organized to interact routinely with the populace, and which came ultimately to represent the interests of that populace. We will begin our evaluation at the top, with imperial government.

Imperial Government

As a British possession, at the very apex of the Province of North Carolina’s executive sat the King of Great Britain, almost 4,000 miles distant. To translate the

monarch’s wishes for North Carolina into practice, a complicated arrangement of imperial and provincial institutions spanned the Atlantic Ocean, mediating local, provincial and imperial interests. Although Royal proclamations to the colonies bore the

King’s cypher alone, in an empire of more than one million square miles and 16 million inhabitants, several levels of intermediaries between sovereign and colonial subject were necessary for efficient governance. The first of these intermediaries resided in London, serving as a final funnel into which all of the strands of governance aimed to and from the ruler were gathered, known as the King’s Privy Council.

The Governorate of Astrakhan too was ruled ultimately by a monarch, the

Imperator of All Russia (Imperatritsa of All Russia when female), who at the time was still commonly referred to as the Tsar (Tsarina when female). Although the British and

Russian monarchs were both heads of state, Peter II’s relationship to the Russian government was rather different to that of George II in Great Britain: the Russian

Emperor remained “supreme legislator and supreme judge,”30 unobstructed in agency by an institution akin to the British parliament, and this exemplified the “personal factor” that permeated Russia’s “government of men,” where “law was the tsar’s will,” as opposed to a government constructed around constitutional laws and independent bureaucracy.31 Regardless of the Tsar’s greater power over affairs of state, institutional mechanisms were just as necessary in Russia to translate the ruler’s imperial will into local reality, in the case of Astrakhan spanning 1,300 miles across the steppe from Saint

30 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 24.

31 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 116.

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Petersburg. As in London, the first of these mechanisms was the advisors closest to the

Tsar.

Bodies Advising the Monarch.

Evolving directly from the Norman Royal Court, the Privy Council of the United

Kingdom consisted of a number of individuals ostensibly advising the monarch in the execution of the Royal Prerogative, meaning the exercise of the King’s remaining executive authority. In reality, the Privy Council did far more than simply advise, instead establishing committees to examine particulars, laboring to furnish sound decisions for the King, and often only meeting with him to register its findings. Those findings would ultimately be promulgated as executive orders styled “orders in council” by the “King in

Council.”32 In the realm of colonial affairs, the King retained a great deal of executive authority, ensuring that the Privy Council had much to deliberate regarding Great

Britain’s overseas colonies. The King gave assent to all laws passed by colonial governments and retained the right to veto any of them; he also embodied a final court of appeal for the colonies, reviewed petitions and complaints from the colonies, sent instructions to colonial governments, and approved high-ranking appointments in the colonies.33

Originally, the Privy Council as a whole considered all of these matters for the monarch, but King George II established a permanent Privy Council Committee in 1727,

32 Oliver Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765: A Study of the British Board of Trade in Its Relation to the American Colonies, Political, Industrial, Administrative (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1912), 227.

33Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 101.

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nominating “any three or more of them” to consider matters originating in “the

Plantations,” as Britain’s colonies were then often still referred to.34 That committee came to make decisions for the Privy Council to rubber-stamp in just the same way that the council as a whole did for the King. But in reality, a board numbering even the entire

Privy Council would not have proven sufficient to adequately address the plethora of matters arising daily throughout all of Great Britain’s colonies, and so another body was required for their actual administration. That body was known as the Board of Trade.

In Astrakhan, just as in the administration of North Carolina, several levels of imperial, provincial, and local government structures were necessary to effectively engage central and peripheral interests. The first cog of imperial administration between

Russian ruler and peripheral subject was the Cabinet, although it functioned more similarly to the old English Privy Council than the British Privy Council of the mid- eighteenth century, as it was just as concerned with the personal business of the ruler as with the functions of government. Cabinet members had always served partly as the

Tsar’s personal secretaries, facilitating the immense flow of directives and enquiries from the ruler, as well as the great number of petitions and replies received, and that state of affairs was formalized in 1763 when Catherine II formed a secretariat within it.35 In 1768,

Catherine added a body far closer in operation to the contemporary British Privy Council when she formed the Imperial Council. The Imperial Council brought together a number of the empire’s chief administrators to advise the ruler, and also served as a direct bridge

34 Privy Council Register, vol. 1: 1727, PC-2-90, National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, United Kingdom.

35 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 27.

25

from the monarch to central and provincial government organs, as the heads of the various departments36 and provincial administrators37 often sat upon the Council.

The second in a series of ever-expanding circles of administration below the

Emperor was the Senate, an “administrative oversight board”38 that had replaced the

Boyar Council during the reign of Peter I. Although billed as the “first agency of state,” the Senate’s departments functioned as the foci for the empire’s internal administration, particularly in matters juridical.39 Founded with nine members, by 1762 its membership had grown to 21, all of whom originated in the noble class. It was divided into six departments in 1763, two of which resided in Moscow, and four of which were based in

Saint Petersburg. The most important department, that for state and political affairs, was the first, located in Saint Petersburg, but if any department reached a unanimous decision, it would be promulgated in the name of the entire Senate. As in Great Britain’s plantations, the Russian monarch’s judgment was the highest court in Astrakhan; senate decisions could be appealed to the emperor, just as senate judgments could only conform to existing law – if it felt a new law necessary, the Senate was required to submit a

“respectful report” to the Emperor.40 Although ostensibly an administrative body, the practices of the Senate aptly demonstrate the fusion of administrative and judicial power

36 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 28.

37 Sean Pollock, “Empire by Invitation? Russian Empire Building in the Caucasus in the Reign of Catherine II” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2006), 149.

38 Ostrowski, “The Façade of Legitimacy,” 540.

39 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 32.

40 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 33.

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that was to be found at every level of Russian government at the time, as well as the lack of independent judiciary.

The Senate related to the governance of Astrakhan in three ways. First, the judicial responsibilities of the 2nd and 5th Departments, both of which served as higher courts of appeal for decisions made by provincial governments,41 impinged directly upon the agency of provincial administrators. Effectively, these departments had the ability to confirm or reverse decisions pertaining to distant happenings that their members rarely had personal experience regarding, very much akin to the powers of review that the

British Privy Council exercised. Secondly, a powerful direct link was forged between the

Empress and the organs of her government with the creation of the post of Procurator

General in 1774, who alone in the Senate was guaranteed regular access to the throne.

Each provincial government was appointed a procurator, just as each government college, except for the colleges of War, Navy, and Foreign Affairs were.42 Astrakhan’s procurator, as well as the procurators of the Senate, the Collegia, and the other regional governments were all directly subordinated to the Procurator General, giving him oversight of the workings of the entire imperial bureaucracy.43 This made him the “eyes and ears” of the empress in government,44 as well as a prime avenue of approach to the throne. Finally, the Senate exercised direct control over several of the central government colleges that

41 Ledonne, Ruling Russia,146.

42 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 35.

43 Ledonne Ruling Russia, 30.

44 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 33.

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ultimately directed colonial government officials. Routine dealings with the periphery were arranged at the collegiate level, passing up to senate oversight, and ultimately to royal review via the Procurator General if that was judged necessary. Just as in the

Province of North Carolina, several imperial government bodies were active in

Astrakhan, but unlike North Carolina, none was primarily responsible for colonial affairs.

The more variegated approach in Astrakhan resulted from the rigidly enforced social estate system of the Russian Empire, where individuals residing within the same geographic area were ascribed differing rights and privileges based upon their legally defined class, necessitating parallel mechanisms of control.

Imperial Government Executive Departments and Peripheral Control.

Established by royal commission of King William III in 1696, the British Board of Trade was the primary umbilical linking the central government in London to its overseas plantations, including North Carolina. Through it almost all colonial matters passed, whether directly or indirectly. While the Privy Council Committee for the

Plantations sat as a “board of review and court of appeals, both administrative and legal,” and the Privy Council as a whole met with the King to ratify the Committee’s decisions, it was the Board of Trade that “investigated, gathered facts, and made recommendations to the Committee” in the first place.45 The Board of Trade made representations to the

King in Council via the Privy Council committee that ultimately resulted in Orders in

Council.” In scrutinizing the royal commission that established the Board of Trade and

45 Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765,104.

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later orders in council that altered its responsibilities, it quickly becomes evident how wide-ranging the Board’s representations were.

According to the royal commission, the Board was to conduct all official correspondence between the imperial government and the plantations, including issuing instructions to colonial governors, and was expected to keep the King apprised of the content of its correspondence with the plantations. It was also required to review all colonial legislation and to present an opinion regarding that legislation to the King in

Council (who almost invariably acted in accord with when deciding assent), and to do likewise regarding all complaints from the plantations. The Board was required to keep records of the fiscal appropriations and expenditures of the individual colonial governments, and an order in council of March 11, 1752 required the Lords

Commissioners for Trade and Plantations to present to the King in Council nominations for governorships and vice-governorships, secretaries, provincial counsellors, and “all other officers, which have been, or may be found necessary for the administration of justice, and the execution of government there.”46 Parliament too occasionally levied specific duties for the Board, such as when it legislated more than £100,000 in relief funds for disaster-stricken planters, making the Board responsible for appropriately distributing the money.47

Managing fiscal distributions to the colonies was something that the Board of

Trade became highly experienced at. The Board routinely acted on behalf of Great

46 Order of the King in Council, March 11, 1752, John Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, vol. 5 (Providence: Knowles, Anthony, 1860), 351-353.

47 Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 121.

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Britain’s American colonies to secure financial aid for colonial projects that bolstered imperial aims, such as local defense, and it also ensured that colonial governments repaid the British government for those distributions. Virginia received £3,388 of military supplies in 1702 and Massachusetts received £500 of the same in 1704. While Virginia paid for its supplies from colonial quit-rents, Massachusetts evidently failed to do likewise, as its request for arms and ammunition in 1742 was denied until the previous supplies were paid for.48 North Carolina’s governor attempted to secure financing in the mid-1750s for the construction of a fort to protect the harbor at Cape Lookout, and to arm existing forts upstream. The Board asked that the Privy Council honor the latter request, stating that:

Although we are sensible that the frequent applications of this nature which have of late been made by the colonies in America bring a very heavy expense on this country, nevertheless as the ordnance and stores prayed for in the said memorial are represented to us to be absolutely necessary for the security and defence of the Province of North Carolina and as His Majesty has been graciously pleased to indulge other of his colonies in the like request, we are humbly of opinion that His Majesty may be graciously pleased that such ordnance and stores as from the plan of the said fort and Mr. Dobbs' account of it shall appear to be absolutely necessary may be sent thither.49

Although the precise structure of the Board evolved with the years, its basic constituents remained static throughout the period of time we are considering. Eight permanent (professional) members sat on the board, one of whom was the president, three of whom were required to be present in order to conduct routine business, and five

48 Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 322.

49 Representation of the Board of Trade, April 24, 1755. William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 5 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1887), 399.

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of whom constituted a quorum when meeting with the King or Privy Council.50 A number of important figures were also named members of the Board, but, despite the fact that some did occasionally consult with the professional members, these appointments were effectively nominal. Below the members of the Board themselves resided the administrative staff, the most important of whom was the secretary. The secretary had an assistant chief clerk, seven clerks, a messenger, and two doorkeepers, costing the government £1,150 in salary. In 1718, the litigious nature of the Board’s work increasing, it was found necessary to attach a consulting attorney.51

While the Board’s charter underlined “the care of the plantations” in its responsibilities, it is clear that such care was not intended to be strictly of the plantations themselves, but rather, of the imperial government’s vision of colonial possessions in the prevailing mercantilist economic system. The Lords of Trade were to ensure that the plantations in their care were not “oblidged [sic] to fetch and supply themselves withall from other princes and states,”52 and this policy was aligned with successive acts of

Parliament that began to be passed at the time to control trade between Britain’s colonies and foreign powers. The import the Board attached to trade laws is amply demonstrated in the fact that it not only included clauses in its instructions to successive North

Carolinian governors mandating their enforcement, but also required the governors to offer up a bond to ensure adequate observation of those instructions. When measures

50 Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 22-24.

51 Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 76.

52 “Commission,” New York Colonial Documents, vol. 4, 147, in Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 25.

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aimed at enforcing trade laws coincided with the wants of the planters – such as in the suppression of piracy – friction did not manifest, but when planters were personally injured by local enforcement, imperatives of the Board of Trade were far harder to implement. One important dimension to the Board’s eventual difficulties in having its instructions to North Carolinian governors carried out is the role that other imperial government executive organs assumed in the colony. In order to fully illuminate the influence of imperial government in the province, these other organs will be briefly described, before turning to North Carolina’s provincial government.

In Russia, no direct equivalent of the British Board of Trade existed. Instead, several government colleges dealt with provincial governments. The Collegia were formed in 1718, originally counting nine individual collegiums, that number rising to eighteen by the 1760s.53 Each college maintained an office in both Saint Petersburg and

Moscow and was led by a president and vice-president. The colleges were staffed by three councilors and three assessors, as well as several clerks in their chanceries, and some were further divided into departments. The College of Justice was subdivided in three, with the president of the College heading one, the vice-president another, and a councilor heading the last. Each department was afforded two deputies, and the College’s chancery counted nine secretaries, 106 clerks, and 27 guards.54 The total staff of the

Collegia was reported as 2,000 in the 1760s.55

53 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 37.

54 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 150.

55 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 37.

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When the decisions of Astrakhan’s governor and the underlying provincial voevodas were to be appealed against, it was the College of Justice that was charged with first hearing the cases. Just as importantly, the College of Justice investigated the crimes of provincial officials when committed in their official capacity.56 As a border governorate, Astrakhan’s governor was issued instructions by the two most powerful colleges – the College of War regarding defensive arrangements and military dispositions within the Governorate, and the College of Foreign Affairs regarding relations with the

Ottoman and Persian empires, and especially the numerous highland peoples of the

Caucasus Mountains.57 As will be examined below, these instructions were complicated by a paucity of tangible resources of control along the border, which constantly saw

Caucasian highlanders trading within Russia’s ostensible territory, as well as settling there, and Russian encroachment into the northern Caucasus, especially to intervene in local conflicts.

Although the vast majority of Astrakhan’s eighteenth-century settlers relocated from within the Russian empire, still others did originate outside of Russian territory, emigrating in the same manner as non-Britons to North Carolina. Just as North Carolina saw increasing numbers of ethnic German immigrants arriving around the middle of the century, fleeing disorder and poverty in Central Europe, Astrakhan too saw large numbers of those same Germans arriving. To these foreign settlers was appended the status of “colonist,” fitting them into Russia’s rigid class system and requiring a special government body to effectively administer them. The Chancellery of Guardianship of

56 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 149.

57 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 19.

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Foreigners was established by Catherine II in 1763, ranking equally with the Collegia.

Although its authority in Astrakhan was confined to the settlements of foreign immigrants, largely along the Volga River, as the only government ministry exclusively concerned with colonialism and the efficient administration of colonies, it is the closest

Russian parallel to Great Britain’s Board of Trade, requiring brief elaboration.

The Russian government sought to populate the empire’s territorial gains in just the same way that Britain did, and much of eighteenth-century Russian colonialism was state-directed. In a society of rigid social estates, where the majority of the population was legally in the possession of the noble elite or of the government itself, and even those with special status due to their state service were routinely ordered to relocate, it is unsurprising that the vast majority of early Russian settlers in Astrakhan were military garrisons and Cossack settlements. Directed resettlements had long been a part of

Russian society, and so movement to the imperial periphery was not administered by government as a separate phenomenon, even when specifically aimed at peopling newly acquired peripheral possessions. Indeed, the term “colonist” does not appear in official publications until the last half of the eighteenth century, and then specifically in relation to Central European immigrants.58

More than just a title, colonist status gave subjects concrete social shape with which to be fitted into Russia’s differentiated system of government by central officials and regional administrators alike.59 Although the chancellery overseeing colonists was named for foreigners, this was effectively a misnomer relating exclusively to their

58 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 36.

59 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 247.

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origins, as those afforded colonist class had applied for and been granted Russian subjecthood at the border, subscribing an oath of loyalty to the Russian crown. The colonist soslovie was that of state peasant, but their obligations and privileges effectively differentiated them from other state peasants, just as in the case of Cossacks. During the period of time under study here, colonists were exempt from conscription into the imperial military, were able to practice their traditional forms of local government and religion, and were exempt from various forms of taxation for varying periods of time, all under the sole umbrella of chancellery oversight.60

As the physical manifestations of colonialism in Astrakhan and elsewhere for which the Chancellery was responsible steadily increased under the influence of an influx of migrants, so too did its own bureaucracy. Originally consisting of an executive of just three individuals supported by two clerks, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the staff of the Chancellery had grown to encompass several additional assistants and clerks, as well as specialized secretaries and translators, and had been divided into four departments.61 At its peak, more than 130,000 colonists from modern Germany alone were administered by the Chancellery of Guardianship of Foreigners, as well as smaller numbers from modern Bulgaria, Moldova, and the Balkans.62 The bulk of the chancellery’s agents worked at the local level, where the majority of its administration took place, as will be elucidated below with reference to local government.

60 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 43.

61 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 70.

62 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 39-43.

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Additional Central Government Influence on Peripheral Control.

The same Order in Council of March, 1752 that directed the British Board of

Trade to nominate individuals to fill government positions in the plantations carefully circumscribed two categories of officials from the Board’s purview; the order concludes by stating “excepting only such as are or may be appointed for the direction and regulation of His Majesty's customs and revenues, and such as are or may be under the directions and authority of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.”63 This phrase illuminates the fact that, while colonial officials were under the direct control of the

Board of Trade, other imperial officials operating in and around Britain’s North

American colonies were beholden to other of the British government’s executive departments.

Although the Board of Trade included in its instructions to provincial governors a mandate to enforce the various Trade and Navigation Acts, those particular instructions were first reviewed by the Commissioners of Customs, whose duty it was to implement the Acts.64 By the same token, while provincial governors were required by the Board of

Trade to ensure that the legislation was enacted, their own administrations did not contain the mechanisms to do so. Rather, it was the customs officials resident in their provinces, reporting to London through the Board of Customs instead of the Board of Trade, that actually enforced the provisions of the legislation. That customs officers were active in

63 George II of Great Britain, “Order of the King in Council, March 11, 1752,” John Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, vol. 5 (Providence: Knowles, Anthony, 1860), 351-353.

64 Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 115.

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North Carolina is captured in a letter from Governor William Tryon to the Board of

Trade in 1766. In it, Governor Tryon states that:

His Majesty's officers of the customs for this river have seized two vessels. The first a brig named the Samuel, Hezekiah Welch master, was stopped the 29th of May by Mr. Pennington, comptroller, on suspicion of the master having made a false entry; upon search near one hundred hogsheads of foreign molasses was found on board her that had not been entered. This quantity has been condemned by a decree in the Court of Admiralty of this province. The sale of this molasses clear of all charges amounted to £324 proclamation money; value in sterling £163. This brig came from Hispaniola bound to Boston. The second vessel named the Fox, Nathan Porter, master, was seized by Mr. Dry, the Collector, the 15th of October last on suspicion of her having broke bulk before entry. This vessel was condemned in the above court together with her cargo, which consisted of wines from the Azores and rum from Santa Cruz. The sale of this ship and her cargo is just finished.65

That the actions of these Customs officials instigated difficulties for North Carolina’s provincial government, and that Customs officials often needed the support of provincial government institutions for the efficacy and security of their activities will become apparent later in this thesis.

Taxation was as prominent in Russian government as it was in British government. Russia’s poll tax, the Capitation, was the largest means of income for the government of Catherine II at the commencement of her reign.66 As for many aspects of

Russian government at the time, the Senate was in practice the highest budgetary authority in 1730, with two of its departments tasked to account for government, and to

65 Letter from William Tryon to the Board of Trade, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 158-161.

66 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 207.

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which all financial reports were consequently submitted. In the same way that the British

Privy Council established committees to deal with complex matters, so too did the

Russian Senate, titling them “expeditions,” and one such expedition was that of State

Revenues, which finally was formed in 1773 to establish an effective state budget.67

The central government machinery responsible for actual revenue generation was far more varied. The College of Audit verified expenditures, and it was the army’s commissary that arranged the collection of the Capitation, which had originally been calculated at 74 kopeks via the division of projected annual military expenditures by the number of serfs declared. While peasants and townsmen directly paid taxes, nobles paid the tax value of their serfs, which they extracted from the serfs themselves, keeping the often significant surpluses as profit. From 1736, although the Capitation had fallen to 70 kopeks, a collection fee of two kopeks per ruble was instituted.68

Other significant sources of revenue beyond the poll tax were the empire’s various embodiments of sales tax. The College of Revenue dealt with the greatest share, especially in the government-controlled sale of Vodka, and – crucial in Astrakhan – wine and brandy, while the Central Salt Board acted similarly for salt sales.69 As a border province buttressed by two large empires and a myriad of mountain peoples known for their artisanry, customs duties were also a powerful factor in Astrakhan.

Reflecting the general fusion of executive, administrative, and judicial powers granted to officials at every level of imperial Russian government, the profusion of

67 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 206.

68 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 251-252.

69 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 208.

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central government entities responsible for revenue lacked independent representation at the provincial level; Astrakhan’s governor and the lower provincial voevodas were ultimately responsible for tax collection within their domains. The governor and the voevodas routinely relied upon military staff officers to actually collect the capitation until 1764, when the deputy governor and deputy voevodas were officially given the task.

In practice, just as the central government delegated to the regional level the task of tax collection, so too did regional officials rely upon locally appointed officials for collection.70

Tax collection in Astrakhan was also complicated by the governorate’s social make-up, as unlike the empire’s western periphery, which was densely populated with non-Russians granted the right to be governed largely as they had been before conquest,

Astrakhan was not populated in the same way as the imperial center. In a territory consisting of only seven large towns afloat in a sea of desert, a concentration of colonist villages along the Volga River, a concentration of Cossack villages along the Terek

River, and very few well-established noble estates and peasant villages, tax revenues were disproportionately low. Colonists, Cossacks and nomads were all largely exempt from paying the Capitation between 1730 and 1775, but they were not excluded from sales and customs taxes.71 In relying upon Cossacks in Astrakhan – effectively those who most profited from the sale of alcohol and cross-border trade, especially the import of equipment and weapons best suited for campaigning in the rugged North Caucasus – to enforce government tax directives along the southern frontier, Russia’s administrators

70 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 211-212.

71 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 298.

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were creating conditions ripe for conflict between central, provincial, and frontier imperatives. Although many of Astrakhan’s subjects were not intruded upon by tax collectors in the way that their North Carolinian counterparts were, central government directives mobilizing the regular army could be just as crippling, often placing it at odds with subjects and paramilitary elements.

In North Carolina, the presence of imperial military representatives created identical frictions as the eighteenth century progressed, but the imperial military establishment there was exclusively embodied by the navy, rather than the army. Just as

North American customs officers directly served their own executive department in

London instead of provincial government, so too were naval forces present in North

Carolina and its waters pursuant to the orders of the Board of Admiralty. In the same way that Board of Trade instructions to provincial governors specifying trade law enforcement were reviewed by the Commissioners of Customs before being dispatched, so too were royal governors given instructions describing Admiralty jurisdiction and the establishment of vice-admiralty courts, those being prepared by the lawyers of the Board of Admiralty itself. In fact, the actual commission appointing the governor of North

Carolina authority to hold a vice-admiralty court was granted directly by the Admiralty, as it pertained exclusively to naval law the sole purview of the Admiralty, and simply accompanied the Board of Trade instructions.72

As with the customs service, evidence of a symbiotic relationship between naval forces and the government of North Carolina exists. This is primarily embodied in the presence of His Majesty’s Ships dedicated to the security of the North Carolina coast, as

72 Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 121-122.

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requested of the Admiralty via the Board of Trade by North Carolina’s governor, as well as by the provision of supplies to permanent and transient naval vessels in return, as will be discussed at length later in this thesis. Although outside of the chronological focus of this thesis, perhaps the most spectacular intervention of the Royal Navy in North Carolina came in 1718, when it found, fought, and killed the infamous pirate Edward Teach –

“Blackbeard.” Of course, not all the residents of North Carolina applauded Blackbeard’s demise, and the popularity of the Royal Navy in North Carolina would wax and wane throughout the eighteenth century in the same way that the popularity of customs officials did, as it sought to balance the demands of the province with the exigencies of its mission.

Official Religion and Government.

The all-pervading influence of official state religion cannot be underestimated in eighteenth-century colonial society and governance in both the British and Russian empires. The British King and Russian Emperor were de jure and de facto heads of religion respectively. Peter I finally replacing the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate with a governing council, known as the Synod, in 1721 was the culmination of a process that saw the Church lose its temporal authority over lands and subjects, and ultimately its administrative independence, effectively becoming another government department that ranked alongside the Collegia. Likewise, the British Monarch had headed the Anglican

Church since the Act of Supremacy of 1534. Given the fusion of church and state prevailing in both polities, and the depth of control that religious belief empowered government with, the prominence of religious officials in formulating official policy in colonial Astrakhan and North Carolina is entirely foreseeable.

41

In Britain, the Bishop of London – an ex-officio member of the Board of Trade who often attended its meetings – was granted ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the

American colonies, including North Carolina. Accordingly, he was able to insert his own passages into the Board of Trade instructions for North Carolina’s royal governors, and when he was forced to be absent from meetings of the Board, he would have a copy delivered for his review in the same way that the Board of Admiralty and Commissioners of Customs did.73 His instructions to provincial governors included the establishment of laws to punish “blasphemy, profanity, adultery, polygamy, profanation of the Sabbath, and other crimes against common morality,” specifying that the testimony of church wardens in civil court would suffice for prosecution. Additionally, he reviewed colonial laws that encompassed religion in the same way that the Board’s resident attorney reviewed colonial laws for compliance with fundamental British law and considered the

“religious principles” of men under consideration for provincial councils.74 Along with the Board of Trade, the Admiralty, and the Commissioners of Customs, the Bishop of

London would greatly influence the business of provincial government in North Carolina.

In Russia, too, religious instructions were issued to secular enforcers. Orders to

Astrakhan’s rural enforcers, the sotskii, in 1774 reminded them to ensure that nobles and peasants alike attended religious services each Sunday and religious holiday, and that all were confessed during lent. Heresies were to be reported to voevodas for punishment.

That they were treated as serious affronts to political and social order is well

73 Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 123.

74 Journal of the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, 1708-1715, United Kingdom Public Records Office, London, in Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 124.

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demonstrated in the fact that military forces were dispatched by Saint Petersburg to surveil peasant villages accused of heretical practices near Kaluga in the 1760s.75

Provincial Government

The next link in the transnational connection effecting administrative imperialism in Astrakhan and North Carolina was provincial government. All of the directives and demands of the various imperial government bodies directly influencing colonial policy converged first at the provincial level, flowing down to the local level only after transmutation into provincial government direction to colonists, provincial government agencies, and local government bodies. Heading provincial government in both

Astrakhan and North Carolina was a colonial governor.

The Provincial Governor.

Just as the King headed the British imperial government, his chief representative in each colony – the royal governor – served as the head of the provincial executive. The governor was not elected, but was appointed by the King upon nomination, at first by the

Secretary of State, and from 1752 by the Board of Trade. In an era of undisguised patronage, the qualifications deemed necessary to serve as a provincial governor were not in the realm of public service experience, but simple alliance with the nominator.

Accordingly, not only did North Carolina’s governor have to contend with machinations of the provincial sociopolitical order onto which he was grafted, but also the work of those physically far closer to his patron who desired his post for themselves. This resulted

75 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 113.

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in a far more fragile position than one might expect from the autocratic powers theoretically invested in the governor.

The practical foundational law of the Province of North Carolina was the governor’s commission and the Board of Trade’s instructions to him. According to those instructions, the physical manifestation underwriting the governor’s authority would be military, as he was commander in chief in his province, as well as civil governor. Not only was he empowered to construct fortifications and to levy and arm a provincial military force – the militia – but he was also commissioned to directly command his forces and to deploy them in the defense of the province, as well as in the defense of any other American colony. His military authority made him the ultimate provincial arbiter of martial law, which he was empowered to execute during attack from without and riot within, and he was the appointing authority for the military officers who would enforce that law.

In the civil realm, the governor’s mandate disposed him to “require the sheriffs to use all lawful means to keep the peace and to put down insurrections or riots,” and it was he who granted commissions to the province’s local government officers – the sheriffs, justices and other court officials around which county government revolved.76 Although the governor lacked the power to appoint permanent members of the Provincial Council with which he shared executive authority – that power residing with the Board of Trade via the King in Council – it was he who administered their oaths, and he could suspend any of the members for cause (such decisions being reviewed by the Board of Trade), as

76 Lee Raper, North Carolina, A Royal Province, 1729-1775: The Executive and the Legislature (Chapel Hill: University Press of North Carolina, 1901), 6-7.

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well as appoint temporary members to fill vacancies as long as the total membership of the Provincial Council was at least seven. The governor was forbidden to appoint the executive officers of the province, such as the secretary, chief justice, and attorney general, but he could suspend them and temporarily fill their positions, all with recourse to Board of Trade review.

Although the appointed Provincial Council and elected Assembly served as the

North Carolina province’s bicameral legislature, legislative bills could only become law with the governor’s consent,77 and not only could he veto bills, but it was he who called the Assembly to sit, meaning that he could prorogue or dissolve the Assembly to prevent the introduction or passage of bills. The governor’s instructions did enjoin him to secure the passage of laws in support of public schools, the welfare of Native Americans, moral behavior, and efficient provincial government, but the imperial predicate of mercantilism also shone through, the instructions stating his duty to “discourage and restrain any attempts which might be made to establish manufactures or trades in the province which would in any way be prejudicial.”78

Despite the great theoretical authority vested in him by the King, it was the governor’s responsibility to represent the interests of the British ruling class in North

Carolina that would demonstrate the increasingly profound practical limitations of that authority. In strictly enforcing his imperial instructions to limit local manufactures or to enforce the Trade and Navigation Acts, the governor naturally placed himself at odds

77 Raper, North Carolina, A Royal Province, 1729-177, 5-8.

78 Instructions from the Board of Trade, 1728, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 2 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 569.

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with the provincial elite, whose own power stemmed from their wealth, which was in turn derived from their land holdings and the trade or produce there derived. The provincial elite elected the members of the Assembly and often sat on the Council, meaning that the governor sometimes faced opposition from the Assembly and his own council (the latter rarer, as the councilors owed their appointments to imperial patronage). Because the cooperation of the Assembly was required to levy taxes for the routine operation of government, it was easy for the governor to find himself holding the legal power but lacking the fiscal means to impose his will. If the militia was to be embodied and supplied for a campaign, or even to defend his own residence, the Assembly would have to levy funds, just as it would have to for governmental salaries. As Dickerson contends,

“if executive power was limited locally, British control was weakened locally.”79 Clearly then, for North Carolina’s governor to effectively represent the interests of the imperial ruling class in the province, he would require strong assistance from the imperial government in the same way that the province’s local elite supported the Assembly in furthering their own interests. The degree to which this imperial support actually materialized, and the effect it had on the effectiveness of provincial government will be examined in detail throughout this thesis.

In Astrakhan, although the governor did enjoy greater effective control over the governorate and benefitted from strong imperial support, he also endured more considerable oversight. While Astrakhan’s governor was appointed by the monarch and

79 Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696-1765, 154.

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the governorate was to be administered “according to his discretion,”80 his business was directly subordinated to the Collegia, which was empowered to punish him for the goings-on within the governorate without consulting either the Empress or the Senate.81

Governors were ultimately responsible for keeping order, trying criminals, supervising tax collection, local defense, and – in Astrakhan’s case – conducting a useful relationship with the various peoples along the imperial border, especially in the regulation of cross- border commerce. All of this, however, was conducted via the instructions of the pertinent colleges.82

Like the governor of North Carolina, the governor of Astrakhan was also limited in his control over those appointed to his government. His deputies were commissioned by the Senate and could only be removed with its approval,83 and more constraining still was the decision made in 1733 to appoint a procurator to each governorate and subordinate province. Procurators at both levels reported not to the governor, but directly to the Procurator General in Saint Petersburg,84 as did the representatives of the agencies administered directly by the Collegia.85 And in 1775, the governor’s position became

80 Institution of the Administration of the Provinces of the Russian Empire, 7 November 1775, in Russia Under Catherine the Great, vol. 1, by Paul Dukes (Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1978), 140-157.

81 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 17.

82 Kollman, The Russian Empire 1450-1801, 2.

83 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 42.

84 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 75.

85 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 17.

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even more restricted, when a level of government was inserted between the Senate and the governorate; according to a December decree, Prince Grigory Potemkin became

Governor General of several of Russia’s southern border governorates, including

Astrakhan, further buttressing the powerful lines of control extending outward and downward from St. Petersburg.

The Provincial Government Executive.

The British King commissioned a Provincial Council of twelve members to aid

North Carolina’s governor in the discharge of his duties, the members of which, and its powers and responsibilities, being included in the governor’s instructions. Functioning as a limited check on the governor’s activities, a minimum of three councilors were required to wait on the governor during his official deliberations, and he to act with “their advice and assent in most matters.”86 The Provincial Council was not only to assist the governor with executive functions, but also to serve in a legislative capacity as the upper house for the province. In its legislative role, the Council could block any provincial legislation, even if the governor desired that it be passed. However, because the Council was appointed by the Crown and from among nominations made by the governor, and because its members could be suspended by the governor, it was expected to buttress the governor’s efforts to especially represent the imperial interests of the Crown within the province. As for the governor, this philosophy would cause the Council to experience much friction with the locally elected Assembly and the social order upon which it stood, and also like the governor, the powers granted the Council appeared to provide it an

86 Raper, North Carolina, A Royal Province, 1729-1775, 3.

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ascendancy over the Assembly that proved increasingly theoretical as the eighteenth century progressed.

All provincial bills of law were required to pass three readings in both legislative houses and be approved by the majority of both before the governor could sign them into law, but only the upper house had the ability to veto bills before they made it to the governor. While either house could amend the other’s bills, and evidence exists showing that the houses routinely came together in consultation to gain agreement, the final decision always rested with the Council, due to its power of veto. Additionally, the

Council could rely upon its executive role to dominate the legislative process, advising the governor to dissolve or prorogue the Assembly, and even advising him as to whether bills already passed both houses should be signed into law or vetoed.87 Of course, the

King in Council via the Board of Trade was the final approval authority for North

Carolinian legislative acts, but evidence shows the monarch to have been far less inclined to disallow bills embodying the imperial interests of the Provincial Council than those underwriting the provincial interests of the Assembly.

In Astrakhan, the governor was assisted before the 1775 reforms by a staff of officials and functionaries in the governorate’s chancery. Other than the procurator, the chancery consisted of two deputy governors, three secretaries, and 37 clerks.88 In a system of combined administrative and judicial government that lacked representative mechanisms at the provincial level, the chancery acted similarly to North Carolina’s

Provincial Council in its administrative capacity, but without the legislative function or

87 Raper, North Carolina, A Royal Province, 1729-1775, 34.

88 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 40.

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the counterbalance of the Assembly that North Carolinian councilors often battled. While the governor alone was responsible for legal decisions, as opposed to the collective judicial functions of North Carolina’s Provincial Council, chancery staff facilitated the process.

Astrakhan’s chancery effectively served as regional government in its entirety, but in North Carolina a further, legislative layer was imposed, with the Council serving as one part of that institution. The other part, the provincial Assembly, imposed a powerful regional inertia on imperial prerogatives that emanated upward from colonial society, the equivalent of which was lacking in Astrakhan. Elected in accordance with writs issued by the governor (to whom they swore oaths of allegiance), the members of North Carolina’s provincial Assembly were from among the male freeholders of the province and elected by the same, meaning that representation extended only to those who owned a specified amount of property. Complicating the degree of representation still further was the apportioning of seats according to the province’s local government structure, which the royal colony’s counties inherited from the former proprietary colony’s precincts. At the beginning of direct imperial rule, three counties were allowed five representatives each in the Assembly, one county was allowed four representatives, and four counties were allowed to send only two representatives. As the colony continued to grow throughout the royal period and further counties were created to accommodate western settlers, the older, north-eastern counties continued to have greater representation in the Assembly than the newer ones.89

89 Raper, North Carolina, A Royal Province, 1729-1775, 48.

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Naturally, the older counties in the north-east were the most developed and affluent, which engendered different needs and wants in them than could be found in the frontier counties to the south and west. Because the north-eastern counties were afforded greater representation in the Assembly, it was assured that their interests would always weigh most heavily there, hence a small minority of the colony’s wealthiest subjects controlled the Assembly, to the detriment not only of the governor and Council’s policies, but to the needs and wants of much of the province. Successive governors sought to mend this imbalance in the electoral system, but none was permanently successful, and for the majority of the time from 1730 until 1775, the imbalance persisted.

One way in which North Carolina’s governor could hope to affect the composition of the Assembly was in the incorporation of towns and counties. The

Assembly could not add to its number by legislating local government into existence.

Instead, the governor was empowered to issue a charter of incorporation that formally recognized a locality and entitled it to a writ of election for representatives to the

Assembly. However, that the Assembly and certain localities defied the governor’s right to incorporate is evident in an order of the Provincial Council in 1759 that writs of election would not be issued to counties and towns that refused to seek charters of incorporation from the governor.90 This hints at the real limits to royal power in provincial North Carolina, as well as the true degree of autonomy that the Assembly increasingly wielded as the eighteenth century continued.

90 Raper, North Carolina, A Royal Province, 1729-1775, 49.

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The governor and Provincial Council always retained the legal power to veto provincial legislation, despite the fact that the Assembly was allowed to originate legislation, and to debate and amend bills of the upper house. However, for a bill to become law, it had to pass three times through the Assembly, as well as the Council. This fact evidently forced the governor to grant rights to the Assembly in practice well beyond those allowed to it by law, such as during the Assembly’s multiple refusals to conduct business without a simple majority of its members present, despite the governor’s position that it operate with the quorum of twenty-five specified in the King’s instructions.91

The predominant reason that the North Carolina Assembly was so easily able to undermine imperial authority within the province seems to be the threat of “loss of supply” to the government. Essentially, this related to the fact that the Assembly was needed to pass bills that appropriated the funds to operate government, meaning that its assent was required for the continued operation of government functions. As an example, although the governor was the official authorized to embody and command the colony’s military forces, the imperial government in London provided him with neither soldiers and equipment nor funds to pay his military with. Instead, British policy was that the colonies should make their own provisions, meaning that provincial legislatures needed to pass laws instituting and defining their militias, as well as providing for taxes to equip and pay them.

Each time during the 1740s, 1750s, and 1760s that the French and Spanish threatened British control of North America and the British government requested the

91 Raper, North Carolina, A Royal Province, 1729-1775, 75.

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colonies contribute forces to their defense, North Carolina’s governor was forced to ask the Assembly to pass legislation authorizing the raising of military forces and the funds for their upkeep. While these acts were passed in the beginning, as the perceived threat to

North Carolina diminished, the governor and Council were at first forced to accept the amendments of the Assembly in order to have bills passed, and then, when those amendments became unconscionable and no legislation could be passed, they had to report to the Board of Trade and the British military establishment on the continent that they were unable to furnish any forces at all. As in many other areas, the Assembly’s power of supply had rendered it the final military authority in the Province of North

Carolina, despite what was legally mandated, but greater still was the influence that local government exerted on the Assembly. At the center of gravity of local government in provincial North Carolina was the local, or inferior courts. Accordingly, before examining local government composition, it is necessary to outline the provincial, or superior courts that sat above them, and which were wholly absent in Astrakhan.

Provincial Judiciaries.

The Crown granted to North Carolina provision for a number of provincial courts, ranging from the court of exchequer to the court of vice-admiralty, to a chancery court, a court of superior pleas and grand sessions, and a superior criminal court known as the court of oyer and terminer.92 As discussed above with reference to the governor, the

92 Instructions from George II, King of Great Britain, to George Burrington concerning the government of North Carolina, December 14, 1730, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 3 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 104-108.

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admiralty court was not a provincial edifice, as it operated exclusively under the auspices of the Admiralty and the governor executed his authority therein separately from his authority as provincial governor. The courts of exchequer and chancery were largely inactive during direct royal governance, largely because of provincial resistance to the fact that they comprised the governor himself and a number of provincial councilors, rather than justices, and so the General Court (as the court of superior pleas and grand sessions was then referred to) came to assume de facto the role of court of exchequer, as well as usurping the court of chancery’s place as highest provincial court of appeal.

In Astrakhan, no separate governorate-level judicial bodies existed before 1775.

Instead, regional administration and jurisprudence were fused in the person of the governor and the voevodas of the governorate, each serving as administrative, criminal, and civil court. In accordance with the Russian Empire’s rigid estate system, administrators at every level were not trained as lawyers, but were usually middling nobles who often had trained and served only as military officers.93 Just as the decisions of voevodas could be appealed to the governor, the governor’s decisions could be appealed to the imperial government, specifically the Senate, and ultimately, to the

Empress herself.

Judicial practices in Astrakhan also differed greatly from those ostensibly employed in North Carolina. “Inquisitorial procedure” was relied upon for evidence, meaning a coerced confession. Guilt, rather than innocence was assumed, and preventative detention was consequently employed. Although the use of torture began to be outlawed in 1763, corporal punishment remained as common in Astrakhan as it did in

93 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 116.

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North Carolina, such as for an Astrakhan City clerk, Ivan Smirnov, who was sentenced to whipping with the knout in 1769.94 While initially the decisions of local magistrats were appealed to the Central Magistrat in Saint Petersburg, as in the case of Smirnov, the

Central Magistrat was abolished in 1775 and governorate magistrats were established instead, being placed under gubernatorial control, providing the governor with even greater judicial power.

In North Carolina’s far more robust and variegated judicial structure, several distinct judicial posts were employed. Presiding over the General Court was the provincial Chief Justice, an official appointed directly by the Crown. Originally fixed at the provincial capital of Edenton, by 1746 the General Court’s center was moved to

Newbern in order to account for the colony’s geographical and demographical expansion, and it also became a circuit court, holding two sessions annually at Newbern, but also at

Edenton, Halifax, Wilmington, and eventually Salisbury.95 A number of changes were made to the Chief Justice’s assistants and associates during direct royal government, but by the law of 1762, an associate justice was emplaced at each of the five circuit courts to assist the Chief Justice, and the justice at Salisbury – owing to its distance from

Wilmington, and the size of its attendant judicial district – was empowered not only to hold court in the absence of the chief justice, but to hold the court of grand sessions. The act establishing the court at Salisbury elucidated the authority of the General Court, including “power over all pleas of the crown (treason, felony and other crimes committed

94 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 169.

95 Raper, North Carolina, A Royal Province, 1729-1775, 157.

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in breach of the peace), suits in common pleas, legacies and estates of intestates, whether original or on appeal from the inferior courts by means of a writ of error.”96

Below the General Court was the Court of Oyer and Terminer, the province’s criminal court. This court originally consisted of the Chief Justice, his assistant justices, and members of the Provincial Council, with the Chief Justice and at least three of the others constituting a quorum.97 The province’s chief prosecutor was the Attorney

General, who was appointed by the Crown in the same way that the Chief Justice was.

The Crown initially required the governor to call two sessions per year, and once the

General Court became a circuit court, that was expanded to two sessions in each of the districts of the General Court.

Although the governor was legally responsible for calling courts and commissioning lower judicial officials, and higher judicial officials were appointed directly by the Crown, the evolution of the province’s superior court and criminal court described above was driven very much by forces outside of the royal government. The courts were chartered by the King, but it was successive acts of legislature introduced by the Assembly that progressively altered their composition. It was the Assembly that mandated the establishment of a circuit, that legislated the Salisbury courthouse into existence, and by the same act defined the categories of crimes to be considered therein

96 Acts of the North Carolina General Assembly, November 3, 1762 −December 11, 1762, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 23 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1905), 550-595.

97 Instructions from George II, King of Great Britain, to George Burrington concerning the government of North Carolina, December 14, 1730, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 3 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 104-108.

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as treasonous, felonious, and misdemeanor.98 Finally, it was the Assembly that altered the number and powers of the Chief Justice’s assistants and staff. Because the Assembly also controlled the supply of money from which the royal officials of the province were paid, and because the Assembly repeatedly voted them additional allowances of short duration, by 1775 the Assembly had come to exert a high degree of influence over not only the province’s executive and legislature, but also its judiciary. Rather than providing a restraint on the ever-growing power of the Assembly, the apparatus of local government predominantly underwrote it, as the top of the provincial social order largely dominated the local government institutions upon which representation was based, effectively ensuring that they also dominated the representatives dispatched to sit in the Assembly.

Local Government

Local government was where the directives of the hegemonic center finally reached colonial subjects at the periphery. In both Astrakhan and North Carolina, it was local officials who were relied upon to implement imperial and provincial directives, as well as to facilitate local wants where they didn’t conflict with central government policy.

Local government officials were also primarily responsible in both colonies for addressing local resentments and disorders, including the enforcement of imperial, provincial, and local tax collection, and the punishment of noncompliers. Despite their largely identical role in the administrative imperialism of which they were a part, local government in Astrakhan and North Carolina was not configured identically, the result of

98 Acts of the North Carolina General Assembly, November 3, 1762−December 11, 1762, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 23 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1905), 550-595.

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differing socio-economic constructs and the manifestations of social differentiation. As will be shown below, despite their structural differences, the role that local government played respectively in Astrakhan and North Carolina was largely analogous.

North Carolina: The County, its Officials, and Inferior Courts.

In 1730, many large towns and cities already existed in Britain’s North American colonies. By 1750, both New York City and Philadelphia were home to more than 20,000 inhabitants each, and Charlestown boasted a population of more than 10,000.99 Even though only approximately five-percent of British North America’s colonists lived in cities and towns, the more populous colonies provided for a number of additional territorial subdivisions to encapsulate differing degrees of urbanization, ranging from townships to districts to hundreds.100 No such provisions were necessary in colonial

North Carolina, due to its overwhelmingly agrarian composition. In fact, only two towns embodied the qualification of 60 residents necessary to send a representative to the

Assembly during its inaugural sitting under direct royal government in 1730.101

Consequently, counties overwhelmingly became the center of local government in provincial North Carolina, known as precincts before 1738, as they were during the

99 Theodore Roosevelt, New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 89.

100 Conrad Guess, County Government in Colonial North Carolina (Chapel Hill: The University Press, 1911), 15.

101Guess, County Government in Colonial North Carolina, 18.

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proprietary period.102 The most important officials in the counties were the sheriffs, known as marshals until 1738 in another holdover from the proprietary period.

Just as the governor represented the King in the province, so did the sheriff represent the King in the county, serving at the governor’s appointment as the chief civil official of the county and conducting his business in the name of the king. Sheriffs served for two years, being selected from among the justices of the peace of the county and proposed by the county courts. To be appointed sheriff, a man had to be a freeholder living in the county and provide a surety of £1,000, this latter stipulation because sheriffs were required not just to execute writs, maintain the county’s jail, and inflict corporal punishment, but were also to be the mechanism translating provincial fiscal policies into local reality. Acts of the Assembly levied poll taxes and empowered sheriffs to collect them, and sheriffs also collected county taxes for the benefit of the county courts and parish taxes to support the local church establishment.

As not only the chief ministerial official of the county, but also the chief official of the county court, and being appointed from among the justices of the peace on that court’s advice to the governor, the close association of the office with the county court is plainly evident. Given that the sheriff was legally empowered to supervise elections and summon juries, the power that the local elite exercised over the county and over the provincial Assembly can easily be inferred. That this did occur and did manifest conflict locally and provincially will be explored later in this thesis. Guess argues the county courts to be the “pivotal factor of the county administration in colonial North

102 Guess, County Government in Colonial North Carolina, 8.

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Carolina,”103 and this influence over the legislature is one facet to this claim, although not the only one.

While the sheriffs actually carried out the decrees of the county courts, the justices of the peace presided over the courts, and they, along with the officials attached to them, were the government’s primary means of maintaining peace and order throughout the colony. In colonial North Carolina, a justice of the peace had the authority to order the arrest of anybody who committed a felony or breached the peace in their presence, as well as to prevent a breach of peace, and could issue warrants of arrest for crimes not committed in their presence. Three justices of the peace sitting together constituted a quorum, and three presided over the county court. Sitting four times each year from 1746 and deciding “all other offences of an inferior nature,” including breaches of the peace, trespasses, assaults, batteries, and petty larcenies, the justices of the peace were empowered to hear civil litigation of a value between forty shillings and twenty pounds.104 The justices of the peace were assisted by a clerk of court, who was at first appointed by the provincial secretary, and later by the provincial clerk of the pleas, and a

Crown prosecutor was appointed for each county by the provincial attorney general.105

As the eighteenth century progressed, and the colony grew, the degree to which the county court influenced the lives of North Carolina’s colonists burgeoned. By 1750, the county court adjudicated land and property transactions, granted business licenses, recorded farmers’ livestock brands, supplied remedies for delinquent debtors and

103 Guess, County Government in Colonial North Carolina, 18.

104 Raper, North Carolina, A Royal Province, 1729-1775, 162.

105 Guess, County Government in Colonial North Carolina, 26.

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indentured servants, and decided matters of decedents’ estates. During the majority of the year, when the county court was in recess, the justices of the peace were kept busy presiding alone or in pairs over magistrates’ courts, which were entitled to try cases of forty shillings’ value and below. Magistrates court was tried without juries, but appeals could be granted to the county court, hence ultimately decided by jury.

Legal authority to maintain order resided with the justices of the peace, but they appointed officials to execute their authority in that regard, and these officials were termed constables. The constable was the chief official of the magistrate’s court and acted as directed by the justices, but also acted autonomously in keeping the peace, restoring the peace, and fetching punishment for those who broke the peace. Constables returned runaway slaves and military deserters, but their small numbers often resulted in an inability to successfully execute their duties. Instances of assault on constables are commonly recorded, such as the case of one Granville County constable who attempted to put down a brawl in 1759, and was taken by the crowd, bound, and covered in excrement.106 More serious incidents included threats of murder, and the actual discharge of a firearm at one Rowan County constable.

The Rowan County constable’s assailant was eventually taken by three members of the constabulary, and despite their numerical shortcomings, constables, sheriffs, and justices of the peace were usually able to maintain control of the North Carolinian countryside. The many small individual breaches that attended colonial North Carolinian life were within the ability of the colony’s rudimentary law enforcement mechanisms to

106 Alan Watson, “The Constable in Colonial North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 68, no. 1 (1991): 2.

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address because constables could meet individual robbers, murderers, highwaymen and the like, as well as small groups of peace-breakers on even terms. When larger disturbances erupted, order often dissolved. The smaller and longer established east-coast counties still saw fit to appoint less than ten constables in 1775, while the far larger and less ordered western counties never appointed more than thirty-six.107 It is unsurprising, then, that constables were sometimes forced to stand idly by while the peace was breached and crimes were committed, because they lacked the numbers to effectively intervene and reinforcements were a lengthy horse ride away. Governor Johnston was evidently mindful of the limitations of his local government peacekeepers when issuing a proclamation in 1735 that ordered the province’s colonists to pay the large amount of outstanding taxes they owed, as when writing to the Board of Trade on the subject, he mentioned that “being informed that this occasioned a general murmur I took care to put the militia in such hands as to prevent the King’s officers from being insulted in collecting of his Rents.”108 He goes on to express his pleasure at the resulting “General

Submission to those orders.” As on many other occasions in provincial North Carolina from 1730 until 1775, local government was deemed insufficient to keep the peace and the specter of an armed body of government troops was required to pacify colonists chafing under imperial and provincial directives, especially fiscal policies.

107 Watson, “The Constable in Colonial North Carolina,” 6.

108 Letter from Gabriel Johnson to the Board of Trade of Great Britain, 1735, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 4 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 8.

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Astrakhan: Municipal Administration and Differentiated Government.

Although Astrakhan counted only seven towns by 1775, local government – where it existed – was centered very much around the town and the village, as opposed to the county government that was such a feature of contemporary North Carolina. Local government was especially important in Astrakhan because it facilitated the Russian

Empire’s widespread policy of the parallel governance of disparate social groups within a single geographical space. This phenomenon was most blatant in the empire’s western periphery, which was far more heavily peopled and where Russian governance was grafted atop existing regional and local government institutions, but it was also crucial at the local level in Astrakhan, as several social groups came to populate the far sparser southern frontier. Not only were differentiated elements of the state peasant estate, such as Central European colonists and Cossacks present, but so too were communities of the

Turkic peoples who occupied Astrakhan before Russian control, Caucasian mountain peoples compelled for various reasons to cross the Russian line of control to settle in

Russian-administered territory, and scattered state peasant and noble serf villages.

In his own discussion of Russian imperialism, Alexander Morrison emphasizes a duality in local administration, describing the “clear division” of Russian colonial administration between the overarching regional officialdom, “where executive power was reserved for military officers on permanent secondment from their regiments,” and the grassroots functionaries of the lower, local institutions.109 While Morrison is discussing the segregation of Great Russian institutions from Turkic communities,

109 Alexander Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarakand, 1868-1910: A Comparison with British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.

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several additional parallel divisions occurred in Russia’s colonies. Not only were new

“Russian quarters” built next to already well-established Turkic cities, such as at

Astrakhan City itself, but several further distinct communities were formed in the governorate, each exercising a distinct form of local administration and judiciary. Locally elected councils, known as rasprava, were established in every settlement, serving as an internal court for the community and reflecting not the predilections of the higher,

Russian courts, but local community values, whether Central European colonist, Cossack,

Turkic Muslim, mountain nomad, or transplanted state peasant.110 Whenever members of two or more estates were involved in litigation, then the higher Russian officials of the magistrat and governorate chancery substituted, just as they served as courts of appeal for all subordinate courts, ensuring that all subjects ultimately fell into Russian central government lines of control.

The myriad of legal systems permitted at the local level in Astrakhan not only allowed smooth internal administration of a vast territory that was largely devoid of urban settlement and effective roads, thereby prohibitively difficult for central government to directly control, but it also allowed a significant degree of local self- government. In the case of serfs, this meant only that they dealt with their noble lord, either directly or through the lord’s appointed overseer, but other subjects enjoyed far more participation in their local government organs. State peasants, including the former church peasants, elected their own officials (the starosty and sotskii), and as Caucasian highlanders began to be granted their own settlements, they too were allowed rasprava, alongside Armenian and Tatar communities. In the countryside, elected village headmen

110 Kollman, The Russian Empire 1450-1801, 1.

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took charge, while in the towns, bodies were elected to serve as minor judiciary and local administration.111

As in North Carolina, local elections were not predicated on the participation of all, but just a small percentage. Those recognized as “townsmen” were actually admitted members of professional guilds, such as bankers, traders, and doctors, and the guilds were in turn controlled by the local nobility,112 effectively coopting a subaltern class to better entrench noble wants. Following the emancipation of the Russian nobility from central government service in 1762, the majority of nobles did not have the luxury of returning to their rural estates and idling away their time. Instead, they sought government positions in the provinces where their estates were located, or service of the same stature in colonial government,113 meaning that they came to concentrate in governorate, provincial, and county capitals. Accordingly, towns became the local government foci, where “the [noble] elite collected and forwarded the revenue, concentrated its police forces, and settled disputes.”114 The link between the nobility and municipal administration became the townsmen and the local bodies they elected.

Consequently, not only did the townsmen serve imperial government directly as accountants in local customs houses, as census takers, and as quarterers billeting soldiers in local homes, but they also elected from amongst themselves the members of the local

111 Kollman, The Russian Empire 1450-1801, 2.

112 See Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 50-51.

113 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 81.

114 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 50.

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government, known as the magistrat in large towns, and the ratusha in villages. As discussed above, these bodies became responsible for executing police and tax-collecting functions under the responsibility of the local voevoda and governor, and their equivalents existed in the settlements of all of Astrakhan’s other estates.

As in North Carolina, no designated police force existed in Astrakhan. Imperial

Russia’s Ministry of Police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs it would quickly be subsumed into, along with its Special Corps of Gendarmes, would not come into existence until the next century. The distinct government post of Policemaster General came into formal existence in Saint Petersburg in the 1750s, and several subordinate policemasters were appointed throughout the Russian Empire, but none was given authority in Astrakhan, and the concept was abandoned during the reign of Catherine

II.115 Instead, police powers were invested in the governor and voevodas, but two distinct groups provided the actual means of enforcement – those elected from below, such as night watchmen, and those imposed from above, such as locally available military and paramilitary forces.

Municipal magistraty appointed a 12-person watch for each neighborhood following elections, and the watch guarded barricades erected on streets that were closed each night. The watch was expected to capture thieves, curfew-breakers, and other suspects, and to turn them over to the voevoda. When reinforcements were required, watchmen sounded a rattlebox, calling inhabitants out from their homes to assist.116 In

115 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 89-91.

116 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 116-117.

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rural areas, the ratushi performed the same function, electing smaller night watches for their own needs.

As the century progressed, greater reinforcements were granted Astrakhan’s governor in order to buttress his civil authority. Military field formations resident in

Astrakhan had always been obliged by orders to aid local government when able, but regular army members were never present in Astrakhan in great numbers, and the military officers of field elements followed the orders of their direct superiors firstly, often rendering no meaningful assistance to Russia’s colonial governors in the south and east. Two bodies were constituted during the time in question here to provide colonial governors with force greater than local government could manifest. The first was the shtatnye komandy, a paramilitary body formed primarily to provide income to those soldiers no-longer fit for service in the military. Each governorate capital received a company of 132 shtatnye komandy gendarmes, and each provincial capital a platoon of

58, giving the governor and voevodas the ability to not only ensure the order and security of their towns, but also to reach out into the surroundings to a small degree, dealing with disturbances in nearby settlements and the countryside.117

Still more far-reaching were the garrison forces of the empire. While soldiers assigned to field forces operated under the auspices of their direct chain of command, the commandants of the second-line garrison forces reported to their respective governors.118

Garrison forces were intended primarily to be one half of the Russian Empire’s border- security arrangements, aimed mostly at controlling the peripheral peoples inhabiting

117 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 100.

118 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 44.

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newly conquered territories. Accordingly, their numbers were relatively small, reaching a strength of 24,400 by 1764, distributed among 32 battalions. Of these, seven were stationed in Astrakhan: four in Astrakhan City, two at Kizliar on the very southern border, and one more at Mozdok, close to Kizliar, giving a total paper-strength of 5,404 men.119 The commandants of these three garrisons were charged by the governor not only with defending the border, but with maintaining order and security in the towns themselves, as well as guarding government offices and the post office, collecting taxes from the most recalcitrant, protecting treasury convoys, capturing criminals, guarding prisoners and safely transporting the same. While North Carolina’s governors would conceivably have been entirely satisfied with their own garrison forces – in fact, several of them requested His Majesty’s Government to provide the colony with only two or three companies, all requests for which went unfulfilled – Astrakhan was a larger territory, and when faced with large-scale internal disorder, Astrakhan’s governors found the shtatnye komandy and the garrison forces spread far too thinly to be effective.

As the only estate of civilian settlers in Astrakhan overseen by an exclusive central government body, European colonists enjoyed a unique relationship with government; likewise, their local government structure was unique, albeit formed in accordance with the prevailing duality of local autonomy and autocratic central control.

A number of inducements were formally offered to attract the more than 30,000 German,

Bulgarian, Polish, and other Volga settlers of Catherine II’s reign, chief among them local administrative and religious autonomy. Accordingly, local colonist governments differed the most from the framework imposed on other state peasants.

119 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 99.

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Central to colonist society was land use. The lowest administrative construct was the household and the farmstead, around which the electoral process was constructed.

Every head of household sat on the village Assembly, allowing them to vote for the village mayor and board, as well as the district mayor and board. Although heads of households were male, voting rights passed to widows when no male heirs existed or hadn’t reached the age of majority, remaining with the widow until she remarried.120 The village and district boards administered the colonists and served as judiciary for “minor disputes and civil claims.”121 Instead of taking appeals to these verdicts to the regional

Russian administrators, the colonial Chancellery served as court of appeal. While disputes involving colonists with other social estates required the intervention of the voevoda and gubernatorial courts as for other subjects, it was mandated that a representative of the Chancellery of Guardianship of Foreigners was present to ensure the interests of the colonist concerned.122 The colonist’s district mayors not only met with

Russian colonial officials, acting as intermediaries between central government instructions and village and district board administrators, but they also served as chiefs of police and chief judges, passing sentences of labor, imprisonment, fines, and – with central government approval – corporal punishment. As successive imperial decrees targeted their powers and responsibilities, they came more and more to represent the interests of the central government over those of the householders who elected them.123

120 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 163-168.

121 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 155.

122 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 121.

123 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 125.

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Like local government elsewhere across the governorate, local judiciary was small and closely tied to general administration in the colonist settlements.

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Chapter V.

Armed Institutions of Imperial Control

As discussed in Chapter IV, local government mechanisms extant in Astrakhan functioned adequately to control colonists and to buttress social caste and differentiation during the course of routine local government business, as well as during small-scale disturbances of the peace. However, large-scale disorder repeatedly proved beyond the capabilities of civil government institutions to control, requiring the intervention of larger, armed institutions. The situation was identical in North Carolina, where while the provincial and county judicial systems had proven largely able to control the colony’s inhabitants, enforcing on the majority of colonists the dictates of the imperial ruling class on the one hand and the local elite on the other hand, larger-scale disruptions to control of the province would eventually arise from within and from without. To effectively meet these threats, the intervention of more capable institutions of control than the colony’s rudimentary judicial system was required.

The armed institutions that the governments of North Carolina and Astrakhan relied upon in the face of widespread internal disorder can be divided into two parts between the military and the paramilitary. Both Astrakhan and North Carolina maintained local paramilitary forces that were intended not only to serve in territorial defense, but also to primarily perform activities of a nature that one expects from paramilitary bodies

– securing mail, roads, and government buildings, enforcing customs and immigration laws, seeking bandits and raiders, and putting down internal rebellion. Additionally, small numbers of imperial military forces were present in Astrakhan and North Carolina,

and even though these forces were not subject to provincial government control, they did make themselves available where possible. The degree to which their activities aided imperial control, as opposed to fostering peripheral resentment that ultimately infected members of the local paramilitary, imparting impetus to peripheral inertia against imperial control will be explored below.

Provincial Military Forces

Both North Carolina and Astrakhan relied primarily on local irregular forces for defense and control, but the philosophies and organization underpinning each respective element differed. North Carolina’s provincial defenses were composed of civilian subjects who lived in and contributed to civilian society while standing ready to form military units as required, while Astrakhan’s provincial defenses consisted of members of a military caste living within their own martial society who were expected to conduct the civilian activities necessary to support themselves only when not campaigning.

Accordingly, while the members of North Carolina’s militia complained of the burden engendered for their civilian lives by provincial military service, the members of

Astrakhan’s Cossack hosts found themselves constantly “negotiating between the demands of the state and the needs of their communities.”124

In North Carolina, evidence that a provincial military establishment was provided for at least as early as 1665 exists in the form of the colony’s second proprietary

124 Thomas Barrett, At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700-1860, 3.

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charter.125 Successive pieces of legislation passed under proprietary rule from that time until 1715 further defined the shape that North Carolina’s military would take: All of the free males of the colony aged between 17 and 60 were expected to maintain the necessary arms and equipment to fight in its defense when so-ordered, meaning that although military service was compulsory, there were no active military institutions or professional soldiers. Instead, men ostensibly maintained in martial readiness would be called by the provincial government to embody an active military force when one was required for the defense of the colony.

Proprietary legislation defining the militia did provide exemptions from military service for some members of colonial society deemed vital in other ways, such as the members of the Assembly, constables and other judicial officials, surgeons, and clergymen (although only of the Church of England). These exceptions were continued under direct royal government in the Militia Act of 1746, which added millers and ferrymen to the list, but also required servants to perform militia duty, alongside the freemen of the province.126 The act also went into detail describing the composition of the militia and the manner in which its preparedness would be maintained. The basic organizational element of the militia was to be the company, commanded by an officer in the rank of captain and comprised of 50 private soldiers, eight non-commissioned officers

(three sergeants and five corporals), and two drummers. Slaves were excluded from

125 Milton Wheeler, “Development and Organization of the North Carolina Militia,” North Carolina Historical Review 41, no. 3 (1964): 307.

126 An Act for the Better Regulating the Militia of this Government, June 28, 1746, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 23 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1905), 244-250.

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serving in the militia, as it was one of the institutions to be relied upon in putting down any widespread uprisings of slaves or servants. In forcing the poorest colonists to serve in the militia as private soldiers and the middling freeholders as non-commissioned officers, the wealthiest landowners, who owned the majority of the colony’s slaves and kept the majority of its servants, and who officered the militia, were effectively utilizing the inhabitants of their counties in the maintenance of their own positions.

The militia captain came to be assisted by a lieutenant and an ensign, and was expected to muster his company four times each year, to read his men the Militia Act once each year, to ensure that each of his soldiers mustered with the necessary equipment, and that their equipment was serviceable. Those soldiers who failed to muster or to properly equip themselves were to be fined and the money used to improve the company’s equipment.127 It is important to note that the militia was expected to be self- supporting in peacetime via mechanisms such as the fines and county taxes. Only when actually ordered to active service by the provincial government were provincial funds to be expended on the militia, and then only for the upkeep and expenses required in the execution of the campaigns themselves.128

Militia companies were grouped together into regiments, with one regiment being formed in each county within the province and commanded by a colonel, who was expected to muster his entire regiment together once per year. The regimental colonel was assisted by a lieutenant colonel and a major, both of whom were commissioned by

127 Wheeler, “Development and Organization of the North Carolina Militia,” 313.

128 Marvin Kay and William Price, “‘To Ride the Wood Mare’: Road Building and Militia Service in Colonial North Carolina, 1740-1775,” North Carolina Historical Review 57, no. 4 (1980): 384.

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the governor in the same way he was, but the governor appointed the officers of his subordinate companies strictly on the colonel’s own advice.129 The number of companies making up each regiment varied with the population of each individual county, and the composition of the militia as a whole evolved with time, as the provincial legislature passed statutes altering it in response to a number of threats faced by the colony between

1740 and 1775.

Not only Great Britain maintained colonies on the North American continent – so too did Spain and France. When the British government went to war with Spain in the

1740s, Spanish and British colonies in the Americas found themselves their imperial governments’ battlefields. North Carolina’s northern and southern borders were with the comparatively wealthy and well defended British colonies of Virginia and South

Carolina, hence largely secure, but the colony was bordered to the east by the Atlantic

Ocean, which the Spanish quickly came to exploit in striking the British Empire by way of its North Carolina colony.

In an age of legally sanctioned piracy, when mariners could receive a license from their government, known as a letter of marque, commissioning them to attack their government’s enemies from the sea and to receive as a prize a portion of enemy shipping and goods captured, or sometimes destroyed, the North Carolina coast quickly became a dangerous place to live and to do business. Two Spanish privateers arrived off of the

North Carolinian coast from Spain’s colony of Florida in April of 1741, capturing six

129 Kay and Price, “‘To Ride the Wood Mare’: Road Building and Militia Service in Colonial North Carolina, 1740-1775,” 388.

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North Carolinian and other British ships.130 The Spanish eventually established themselves on shore at Ocracoke, raiding along the coast, harassing shipping, burning settlers’ homes and killing their livestock, until the North Carolinians were able to drive them away in August.

Britain’s imperial War of Jenkins Ear was finished in 1742, but it was at war with

Spain again in 1744, and the North American colonies would once more become imperial battlefields. In 1747 and again in 1748, Spanish privateers returned to North Carolina, attacking and occupying the coastal towns of Beaufort and Brunswick. These attacks would prove to be more significant than those of the early 1740s, as not only were ships and buildings burned, and livestock slaughtered, but slaves were kidnapped and British subjects killed. The Spanish privateers, numbering perhaps a little over 250, reportedly began their assault on Brunswick with a simultaneous cannonade of the ships in the harbor and an overland attack mounted by a landing party that had been put ashore out of sight. Sailors caught on the river and on shore were captured and carried back in boats to the Spanish ships, while at least one was shot dead as he attempted escape. The inhabitants of the town snatched what they could and fled into the woods, and the

Spanish plundered possessions from empty homes and warehouses, and from the vessels at anchor in the river.

The Militia Act passed in 1746 was in response to fears generated by the earlier

Spanish attacks, hence aimed in part at generating an adequate response to just the manner of attack that the privateers mounted. As Brunswick’s residents fled across the

130 Robert Connor, History of North Carolina, vol. 1 (New York: Lewis Publishing Company, 1919), 262-265.

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countryside they raised the alarm and the members of the local militia began to collect their arms and ammunition, coalescing together under the command of Captain William

Drye. Within two days of the attack, Captain Drye mounted a counter-attack with around eighty militiamen, surprising the Spanish and forcing them back under the protection afforded by the guns of their ships. Fire from the ships to shore and from shore to the ships persisted throughout the rest of the day, but an accident on the Spanish flagship, the

Fortuna, set it afire, causing its powder magazine to explode, killing the crew. The remaining Spanish slipped back downriver in the dark, avoiding a force of 130 additional militia that had arrived from Wilmington and camped in the forest overnight.131

In the final analysis, it is estimated that as many as 140 of the attacking privateers were killed, and a further 29 were captured, marking rather a success for North Carolina’s militia system in driving the Spanish off. However, the defensive obligations imposed upon North Carolina by Great Britain’s wars with its imperial rivals during the 1750s would demand ever greater defensive preparations, and several further Militia Acts were passed in the legislature. In 1756, militia companies were required to muster five times per year and penalties were provided not just for the private soldiers, but also for officers who failed in the execution of their duties. County sheriffs were allocated five-percent of all the militia fines collected in a measure aimed obviously to ensure the best possible enforcement of the new requirements.132 In 1760, militiamen were granted the use of

131 Connor, History of North Carolina, 265-267.

132 North Carolina General Assembly, “An Act for the better Regulation of the Militia, and for other Purposes,” September 30, 1756, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 23 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1905), 334-337.

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tolled bridges and ferries without charge not only when on official business, but while travelling to and from their musters, and it was ordered that no member of the militia could be arrested in a civil action while mustering or travelling to and from a muster.133

In the case of the attack on Brunswick, North Carolina’s militia system appears to have fared quite well, but viewing the episode in the context of provincial North

Carolina’s economic and demographic environment at that point suggests less robustness overall. The smaller eastern counties were the wealthiest and most densely populated, and even though this was most true of the Albemarle region, nearby Wilmington was then one of the colony’s largest towns, providing Brunswick with a ready supply of closely proximate militiamen. The militia system as a whole was evidently not as functional, as when the frontier western counties began to experience hostile incursions by Cherokee, the intervention of the legislature itself was required to appropriately arm their militiamen; the purchase of arms and equipment to the value of £1,000 for the militia companies along the western frontier was legislated in 1754, and more extensive defensive preparations, outside of the militia, were legislated the following year.134

Militiamen were not paid for attending musters, and many have argued that militia service therefore entailed another, rather onerous tax for the colony’s poorest.

One militiaman stated that his service during the 1750s cost him an entire 7 days, including travel time, in attending the annual muster, and 7 additional days in attending

133 Wheeler, “Development and Organization of the North Carolina Militia, 316.

134 Raper, North Carolina, A Royal Province, 1729-1775, 177.

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the four company musters held annually.135 Citing the daily cost of unskilled labor prevailing in North Carolina at the time as 2s.8d, historians Kay and Price calculate the financial cost of militia service as £1.17.4, and this was on top of the £1.7.8 owed annually at the time in provincial tax.136 Many men evidently avoided their militia duties, as Colonel Dry of New Hanover County wrote in 1775 his wish that “sergeants upon the

Captain’s warrant [should] levy a fine” on those who fail to appear without “reasonable excuses.” He recommended 6s.8d for privates and noncommissioned officers, and 20s for lieutenants.137 Of far greater expense for militiamen was the purchase and upkeep of the tools of war that militia law required them to own and to maintain. The poorest militiamen were entirely relieved of the burden of supplying their own arms and ammunition in 1760, the weapons instead being kept by the militia establishment for the use of the poor, but only during muster and actual active service.138 An accounting of the militia forces undertaken in 1755 shows how necessary this measure was and also demonstrates a great variance in the readiness of the militia regiments across the province.

135 Herman Husband, “An Impartial Relation of the First Rise and Cause of the Recent Differences in Publick Affairs,” 1770, in Revolutionary History of North Carolina, ed. Francis Hawks (Raleigh: William D. Cooke, 1853), 21.

136 Kay and Price, “‘To Ride the Wood Mare’: Road Building and Militia Service in Colonial North Carolina, 1740-1775,” 390.

137 Report of William Dry Concerning Readiness of New Hanover Militia, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 5 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 163.

138 Kay and Price, “‘To Ride the Wood Mare’: Road Building and Militia Service in Colonial North Carolina, 1740-1775,” 388.

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Writing in response to a circular letter from Governor Dobbs to senior militia officers, the militia’s colonels detailed for the governor the state of the forces under their command in 1775. Colonel Barrows of Beaufort County reported his regiment made up of 587 soldiers in seven companies, equipped with 50 pounds of powder and 150 pounds of shot, but no public arms. This number represented a county of 1383 taxable residents.139 Colonel West of Bertie County reported 720 infantrymen in 8 companies and

44 cavalrymen for 1876 taxable residents, while Bladen County counted 441 infantrymen and 36 cavalrymen, no arms or military stores, and that “fines not high enough to oblige the militia to attend musters.”140 In Carteret County there were only 195 men in 2 companies, without public arms or military stores. The largest regiment returned was that of Colonel John Hayward of Edgecombe County, who reported 1317 soldiers in 14 companies, but again, no public arms or stores.

In total, the North Carolina Militia reported a strength of 9,041 infantrymen, arranged into 16 regiments and 89 subordinate companies, as well as 119 cavalrymen in 4 troops, and these soldiers were to ensure the security of a reported taxable population of

24,607 in 22 counties (the total population at the time being estimated at 90,000).141 The

139 A List of the Militia and Taxable Persons in the several Counties of the Province of North Carolina for the year 1755, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 5 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 575- 576.

140 Report on the State of the North Carolina Militia, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 5 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 161.

141 United States Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790-1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1909), 7.

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militia maintained only 50 pounds of powder and 550 pounds of shot. Northampton

County reported 200 of its soldiers without firearms, while Johnston county was reported to be “indifferently armed,” but that “most had guns.”142 Although the militia’s apparent state of readiness doesn’t reflect that of contemporary professional military forces, that was a role which it would never fulfill before 1776. Instead, it would deal with small incursions along its eastern coasts and at its mountainous western periphery, launched not by regular enemy forces, but by Spanish privateers on the one hand, and displaced Native

Americans on the other. Only on one occasion during royal government was the militia activated in significant numbers, and the campaign it then came to fight was not against external enemies at all. Instead, the militiamen would find themselves fighting their fellow North Carolinians, as they struggled to put down a rebellion that has come to be known as the War of Regulation.

In Astrakhan, Cossack communities had inhabited the steppe frontier as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century,143 long before they fell under Russian imperial control. The first Russian sources to mention Cossacks living in the North Caucasus date from 1563, and the first references to their paid Russian service date from 1623.144

Cossack society was necessarily martial, as their communities initially existed beyond any effective central government control, living independently and surviving by, among other things, raiding other such peoples, as well as traders travelling between the large

142 Report on the State of the North Carolina Militia, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 5 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 162.

143 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 82.

144 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 13.

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polities of the region. Like their lifestyles, their societies corresponded in many ways to that of the buccaneers living along the North American seaboard at the same time.

Cossack communities came to elect their own officers (starshyna), including the Hetman, their supreme leader, and an assembly, the Rada. Their numbers were constantly replenished by Russian peasants and serfs escaping the restrictions of their castes, and by swashbuckling representatives from every nearby social stratum.145

As Great Russia extended its borders to the south and the east, the Cossacks of the

North Caucasus region became increasingly squeezed between the Russian Empire to the north, and the Ottoman and Persian empires to the south, while at the same time, the

Russian government recognized in the militant Cossack communities an opportunity for a protective buffer against imperial rivals and peripheral mountain people alike. In consequence, the Greben Cossacks of the North Caucasus came to fight for Russia in exchange for their continued social and political autonomy.146 By 1720, the relationship had evolved to the point that the North Caucasus Cossacks were enrolled under the

College of War, formally becoming a component of the Russian military establishment.147 As part of their enrollment, the Greben Cossacks were re-settled in five villages on the north bank of the Terek river, which served for the Russian government as the effective border of the Russian Empire.148 By 1775, the number of villages had grown

145 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 82.

146 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial 84.

147 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 23.

148 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 30.

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to ten, forming with two large fortifications at Kizliar and Mozdok the Terek Defensive

Line.149

Because Cossack service at that time still entailed independent internal self- government, but resettlement at the very periphery of the Russian Empire, Cossack communities were expected to serve in both a military, border-security role, and in a frontier settler role. Not only were the Terek Cossacks expected to defend Astrakhan’s frontier, but they were also expected to build communities and establish industries, being self-sustaining and aiding the imperial effort to populate new territorial acquisitions. The foundation of Cossack existence was “their home economy [which] provided the material base for their military service.”150 Just as in the North Carolina Militia, all able-bodied male Cossacks were expected to serve as soldiers, performing a variety of military duties and attending an annual military camp, but their service was graduated with their ages.

Officially, only those aged 21 to 32 were active soldiers, while those aged 18-20 were military apprentices and those aged 33-38 were reserves, which included the right not to attend annual camp. Those aged 39-45 were to perform defensive duties in and around their villages only, and those older than 45 were considered to be retired from military service and in the care of their village. In reality, the tenuous position afforded frontier

Cossacks by the natural environment enveloping the North Caucasus meant that every village struggled to survive, and most Cossacks served actively into their sixties.

Like North Carolina’s militiamen, Terek Cossacks received a salary only when actively campaigning; local guard duties and paramilitary activities were expected to be

149 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 33.

150 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 89.

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supported solely by the Cossack community itself and that manner of work encompassed the bulk of their responsibilities.151 From escorting supply trains and mail along the frontier, to manning watchtowers on the Astrakhan side of the river and hidden listening posts on the far side, to mounting preventative and punitive patrols beyond the frontier, the Terek Cossacks worked to make their string of forts and villages into an effective cordon, buttressing the aims and requirements of the colleges of War, Foreign Affairs and

Revenue.152

With the establishment of a customs house at Kizliar in 1755,153 Saint Petersburg began to directly affect the lives of those on the Caucasian frontier. Although Cossacks were exempt from the poll tax, they were required to pay sales tax, as were the merchants they traded with along the border, and all were required to pay customs duties. Those taxes were to be collected at customs houses like that established at Kizliar, as well as at the various Cossack villages along the border cordon.154 That Cossacks received no assistance from the imperial or provincial government and relied upon both exports of wine for income and trade with their Caucasian neighbors for the supplies they needed on campaign meant that the imperial government’s tax regime was as disregarded at the frontier of Astrakhan as it was in the province of North Carolina. In 1765, the customs collector at Kizliar reported that not only did Cossack villages along the Terek fail to

151 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 152.

152 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 152-157.

153 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 112.

154 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 104.

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collect customs fees, but that they traded freely with the mountain peoples for necessary supplies, all with the support of their officers.155 However, evidence suggests that the

Terek Cossacks were very diligent in their border defense duties, the consequences of failure at which were very high.

That the Terek Cossacks were kept busy protecting the frontier from armed incursion is well attested to. When those on watch espied bands of highlanders crossing into Russian territory, warning shots were fired and beacons lit, alerting villagers to collect their arms and to form up to mount a defense or offense as required.156

Kidnapping settlers in order to sell them to slavers was a long-prevailing phenomenon along the southern frontier and had existed long before Russian influence encroached on the area. It is reported that in the first fifty years of the eighteenth century more than

150,000 Russians were captured and sold into slavery along the empire’s southern frontier,157 and many of the Caucasian peoples across the Terek were active participants in the process. As the century progressed, the villages of the German colonists spread southward, and Don and Volga Cossacks began to be re-settled north of the Terek, bolstering the region’s defenses, but also increasing the prospects for slavers. Successive government decrees spurred population growth in the region, turning over government lands in Astrakhan to noble families as long as they established local estates and peopled

155 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 114.

156 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 157.

157 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 104.

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them with their serfs, and relocating 11,000 state peasants to farm the territory.158

Fugitives from the mountains were also accepted on the Russian side of the river and were allowed to settle behind the protection of the Russian defensive line to farm, and even to join Cossack communities. This precipitated not only outcry from the mountain elites who lost their slaves and servants, but also more violent incursions into Russian territory.159 By 1733, there were seven distinct quarters surrounding the fort at Kizliar alone, to include several mountain peoples, especially Georgians, Armenians,

Kabardians, and Chechens, as well as Persian traders, totaling more than 4,000 settlers.160

The construction of fortified lines of control to delineate Great Russia’s ever- expanding borders and to disrupt the nomadic existence of people already settled there was a well-established practice by 1730. Soon after conquering Astrakhan in the sixteenth century, Russia extended a line of fortifications from Tsaritsyn, bisecting the traditional lands of the local Tartar people. The same strategy was employed effectively as the empire expanded eastward, with Russia’s Ural claims coming to be protected against Tartar and Bashkir warriors by the Trans-Kama Line161 and the Siberian Itysh

Line counting 35,000 Cossack defenders by 1755.162 By 1770, the Tsaritsyn Line had served its purpose of displacing and pacifying existing populations in the north of the

158 Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 3.

159 Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, 34.

160 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 34.

161 Sabol, The Touch of Civilization, 74-75.

162 Sabol, The Touch of Civilization, 83.

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Governorate of Astrakhan, and new lines of fortifications were built to the south, girding expanded imperial boundaries.

The Fortress of Kizliar was founded in the extreme southeast of Astrakhan in

1735, ten days’ ride from Astrakhan City and sometimes four months by post from Saint

Petersburg.163 This commenced the process of constructing the empire’s cordon that the

Terek Cossack Host would come to defend. The original Cossack stanitsas were joined by several later waves of re-settlers, all of whom pushed the fortified line westward. In

1763, a fortress was constructed at Mozdok, 60 miles west of Kizliar, serving as an anchor for Russian efforts to limit the migratory cycles of the Kalmyk mountain tribes.

Defensive arrangements were formalized in 1769 with the official establishment of the

Kizliar/Mozdok Line as a distinct military echelon. In 1774, the Mozdok Line was extended further west toward Azov with the resettlement of 2200 new Cossack families in 22 additional stanitsas.164

Despite official government estimates and authorized strengths, a host of exogenous factors combined to limit the military effectiveness of the fortified line in reality, and when officials ordered reports of military readiness, the results returned indicated much the same state of affairs as those of North Carolina’s militia officers when pressed for reports at about the same time. By 1775, only 1640 Cossacks could be counted on between Kizliar and Mozdok for military operations.165 Of all the Cossack hosts defending the Terek, the best equipped still counted 48% of its soldiers as without

163 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 72.

164 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 36-39.

165 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,”37.

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mounts, and 36% without even weapons.166 Because the terms of their service specified self-sufficiency, help from the governorate’s chancery was not forthcoming, and no measures were taken for the provision of arms to the poorest soldiers such as had been done in North Carolina.

The environment evidently had much to do with the poor state of preparedness along the Caucasian Line. By the 1770s, many Terek Cossacks had been resettled from

Great Russian and Ukrainian territory, where the climate and growing conditions were far more favorable, necessitating a profound struggle at adaption. As most homes were traditionally constructed of wood, the scant forests lining the Terek river were quickly exhausted, leading rapidly to soil erosion and the necessity for clay houses modeled after the indigenous fashion.167 During heavy winter rains and snows, the Terek would rise, turning homes into sodden, dripping messes.168 Unsurprisingly, sickness was rampant along the Line, especially when Cossack communities switched to growing rice, flooding paddies all the way to the walls of their stanitsas, thereby inviting disease-carrying mosquitoes to their doors.169

Despite all of the frontier adversity that they endured, Cossacks of the Caucasian

Line faced the greatest routine danger from beyond the frontier, among the Caucasian peoples the Line had displaced and frozen. In response to ever more forceful tendrils of

166 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 102-103.

167 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 30.

168 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 37.

169 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 45.

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Russian influence, and with the assistance of the Ottoman Empire, violent resistance to

Russian encroachment broke out, eventually culminating in a large-scale insurgency. The insurgency embodied the greatest challenge to border security that Astrakhan would endure during the period under consideration here, but even it paled in terms of debilitation of government control when compared to the massive internal disorder that spilled over into Astrakhan in the late 1760s. In dealing with the latter, Astrakhan was also able to draw support from imperial military resources in the same way that North

Carolina did when similarly endangered.

Imperial Military Forces: Imperatives of the Center and Peripheral Resistance

Writing to the Board of Trade in March of 1764, Governor Dobbs outlined his requests for imperial support of provincial defense. Among calls for an independent regular army company to “assist the Revenue Officers in preventing an illicit Trade, and to protect if necessary the Surveyors to resurvey His Majesty's Lands when encroached upon, and to prevent Frauds in receipts of the Quit rents,”170 Governor Dobbs lamented the lack of naval support for the province. The Board of Trade had assured him as early as 1757 that his representation of “the expediency of having ships properly Stationed for the protection of [North Carolina’s] Coasts” having been duly conveyed to the Admiralty,

“their Lordships [had] in consequence thereof acquainted [the Board of Trade] that a

170 Letter from Arthur Dobbs to the Board of Trade of Great Britain, Dobbs, March 29, 1764. William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 6 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 1028.

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Twenty Gun Ship and a Sloop [were] ordered to be stationed upon [North Carolina’s]

Coasts.”171

Despite the Admiralty’s assurances, it would be some time before a permanent

Royal Navy presence was finally established in North Carolina. Governor Dobbs argued in 1764 that no naval vessels had arrived for two years after Admiralty instructions had been received attaching any proximate warships to North Carolina’s defense, and claimed that when HMS Zephyr finally did appear, its captain “delay'd and neglected to obey them under pretence [sic] of being ordered to the Northward, & afterwards to the West

Indies, and when he departed left the Letters and orders for the next Ship stationed here.”172 The next ships would be the Hornet and the Viper, arriving in 1764, just as the navy assumed an expanded customs enforcement role, and despite the governor’s intent for them vis-à-vis the good of his province, the warships and their crews would quickly come to clash with the colonists.

At a time when the Royal Navy was being rapidly professionalized and centralized, when formal uniforms and ranks akin to those of the Army were first being mandated, subordination to superior officers was brutally enforced with the lash and the hangman’s noose, and even an admiral was executed for dereliction of duty,173 the

171 Letter from the Board of Trade of Great Britain to Arthur Dobbs, March 10, 1757. William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 5 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 748-750.

172 Letter from Arthur Dobbs to the Board of Trade of Great Britain, March 29, 1764. William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 6 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 1028.

173 Sarah Kinkel, “The King's Pirates? Naval Enforcement of Imperial Authority, 1740–76,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2014): 18.

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obedience of naval officers in executing their duties was something entirely alien to

North Carolina’s populace. Not only were sailors separated from the people of North

Carolina by the brutal, strongly hierarchical system of naval discipline to which they were subject, but they were also immune to the financial, social, and familial vulnerabilities that haunted other royal officials in North Carolina. While customs collectors, provincial officers, militia officers, and even governors worried about the safety of their families and the security of their homes, as well as financial and social ostracization, naval personnel could rest assured that the Admiralty would continue their pay and their families would remain safe, regardless of local discontentment; while an angry mob might assail a customs collector or a judge on the road or even in their home, that same mob could do little more than shake its fists in impotent anger at a warship anchored off of the coast. As Stout phrases it, in times of local unrest, “the Royal Navy was almost the only instrument of the British government capable of exercising its authority in the continental colonies. The royal governors, the stamp distributors, the customs officers, and all others who could not or would not forget their commitment to uphold the British government and Parliament's laws, were busy saving their own skins.”174

As early as 1765, the presence of the navy manifested disruption in North

Carolina, and just in the course of its routine operations, let alone increased enforcement.

In March, two of HMS Viper’s crew fought a duel in Brunswick in consequence of the affections of a North Carolinian woman. Lieutenant Whitehurst had his leg broken by a

174 Neil Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 1760-1775: A Study of Enforcement of British Colonial Policy in the Era of the American Revolution (Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 1973), 91.

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pistol ball and lost his life to a physical strike from the same pistol, which “was broke by the violence of the blows he received.”175 Mr. Simpson, Lieutenant Whitehurst’s assailant and the sailing master of the Viper, himself having received a ball in his back that exited under his arm, was arrested by the constables of the Superior Court in Wilmington. Under the influence of depositions taken from two of Viper’s midshipmen and the results of the

Coroner's inquest regarding Lieutenant Whitehurst's body, the verdict was against

Simpson, and he was committed to the jail, but escaped, the murderer disappearing into the North Carolinian countryside.176

In 1766, Hornet’s captain raised the ire of nearby Virginian planters with his efforts to curb smuggling, in consequence of which they tarred and feathered one of his collaborators. The following year a landing party from Hornet searching for deserters was set upon by the people of Norfolk – led by their mayor – and an arrest warrant was issued for Hornet’s captain after a trial in absentia in county court.177 In 1768, Governor

Tryon issued a proclamation “for the Benefit of His Majesty's Service and the advancement of Commerce” in which he required North Carolina’s justices of the peace and “other the Kings officers” to arrest any seamen they suspected were deserters from warships, and warned all tavern keepers and any other persons sheltering deserters that

175 Letter from William Tryon to the Board of Trade, 24, 1765, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 94.

176 Letter from William Tryon to the Board of Trade, 24, 1765, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 94.

177 Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 1760-1775, 79-80.

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they subjected themselves to “the utmost rigour [sic] of the Law.”178 The reason for his proclamation was a warning from the commander of HMS Martin that if his sailors continued to vanish into the North Carolinian interior, he would exercise one of the Royal

Navy’s most abhorred legal rights – the forced impressment of merchant sailors and others into its crews. As Britain’s parliament embarked upon its final, terminal course of trade laws in 1764 and the navy ramped up its enforcement accordingly, friction between the sea service and the colonists blossomed.

The Admiralty’s instructions to North Carolina’s naval guard explicitly circumscribed naval officers from provincial control, stating regarding the governor and

Provincial Council that officers were “from time to time to advise and consult in what manner [they] may be best employed in guarding the Coast, and securing the trade bound to and from that Colony.”179 At the same time, the instructions were broad enough to allow a great deal of interpretation by naval officers concerning against whom they would most focus their efforts at trade protection, stating only “Pirates, or others” should be targeted, but demanding that commanders use their “utmost endeavours [sic] to take or destroy any Pirate Ships or Vessells [sic] that may come upon the Coast.”180

178 Proclamation of William Tryon, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 795.

179 Captain Hayward’s Instructions from the Admiralty, as Recorded in the Minutes of the North Carolina Governor's Council, June 04, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 785.

180 Captain Hayward’s Instructions from the Admiralty, as Recorded in the Minutes of the North Carolina Governor's Council, June 04, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 785.

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With the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, the British government mandated that only documents produced with paper stamped in England, that had to first be purchased at set prices, were legally valid for certain transactions. This meant that almost all legal dealings (and a host of other business transactions, like the production of newspapers) would be directly taxed by the British government, hence the widespread adoption in

British North America of the phrase that would become infamous – no taxation without representation. Like the Sugar Act of 1763, it wouldn’t be North Carolina’s courts that had jurisdiction over Stamp Act violations, but the Admiralty courts, which continued to exclude local, democratic participation. As colonial governments and the navy leapt to enforce the provisions of the Act, civil unrest exploded.

At the same time in Astrakhan, the Russian Army acted much as the Royal Navy did in North Carolina and the waters surrounding it, operating independently of

Astrakhan’s provincial government and serving the needs of the central government in

Saint Petersburg, although it too was obliged to assist the governor of Astrakhan when asked and able. Army elements in Astrakhan fell under the operational control of the 11th

Military Region, but like the Royal Navy in North Carolina, regular army numbers were never very high in Astrakhan during peacetime, and provincial garrison and Cossack forces outnumbered the regular army. By the 1770s, Astrakhan’s garrison consisted of two regiments of infantry, one regiment of dragoons, and two battalions of light infantry,181 providing a total field force of around 2,500.182 Most of these soldiers were

181 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 293.

182 Aleksander Stoyanov, “Russia Marches South: Army Reform and Battlefield Performance in Russia’s Southern Campaigns, 1695-1739” (Ph.D dissertation, Leiden University, 2017): 295.

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concentrated at the frontier, manning fortifications along the Terek Line. During military crises, such as the Karbadian insurgency, additional military forces would be moved to

Astrakhan and field commanders appointed, such as in 1769, when Major General Ivan de Medem was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Imperial forces in North Caucasia, but such instances were rare between 1730 and 1775.183

Despite the army’s small presence in Astrakhan, its relationship with the colonists was just as fraught as that of the Royal Navy in North Carolina. Like imperial sailors serving in North Carolina, most of Russia’s imperial soldiers served in regiments raised elsewhere, remaining in Astrakhan for limited periods of time. Consequently, they too had no stake in colonial society, nor any need to satisfy local sociocultural expectations.

Conditions of service in the Russian Army were arguably harsher still even than those encountered in the Royal Navy, and evidence suggests that standards were not relaxed when on campaign along the Astrakhan frontier. While fighting the Karbadian insurgency, soldiers of the Russian field-army were expected to sleep outside in full uniform,184 and over 1,000 soldiers and officers were afflicted with frostbite after fording rivers in freezing weather.185 In 1750, more than 1,000 soldiers of Astrakhan’s three regular army regiments were hospitalized with epidemic disease. Two of the regiments became so debilitated that they were rotated off of the line in 1751, but more than 600 soldiers of the regiments replacing them were dead of disease by 1752. When the

183 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 1.

184 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,”187.

185 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 189.

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garrison was increased by 875 in 1755, 51 of the additional soldiers were dead within six months.186

The irregular Cossack regiments defending Astrakhan’s southern border were known to disregarded central government laws regulating trade and taxation because they needed to maintain a material relationship with other social castes within Astrakhan and with the nomadic peoples beyond the border, but the Russian Army was seemingly as rigid as the Royal Navy in its enforcement of central government instructions, and just as brutal. Damaging the Russian Army’s relationship with Astrakhan’s colonists still further was the burden imposed on the colony by the many exigencies attendant to supporting the military establishment locally. Not only did colonists fear the forced zeal of regular army soldiers enforcing Russian economic and social policies, but they were often also required to billet Russian soldiers in their homes without payment.187 When larger numbers of peasants came to settle the colony in the second half of the century, the specter of military impressment also hung over the governorate.

As North Carolina’s subjects were liable at any time to impressment into the

Royal Navy, Astrakhan’s peasants were subject to forced recruitment into the army.

Aleksandr Stoyanov has calculated that during the eighteenth century between one and three eligible men out of every hundred were taken every five years. Although Russia’s peacetime army was already one of the largest in Europe, standing at 240,000 soldiers in

1730, its demographical needs altered according to the wars it fought, and conscription

186 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 45.

187 Ledonne, Ruling Russia, 98.

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was sometimes far higher. Between 1700 and 1740, more than 750,000 peasants were conscripted from a pool perhaps as low as 11 million.188

At the beginning of the century, service in the Russian Army was for life, and in

1775, it was still for 25 years, meaning that military induction was effectively a lifetime exile from family and friends for those unlucky enough to be called upon. Like Royal

Navy press-gangs, Russian military recruiters were brutal, and escapees were likely to be hung as deserters. While the German colonists, Cossacks, and many non-Slavic, non-

Orthodox subjects were exempt, when increasing numbers of undifferentiated state peasants arrived, the army’s potential manpower pool within Astrakhan continued to grow. As more individuals sought escape to Cossack communities, friction between the army and local inhabitants grew. Resented not only for its own inherent, meaner qualities, but as the physical embodiment of all of the inequitable precepts of imperial Russian society, officered by the noble class and used as the primary instrument with which not only to enforce central government fiscal policies, but also to maintain the exploitative social estate system that enslaved the vast majority of the population, the army would be instrumental in the bloodiest and most widespread civil disobedience to strike the empire during the eighteenth century – Pugachev’s Rebellion. The Royal Navy would be equally pivotal during large-scale civil disturbances in British North America around the same time, but North Carolina’s militia would also grapple with local, North Carolinian unrest.

188 Stoyanov, “Russia Marches South: Army Reform and Battlefield Performance in Russia’s Southern Campaigns, 1695-1739,” 250.

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Challenges to Imperial Control in North Carolina: The War of Regulation

Provincial North Carolina’s Regulators were a body of discontented subjects originating for the most part in the colony’s newer and more rugged western counties, especially Rowan, Mecklenburg, Anson, and Orange. As the eighteenth century had progressed, the population of those counties had exploded, and well-established eastern settlers had quickly realized the opportunity for personal profit that successive waves of immigrants provided them with. By the 1760s, not only did the frontier western counties face financial and physical hardship due to drought and Native American raids,189 but they also struggled under the corruption of county officials, articulated in terms of “unfair representation, taxation, extortion, corruption of local officials, and subjugation of the poor.”190 In a petition to Governor Tryon dispatched in May of 1768, the Regulators of

Orange County complained that they paid “larger fees for recording Deeds than any of the adjacent Counties and many other Fees more than the law allows,” stating that they had been “misused” by their county officials. The Regulators concluded their petition by asking of the governor that “those matters may be taken under your serious consideration and [that you] interpose in our favour so that we may have a fair hearing in this matter and [be] redressed where we have been wronged.”191

189 Sarah Sadlier, “Prelude to the American Revolution? The War of Regulation: A Revolutionary Reaction for Reform,” History Teacher 46, no. 1 (2012): 99.

190 Sadlier, “Prelude to the American Revolution? The War of Regulation,” 98.

191 Petition from the Regulators of Orange County to William Tryon, May 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 735.

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Governor Tryon’s reply evidently was far from what the Regulators had hoped for. Both the depth of discontent and the degree of local corruption can be glimpsed in a further letter from the Regulators to the governor sent in August of 1768. Finding in the governor’s answer to their first petition that he was “displeased and [charged them] with breech [sic] of Honor and that [they had] given occasion for to be looked on as rather bent on destroying the peace of this Government than to wait for Justice,” the Regulators knew who was to blame for the governor’s unfavorable views. Writing that “through false reports and alarms the commonalty under Oppression have been incensed,” the

Regulators argued that the leading citizens of the county were purposely misleading the governor in order to entrench their own positions, hence continue their graft. For the

Regulators, warnings to the governor of the need to “cut off the inhabitants of [Orange

County] as rebels” were efforts to silence those who were “guilty of no other Crime, but endeavoring to obtain justice, and detect fraudulent practices in the officers which has been so common in this Province that it is mentioned in many Public Acts of Assembly made to remedy the same, which constantly prove unsuccessful.”192 In a final remonstrance to Governor Tryon, the Regulators argued that it was “the Representatives refusing us a Conference, and threatening us for requesting one, and frightening and deterring us from petitioning for redress” that actually instigated the disorder reported by county officials.

Unfortunately for the Regulators, their attempts to regularize county government through solicitation of the provincial government were easily parried by the county socio-

192 Letter from the Regulators of Orange County to William Tryon, August 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 810.

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economic elites, upon whom the provincial government depended for the local administration of the colony, and who were appointed as local officials in the name of that government. Having themselves ominously warned the governor in May of 1768 that discontent with exploitative officials in the countryside was “growing more and more so as to threaten a disturbance of the public peace,” the Regulators found their actions couched in ever more alarming terms to the governor by his county officials, especially as, their peaceable efforts at persuasion having been spurned, the Regulators became increasingly aggressive in their resistance. Samuel Spencer, an Anson County judge who happened also to command the Anson militia regiment wrote to Governor Tryon in 1768 of the “unparalleled tumults, Insurrections and Commotions which at present distract this

County” and the threat that those posed to “the internal peace and security of the

Province.”193

For Judge Spencer – at least in his report to the governor – the Regulators’ campaign was simple tax evasion, but he clearly describes how completely overwhelmed the local peace keeping apparatus became, and the accompanying breakdown in order.

Describing the disorder as spawned by the “objections and oppositions of many People in this County and the County of Orange to the Payment of the Taxes now due from them,”

Judge Spencer warned the governor that “a considerable number of transient Persons,

New Comers, Desperadoes, and those who have not paid a tax for several years past were prevailed upon to resist the Sheriff in collecting the Taxes upon pretense that several parts of them were unjust.”

193 Letter from Samuel Spencer to William Tryon, April 28, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 722.

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Numbering at first only around forty, a mob “armed with clubs and some fire arms,”194 occupied the Anson County courthouse, preventing the court from sitting.

Despite their superior numbers, the mob at first allowed the justices to pass and to open the court, but later returned to the courthouse numbering around one-hundred, making “a great deal of noise and uproar, [behaving] very saucy and arrogant and [threatening] to come in and take the Magistrates off the Bench.” After having the Riot Act read to them by one of the justices and being ordered to disperse, the demonstrators instead entered the courthouse to discuss their grievances with the court, eventually convincing Justice

Medlock, who alone among the members had offered resistance, threatening to “[fire] the first man thro' the body who should offer to molest him in the execution of his Office as a justice of [the] Court,”195 to come away with them, before forcibly taking the rest of the members of the court.

Having cleared the courtroom, the Regulators proceeded to appoint their own officials and elect their own member of the Assembly, and Judge Spencer worried that even the militia might prove unable to restore order, writing that:

It has been proposed to me to raise the Militia immediately and to quell the rioters by force of Arms, but whether the seeds of Disaffection to the Payment of Taxes are not so generally sowed through the whole County

194 Letter from Samuel Spencer to William Tryon, April 28, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 723.

195 Letter from Samuel Spencer to William Tryon, April 28, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 724.

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that few can be found to resist the Mob with resolution and sincerity I am at a loss to say.196

The situation was not any better for the local officials of the surrounding counties.

Colonel Edmund Fanning of Orange County wrote to Governor Tryon at the same time regarding the “wretched and deplorable situation of [that] County.”197 According to

Fanning, the “late orderly and well-regulated County of Orange, is now…the very nest and bosom of rioting and rebellion.” Once again, unrest revolved around taxation,

Fanning claiming that “the People are now in every part and Corner of the County meeting, conspiring, and confederating by solemn oath and open violence to refuse the payment of Taxes and to prevent the execution of Law.” The colonists threatened:

Death and immediate destruction to [Fanning] and others, requiring settlements of the Public, Parish and County Taxes, to be made before their leaders—Clerks, Sheriffs, Registers, Attornies and all Officers of every degree and station to be arraigned at the Bar of their Shallow Understanding and to be punished and regulated at their Will.198

Colonel Fanning warned the governor that “the contagion” was “extending itself far and wide” throughout the province, contending that the Regulators threatened a force

196 Letter from Samuel Spencer to William Tryon, April 28, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 726.

197 Letter from Edward Fanning to William Tryon, April 23, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 188.

198 Letter from Edward Fanning to William Tryon, April 23, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 188.

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of more than 1,500 would settle on Hillsborough and “lay the town to ashes.”199 In the same way, his subordinates reported that “the Mob who stand in opposition to paying their Levies” took back from the sheriff a horse that he had seized in lieu of owed taxes, taking and binding the sheriff, shooting “two or three bullets” through Fanning’s house, and treating “sundry of the Inhabitants of the Town very ill.”200

Given the evidently complete failure of local government mechanisms to maintain control of a large swathe of the province – after all, it was opposition to those very mechanisms that had spawned the unrest – and an apparent belief that local militia regiments had become unreliable in those circumstances, Governor Tryon chose to meet the threat with a more general muster of the entire province’s militia. In a warrant issued to all of North Carolina’s colonels of militia, the governor commanded that the leaders keep their regiments in a state of readiness:

To march such a Number of your Men, with proper Officers, as shall be required by Colonel Edmund Fanning or the Commanding Officer of the Orange Regiment to suppress in the most effectual manner any Injuries that may be offered by the Riotous and Injurious Assemblies, and such Officers and Soldiers are hereby required and Commanded to obey all such Orders as they shall receive from the Commander of the Regiment of Orange who I have impowered to make such requisitions as He shall think necessary for the effectual suppressing the said Riottors.201

199 Letter from Edward Fanning to William Tryon, April 23, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 714.

200 Letter from Edward Fanning to William Tryon, April 9, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 705.

201 William Tryon’s Instructions to the Colonels of North Carolina’s Militia, April 27, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 718.

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Writing confidentially to Judge Spencer, Governor Tryon illustrated his private feelings regarding the Regulators vis-à-vis the local elite, remarking that although he

“should be ready to hearken to any real imposition or distress [the people of the province] might labour under,” he was “much obliged” to Spencer for the “favorable Terms in which [he expressed his] regard and attachment to the administration.”202

The scene was now set for the provincial government to act not on the behalf of the Regulators, as had earlier been hoped for, but against them in upholding with violence the position of the county social order that not only oppressed the poor of the countryside, but also routinely opposed the royal government at the provincial level. As noted above,

Governor Tryon ultimately had at Colonel Fanning’s disposal more than 9,000 militia soldiers, against which it has been estimated 7,000 Regulators eventually stood.203

Although militia officials were quick to respond, it soon became apparent that militiamen of the eastern counties would be required in large numbers if the campaign was to be successful. Colonel Gray had to report to Colonel Fanning that, having ordered the captains of his neighboring regiment to turn out their companies for campaign, he found that “out of the seven Companies ordered to meet, there were not above 120 appeared, with Arms, and out of those, so few who did not either openly declare in favor of the

Mob or such who chose to stand neutral that he found it at this time impracticable to raise

202 Letter from William Tryon to Samuel Spencer, May 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 727.

203 Sadlier, “Prelude to the American Revolution? The War of Regulation,” 97.

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as many of the militia as would be able to make the least opposition against them.”204

Consequently, as the campaign unfolded, affluent eastern officials transplanted to the west gained the assistance not only of the provincial government, but of eastern militia regiments in order to put down the remonstrances of the poorer western settlers.

A detailed journal was kept of Governor Tryon’s initial campaign against the

Regulators, which lasted for several months in 1768. That journal provides a clear insight into the way in which the militia was leveraged by the provincial government to suppress the rebellion, as well as its effectiveness on campaign. According to his journal, the governor arrived at Hillsborough in Orange County on July 6, receiving intelligence from the sheriff that still more than 400 regulators were gathered nearby, and that they

“refused to pay any Taxes and generally declared they would kill any man who should dare to distrain for their Levies.” By August 10, the number of Regulators had grown to more than 500,205 and the governor was advised that their intent was to enter

Hillsborough on August 12 to “burn the town,”206 should their demands of him not be met. On the evening of the 11th, the governor’s pickets reported that Regulators had indeed advanced to within twenty miles of the town, and Colonel Fanning was instructed

204 Letter from Francis Nash and Thomas Hart to Edmund Fanning, April 17, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 710.

205 Entry in William Tryon’s Journal, August 3, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 819.

206 Entry in William Tryon’s Journal, August 10, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 820.

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to send messengers to his regiment’s captains with orders to turn-out as many men as they could for the defense of Hillsborough.

Despite the tension, no attack came on the 12th, perhaps because Colonel Fanning had succeeded in mobilizing more than 250 men of the militia. Instead, representatives of the Regulators met with the governor to negotiate and the immediate threat of conflict receded. However, as the governor continued on to Rowan and Mecklenburg counties to review the militia regiments there, more reports came to him from the surrounding woods of Regulator activities, and the threat that they posed to the impending Superior Court sitting at Hillsborough grew large in the governor’s mind. On Friday the 26th of August,

Tryon reviewed the Rowan Regiment in Salisbury, having first held conference with the regiment’s company commanders and field officers, and addressed the eleven companies of the regiment directly.207 After asking the regiment’s officers and men to voluntarily join his force for the protection of the courthouse, the governor viewed their volleys by company, and all those willing to “serve His Majesty King George and protect the

Liberties of the Country” stepped from the ranks to gather below the Union colors at the head of the formation. As each company came forward to the King’s colors, three huzzas were cried out, and afterwards, the militiamen grounded their weapons to “refresh themselves” with provisions arranged by the governor. Before being dismissed, the regiment fell back in on their arms and toasted “His Majesty's health and prosperity to

North Carolina.” One company, however, did not partake in the refreshments or the

207 Entry in William Tryon’s Journal, August 26, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 822.

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ballyhoo; having refused to step forward to the King’s colors, hence to oppose the

Regulators, they instead marched from the field.

And so, the governor continued his tour of the colony’s nearby militia regiments to receive from their officers lists of volunteers for the protection of the Hillsborough

Courthouse. Colonel Harris’ Mecklenburg Regiment marched through Salisbury at 11 in the morning of the 13th of September, having commenced its journey the day before. The journal reports them as marching “in two ranks by files in great order, with two pieces of

Artillery in front, and the train of nine wagons in the rear.” When later in the day Colonel

Osborn’s Rowan Regiment followed them, the governor’s militia in the field constituted a brigade, making seven miles by the end of the day, and twelve miles the next.208

The force that the Rowan and Mecklenburg militia regiments had managed to field was surprisingly sophisticated for the frontier of empire, and, as it would have to march through Regulator controlled territory to reach Hillsborough, careful precautions were emplaced to guard against attack. In accordance with the governor’s orders, each regiment had formed one battalion for the field, with the Rowan battalion holding the right of the Line, and the King’s Colors born by an ensign between the two battalions and guarded by a sergeant with ten men. Captains marched at the head of the companies they commanded, while their lieutenants fell in at the rear and the ensigns to the flank. Behind the colors came the artillery with an identical escort, and behind the marching infantry rolled the wagons of the baggage train. A troop of dragoons led the column, thirteen soldiers ranged ahead of the brigade on the march and 21 soldiers ranged outside the

208 Entry in William Tryon’s Journal, August 10, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 823.

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flank of each battalion, in order to prevent the enemy surprising the column, while 51 more guarded the baggage and 13 the herd of cattle being driven for the brigade’s subsistence. Orders were issued to the effect that any individual “found lurking” in the vicinity of the nightly camp was to be “taken up” and rewards were offered to militiamen who detected horse thieves. Finally, a “guard of honour” surrounded the governor’s quarters, consisting of a captain and fifty private soldiers.209

The governor appointed a large staff for the brigade and its battalions. This consisted of an adjutant general and brigade major, both in the rank of colonel, a Surgeon

General and battalion surgeon, two battalion quartermasters and sergeants-major, as well as two battalion commissaries. Rations were light and the days were long, as each commissary was ordered to provide their militiamen with only “one pound of flour and one pound and a half of fresh meat” per day, as well as “one pound of lead and half a pound of powder as soon as they [arrived] in camp.”210 The battalions’ drummers beat

“the General” at four each morning, the column was expected to begin marching at six, and “the retreat” beat a quarter of an hour before sunset. Company commanders were required to inspect the weapons and ammunition of their soldiers, reporting their findings to their regimental commanders for their own reports to the governor.

Coming to march twenty or more miles per day, by the 19th, the brigade had crossed the Haw River and entered into Hillsborough. At first, six officers and 100 men

209 Entry in William Tryon’s Journal, September 13, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 828.

210 Entry in William Tryon’s Journal, September 13, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 829.

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were detailed to provide a “town guard,” mounting the guard from the courthouse and the market house, but the number of guards would grow, being relieved every morning at eight. A cannon was kept loaded both in town and in camp so as to provide a signal of danger if necessary, no subject was allowed to carry arms into the town without the approval of a military officer, and no supplies were permitted to leave the town. Sentries were posted within the town, “especially at the avenues of the streets,” and a patrol of five toured the town inspecting the sentries every hour overnight. More than thirty soldiers guarded the road into town from the west and 21 more guarded the road from the east. Finally, the brigade was ordered to muster in full every morning and every evening.

On the 21st, the brigade was reinforced by the arrival of a battalion from Orange and

Granville, including a company of light infantry. On the 22nd, that battalion was itself divided into two, forming a second brigade, which took the right of the Line, and the

Rowan/Mecklenburg brigade the left. Accordingly, the governor appointed five lieutenants general and two majors general to command the Line.211

Despite receiving written warnings from the Regulators regarding the possibility of an attack on the militia’s herd of cattle and marching through Regulator territory for days to reach Hillsborough, the provincial force met with no resistance. At dawn on the

22nd, more than eight-hundred Regulators appeared on the outskirts of the town, but once again no violence ensued, and almost thirty insurgents surrendered their firearms to the

211 Entry in William Tryon’s Journal, September 22, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 833.

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militia on the 23rd, the remainder “dispersed to their respective homes.”212 The first campaign of the War of Regulation had therefore ended in anticlimax. More than one thousand militiamen had been mobilized for the defense of Hillsborough, and their presence was evidently enough to dissuade the Regulators from open combat. Despite their total number being more than 7,000, no more than 800 Regulators are reported to have gathered to threaten Hillsborough. Accordingly, the governor was pleased to write the Secretary of State in London of his “great expectations” that the Regulators were thoroughly dissuaded “from collecting again in such tumultuous meetings.”213 Instead, the Regulators would become ever more vociferous in their opposition, leading in 1771 to a final, bloody meeting between them and Governor Tryon’s forces near the Hillsborough courthouse.

When in 1768 Governor Tryon and the Provincial Council had been made aware of the paralysis of county government institutions across the Piedmont region at the hands of the Regulators, they had proclaimed that the militia of the affected counties, bolstered by that of the surrounding counties would be embodied to “prevent the Evil from spreading through the province and becoming general.”214 As was shown above, the mobilization of the militia regiments of the Piedmont was undermined by the sympathy

212 Entry in William Tryon’s Journal, September 23, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 827.

213 Letter from William Tryon to Wills Hill, Marquis of Downshire, October 25, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 859.

214 Minutes of the North Carolina Provincial Council, April 27, 1768, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 720.

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of many of their members for the cause of the Regulators even at that early time. By

1771, the situation had reached a crisis for the control of the colony, and Governor Tryon finally issued orders for another wide scale embodiment of the militia, this time province- wide. The ensuing campaign would precipitate the largest ever mobilization of provincial

North Carolina’s militia, serving as a litmus test for the empire’s control of the province.

Governor Tryon’s concept of the shape his force would assume in the field is evident in the instructions he issued to the militia, and he clearly intended to leverage the wealth and loyalty of the eastern counties in overcoming resistance in the frontier west.

The governor began his circular with a call to arms from among the militia as a whole, informing each county that “some of your Regiment…may have a share in the Honor of serving their Country in this important Service.” He required the militia’s senior officers to choose from among the volunteers of their regiments a company comprised of the following: “One Captain, one Lieutenant, one Ensign, two Sergeants, two Corporals, one

Drummer, a Clerk and fifty private Men, with a Field Officer and an Adjutant to the

Detachment.” The governor commanded that “no Volunteer to be accepted but those who are hearty, spirited and can submit to a ready obedience to orders,” and that “each man will also have a pair of Leggings, a Cockade and a Haversack given him,” for which the militia officers were responsible, but for which they would be reimbursed by a warrant on the provincial treasury, along with a forty-shilling bounty to be provided to each volunteer.215 While on campaign, the militiamen were to receive two shillings per day, as well as eight-pence for provisions, and they were to be rationed one pound of pickled

215 Circular letter from William Tryon to commanding officers of the North Carolina militia, March 19, 1771, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 8 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 541.

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pork and one pound of wheat flower, or one-half pound of fresh beef and one and one- half pound of corn meal when available. To transport baggage and provisions, each company was allowed a “strong commodious cart,” the waggoneers being provided with the same rations as soldiers, but forbidden pay. The letter having been written on the 19th of March, North Carolina’s militia officers would have only until the 20th of April to make the necessary preparations.

While Governor Tryon’s campaign of 1771 was much like that of 1768, the militia force that marched to Hillsborough left from New Bern in the east, and not the frontier counties of the west (although an element of the Rowan County Regiment tried to join the campaign, it was surrounded by a larger force of Regulators and fell back to

Salisbury). The governor again commanded a Line of over 1,000 militiamen, but he was opposed by a field force of more than 2,000 Regulators. After securing the Hillsborough courthouse once again, Governor Tryon quickly decided to move to the offensive, marching from the town to meet the Regulators in the field, they being encamped less than ten miles away.

The governor’s deadline of midday on May 16 past, the militia formed into files and, supported by cannon, prepared for a conventional military attack on the Regulator encampment. As the militia marched forward to within thirty feet of the milling

Regulators, the rebels began to goad the militia to fire on them. The confrontation escalated quickly once the governor shot dead a negotiator, prompting the Regulators to begin firing, and a large-scale engagement ensued. While the militia’s tactics mimicked those of the British Regular Army, the Regulators fought alone and in groups in an uncoordinated fashion that allowed them to early gain the initiative. Without the

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logistical train that attended the militia, however, they soon exhausted their ammunition and were overwhelmed. Nine militiamen were killed and 61 wounded in the gunfire, while nine Regulators were killed and perhaps more than 100 wounded.216 Thirteen

Regulators were taken prisoner, one of whom was executed almost immediately, while six more were convicted at the Hillsborough Courthouse of treason and hanged on June

16, 1771.217 Following his victory, Governor Tryon’s force continued into the surrounding countryside, eradicating the Regulator movement once and for all.

Ultimately, more than 6,000 Regulators were pardoned in return for an oath of allegiance to the King.

Although the governor had ostensibly secured a victory for the King and the

British Empire, perceiving the Regulator movement to be an insurrection against his royal government, the writings of the Regulators themselves were always draped in overtly loyal phrases; the Regulators were railing against the county officials they saw as exploiting them, initially beseeching the governor to employ his imperially-granted power to relieve them from the injustices of local corruption. Because the justice system, predominantly seated in the counties, was the only permanently-standing mechanism of imperial control, primarily embodied in the small number of sheriffs and constables who enforced the judicial system’s imperatives, and because those same officials were the cause of Regulator unrest, it is easy to conceive of how quickly provincial government control failed in the face of Regulator resentments.

216 Sadlier, “Prelude to the American Revolution? The War of Regulation,” 97.

217 Sadlier, “Prelude to the American Revolution? The War of Regulation,” 101.

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Despite its status as a provincial institution, the militia too was organized in the counties, and the same leading men who controlled the county governments also officered the militia. It is unsurprising, then, that the militia responded largely in support of the governor’s call to arms against the Regulators, just as the often-contrary Assembly did, because the governor’s cause coincided with the predicates of the local socio- political hierarchy. Reports to the governor from the counties couched Regulator resistance in terms of defiance of fiscal instructions from the imperial government to the governor, seemingly endangering the hegemonic government’s control of its colony, while Regulator violence actually threatened the safety and commerce of the local elites who dominated both local government and the Assembly. Accordingly, in annihilating the Regulator movement, Governor Tryon not only eliminated a perceived threat to

British control, but also entrenched the position of the local elite. When later events reversed the status-quo, placing the cause of the imperial government at odds with the cause of the local elite, the governor’s attempts to gain the cooperation of provincial and county institutions controlled by the local social-political order met with vastly different results. Fortunately for provincial North Carolina’s royal government, there was one more institution of control resident in the colony, one far removed from provincial elites

– the Royal Navy.

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Challenges to Imperial Control in North Carolina: The Stamp Act Crisis

HMS Diligence arrived at Brunswick, North Carolina on November 28, 1765. The warship carried as cargo the official stamps required by the Stamp Act. A stamp distributor had been appointed to take possession of the stamps for North Carolina, but the unfortunate Mr. Houston had been persuaded by his friends and neighbors to publicly resign his post at Wilmington’s courthouse on the 16th and no willing replacement could be found, so the stamps remained in the custody of the Royal Navy.218 This chain of events was repeated throughout British North America, with the distributor of stamps for

New York forced to resign on the 3rd of September and Rhode Island’s customs collector being warned by the colonists in November that “if he will clear no vessels upon paper without stamps, that he shall be drove out of town with a High Hand.”219

Although stamp distribution in North Carolina was paralyzed from the outset, the navy didn’t hesitate in commencing its enforcement responsibilities. Captain Jacob Lobb, commander of HMS Viper, quickly seized three ships in January of 1766 for employing unstamped clearances. Writing to the customs collector on January 14, Captain Lobb hoped to turn the vessels over to the collector, stating that the captured sloops, “not having their clearances on stampt [sic] paper according to Act of Parliament,” their owners were to be “prosecuted in the Court of Admiralty as I am directed by the

218 Letter from William Tryon to the Lords of the Treasury of Great Britain, April 5, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 195-196.

219 Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 1760-1775, 96.

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Commissioners of the Customs.”220 The customs collector found himself unable to accept the ships; on the 15th of February, he was warned that his property would be destroyed if he allowed the seized ships to be taken from the province, and on the 18th, a mob of more than 1,000 surrounded his customs house, so he dallied by writing to ask for a legal opinion. While the attorney considered the case, order rapidly deteriorated.

Between 6pm and 7pm on the 19th, the governor was visited by men bearing a letter openly signed by three of the province’s leading colonists. In the letter, they disingenuously offered their “protection,” which the governor declined. As soon as the governor’s callers left him, an armed mob surrounded the gubernatorial mansion, numbering 150 and demanding to see Captain Lobb. Significantly, chief amongst the governor’s antagonists was Captain Paine of the militia. When the crowd learned that

Captain Lobb was actually in Brunswick, they departed for that town, but they left armed guards to watch the approaches to the governor’s home, essentially imprisoning him therein. Foremost in the governor’s mind was Fort Johnston, which had a garrison of only

6, but which contained several cannons, impotently facing out to sea to guard against the

Spanish, and much of the province’s ammunition and military stores.

The only recourse the governor had was the navy and so he sent a servant out into the night to slip by the guards with a letter for the captains of the two sloops anchored in the inlet 500 yards from the shore behind his home. In his letter, Governor Tryon asked the naval captains to “repel Force with Force; and to take on Board His Majesty's Sloops so much of His Majesty’s Ordnance, Stores and Ammunition out of the said Fort as you

220 Letter from Jacob Lobb to William Dry, January 14, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 174.

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shall think necessary, for the Benefit of the Service.”221 Upon receiving the note Captain

Phipps sent a landing party of six to the fort, which itself was already surrounded by a mob of 200, ordering the sailors to take spikes to disable the shore batteries if necessary, and to render the garrison “any other assistance that was necessary.” Captain Phipps also tried to visit the governor but was turned away by militiamen. Instead, he sent a note of his own, asking the governor to “show a light on each of the middle windows above stairs” if he and his family were safe. In return, Phipps promised to communicate the safety of the fort to the governor by hauling down his pennant around sunrise the following morning.222

While the governor sweated through the night, the naval officers continued to assess the situation. When Lieutenant Calder, leading the landing party to Fort Johnston returned, he carried intelligence that the militia was marching several hundred men under

Colonel Waddell to take possession of the fort. Unable to move the warships down the river to guard the fort at night and without the aid of a river pilot, Captain Lobb prepared to destroy the province’s cannons before the militia could arrive and possess them. The next day, the governor’s “guards” had quit their posts and Captain Phipps was able to come ashore in the morning to meet with Governor Tryon. Soon after, the governor was successfully evacuated to the Viper, where he held a council with the naval officers and the customs collector, learning that Captain Lobb had a deputation from the men illegally

221 Letter from William Tryon to Jacob Lobb or Constantine Phipps, February 19, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 179.

222 Letter from Constantine Phipps to William Tryon, February 20, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 180.

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in arms aboard his sloop demanding the release of the ships Lobb had seized, and that the customs collector had had his desk broken into overnight on the 19th and the unstamped papers belonging to two of the impounded ships stolen.

In the evening, Captain Lobb – likely having received further intelligence from shore that the militia intended to use the cannon to drive the navy off – sent Lieutenant

Caldwell ashore again. This time, the lieutenant carried an order from the governor to the commander of Fort Johnston, Captain Dalrymple, instructing him to “obey all Orders you may Receive either from the Commanding Officer of the Viper or Diligence Sloops of

War,” as well as a note from Captain Lobb that stated “I think it necessary at this time you will render the Guns at Fort Johnston Unserviceable, as there is a number of Men which intend to insult His Majesty's Ships now in this River.” In compliance with Lobb’s order, 16 heavy cannons and 23 light swivel guns were spiked.223

Though Lobb’s order frustrated any ambitions the militia may have had for Fort

Johnston in neutralizing the navy, North Carolina’s colonists were still able to interfere with Captain Lobb’s own efforts, and to paralyze the province’s royal government, all the way to the governor himself. At the time Caldwell’s sailors were driving nails into the fort’s cannons, Governor Tryon’s mansion was once again being threatened by the colonists. As many as 500 armed men approached the house at 10pm, coming to within

300 yards, while a deputation of 60 came to the governor’s door. At the head of the detachment stood Mr. Harnett, a member of the Assembly for Wilmington, and he demanded that the governor give him Mr. Pennington, comptroller of customs for

223 Letter from William Tryon to Jacob Lobb, February 23, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 180.

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Brunswick, who had sought the governor’s protection. Harnett warned the governor that he “hoped [Governor Tryon] would let [Pennington] go, as the people were determined to take him out of the house if he should be longer detained; an insult…they wished to avoid offering.”224 The governor refused, but Pennington eventually consented to go, resigning his position and being made by the colonists to sign an oath along with a number of other royal officials promising not to enforce the Stamp Act.

On the 22nd, Lobb found his command without the victuals he had ordered on the

5th and only one day’s worth of bread left aboard the sloop for his crew. Upon enquiring with the contracted victualling agent, William Dry, he found that the inhabitants of

Wilmington had prevented the supplies from leaving shore; in fact, not only had they prevented the supplies from reaching HMS Viper, they had kidnapped the crew of the boat Dry had sent and thrown them into Wilmington’s jail, all because of their association with Captain Lobb and his sloop.225

Had Captain Lobb not consented to release the three merchant ships he had seized, the conflict between the colonists and the navy may well have continued to escalate. Among the institutions of control resident in North Carolina, only the Royal

Navy remained effective at enforcing the law and resisting the mob during the Stamp Act

Crisis; the governor had been made a prisoner in his own home, the courts were closed,226

224 Letter from William Tryon to Henry Seymour Conway, February 25, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 171.

225 Letter from Jacob Lobb to William Tryon, February 22, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 184.

226 Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 1760-1775, 107.

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royal officials were taken and forced to give oaths to the peace-breakers, and militia officers and assemblymen were not only members of the mob, but its chief organizers.

According to Governor Tryon, the insurrection counted 580 armed men and more than

100 unarmed rioters, and the mayor of Wilmington and his corporation, several comparatively wealthy merchant captains, and the leading subjects of Bladen, Brunswick,

Duplin and Newhanover counties all were to be found among its ranks.227 Without the arms necessary to oppose the navy, North Carolina’s rebels would have been virtually powerless to prevent Captain Lobb from taking his prizes to Halifax for admiralty trial, and the worth of the navy is suggested by Governor Tryon himself, who claimed when writing to the Board of Trade following the disturbance that “two of his Majesty's sloops with their full complement of men, and two tenders with 30 or 35 men in each would be sufficient in my estimation to give law to the commercial interest of this government.”228

Although, Lobb’s actions were later vindicated in the legal opinion the customs collector eventually received, the attorney stating at the conclusion of his lengthy summation of the case that “upon the whole it is my opinion that it is the duty of the

Collector to prosecute on the information received,”229 the naval officer’s decision to relent was no-doubt considered in the best interests of the province, defusing a rapidly

227 Letter from William Tryon to the Lords of the Treasury of Great Britain, April 05, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 195-196.

228 Letter from William Tryon to the Board of Trade of Great Britain, April 30, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 201.

229 Legal opinion of Robert Jones, February 3, 1766,” (Jones, Robert, 1718-1766, February 3, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 177.

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burgeoning crisis. The stamps themselves were never used, being shipped back to Great

Britain aboard HMS Diligence in March of 1766. North Carolina’s ports were kept open,230 prosecutions relating to Stamp Act unrest were not pursued in the province’s partial courts, and – in the face of violent resistance throughout the American colonies –

Britain’s Parliament finally repealed the Stamp Act in 1766.

Challenges to Imperial Control in Astrakhan

While peripheral peoples displaced from North Carolina, including the Catawba and Cherokee, repeatedly mounted bloody expeditions into the west of the province throughout the eighteenth century, and provincial government was obliged to build a fort and to occasionally dispatch the militia to combat their efforts, the level of disruption they achieved to provincial government was far more limited than that achieved by the

Regulators or Stamp Act rebels. In contrast, displaced peoples were far more effective at disrupting local control in Astrakhan and the Terek Cossacks were most occupied by – and most effective against – their efforts. The fortified lines that the Russian Empire constructed to embody its expanding borders were intentionally designed to do more than simply secure Russian territorial claims. Independent peoples were already living on the lands between the city of Astrakhan and the governorate’s southern border along the

Terek river when Russian settlers arrived. In common with many of the cultures inhabiting the steppe immediately prior to Russian control, Caucasian peoples did not live a sedentary, agriculturally based existence, but rather were pastoralists who relied

230 Letter from William Tryon to Henry Seymour Conway, April 28, 1766, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 199.

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upon their herds for sustenance, migrating cyclically from the mountains to the plain with the seasons. Russian policymakers knew of the importance for the highlanders of the pasturelands consumed behind the Terek Line, as well as of commodities such as salt that they sourced there. One hallmark of Russia’s fortified lines of control was the practice of restricting the migratory cycles of nomadic peoples, forcing them not only to submit to

Russian control in order to gain access to traditional lands, but also compelling them to settle behind the Russian frontier, and this philosophy was plainly evident in Astrakhan.

Often, local agents aided the process of subjugation of existing peoples by destroying crops and raiding herds. As the commandant of the Kizliar fortress phrased it in 1768, the highlanders would be “completely starved and impoverished and without their horses, and what could they do then?”231

For the Karbadian people living adjacent to the fortress at Mozdok, the Russian presence engendered a loss of social control for elites, but a chance at improved conditions for the lowest social strata. More and more Karbadians fled their lords, sheltering behind the protection of the Terek Line and hoping to build a life there, with more than 800 appearing outside the walls of Mozdok in a single day.232 Karbadian nobles angrily petitioned the commandant of Mozdok to return their people, fearing that the remaining subjects would become uncontrollable, but Astrakhan was happy to receive them. Because those at the lowest level of Karbadian society were captives traded for the equivalent of around 100 rubles each, and 1,000 such captives had fled to Astrakhan by

231 Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, 23.

232 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 192.

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the 1770s,233 the economic damage that Russian asylum dealt the Karbadians was almost as significant as Russia’s control of traditional Karbadian grazing lands. As tensions rose and the regular Russian military began to build a presence in the region, Karbadian antagonism grew daily, culminating in an attack on the Russian Army that killed more than fifty soldiers and precipitated a large-scale Russian pacification campaign.234

Eventually, the Karbadians were able to convince other highland peoples to join them in their struggle against the Russian defensive line, transforming the confrontation into a full-scale guerilla war.235

In alliance with Russia’s most significant enemy of the time, the Ottoman Empire,

Karbadian highlanders first struck the Russian defensive line in June of 1769, wiping out four entire Cossack villages before they reached Naur. Although the Terek Cossacks eventually rallied and defeated their Karbadian besiegers, the insurgency continued, persisting for the remainder of the decade. When a force of Karbadians cut the Terek

Line near Marinsk and besieged nearby villages, several Cossacks were killed and much of the Line’s livestock in the area was taken.236 In response, the governor of Astrakhan ordered the commandant of Kizliar to imprison the town’s Karbadian population, but worse was to come. By June, 15,000 highlanders gathered outside Marinsk, costing the

Cossacks and Russian regulars six hours of intense fighting to dislodge, and beginning a

233 Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, 30.

234 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 187.

235 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 125-126.

236 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 185.

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cycle of attacks that resulted in several deaths, precipitating the movement by the College of War of several regiments of Don Cossacks to the Terek Line in order to bolster its defenses.237 When a mixed regular army and Cossack expedition surprised a 6,000 strong

Karbadian force eight miles from Fortress Pavlovsk late in September, the ensuing battle was fierce, killing more than 500 of the highlanders’ elite (the majority of the lowest social strata having fled in advance of the Russian arrival), as well as 20 Russians.238

Within weeks of this climactic battle, the Kabardian princes sought peace with the representatives of the Russian military juggernaut. The instrument that they signed ended any pretensions they had previously harbored of independence from Russia. The

Karbadians acknowledged their status as “eternal subjects of Her Majesty,” gave assent for their peasants to settle behind the Terek Line, promised to return captured Russian subjects and livestock, and swore an oath of fealty.239 Like several nomadic steppe peoples before them, and the several mountain peoples who would come after them as

Saint Petersburg expanded further south into the mountains, the Karbadians found themselves incorporated into the Russian empire, subject to the governor of Astrakhan.

Their integration was uneasy, though, and soon afterward they would have the opportunity to challenge imperial authority again, this time as part of a far more widespread and effective opposition begun in neighboring Orenburg Governorate.

Orenburg Governorate, carved from Kazan Governorate in 1744, had been settled in the usual manner of the century: fortified lines had been constructed along a defensible

237 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 186.

238 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 187.

239 Pollock, “Empire by Invitation,” 189.

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river and a cordon of Cossack irregulars emplaced. The irregular garrison along the Ural frontier in Orenburg was the Yaik Cossack Host, and its members had many of the same complaints as contemporary Terek Cossacks. In the early 1770s, duties imposed on the fruits of their booming fishing industry were just as crippling as those imposed on Terek viticulture, and central government demands to pacify the fleeing Kalmyk people were even more debilitating than those the Terek Cossacks faced regarding the Kabardian people. Like all Cossacks, relative freedom from central government control and internal self-determination had traditionally been a cornerstone of Yaik society, including the egalitarian practice of internal elections. But by the 1740s, the Yaik ataman was no longer elected, instead being appointed by the Russian government, and he was placed under Orenburg’s governor in the 1750s.240 By this means the governor came to control

Yaik leadership, which in turn controlled the administration and economy of the host, leaving the members of the host to see “their traditional rights and privileges wither away.”241 Regular army officers taking charge of the Yaik military effort in the early

1770s and attempting to enforce their own strict discipline on the irregular forces, combined with non-payment by Saint Petersburg of six years of owed allowances, proved the catalyst igniting popular discontent into a series of open Yaik Cossack mutinies.

When a Don Cossack deserter named Pugachev stepped forward claiming to be

Peter III alive after all and offering to free the Yaik from their burdens of service if they helped him to overthrow the Russian government and “restore” him to the throne,

240 Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarakand, 1868-1910, 46.

241 Isabel de Madariaga, Catherine the Great: A Short History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 187.

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isolated mutinies rapidly coalesced into a violent rebellion. The disorder quickly turned west, heading toward the city of Orenburg and the governorates of Kazan and Astrakhan beyond. Pugachev singled out “wicked nobles and mercenary urban judges” in his manifesto, targeting the foot soldiers of the imperial bureaucracy that was then stripping rights from the Yaik and oppressing peasants alike. As the rebels moved westward they were joined by many others seeking to cast off the shackles that Russian society bound them with, from serfs to non-Orthodox Russian believers, to displaced nomadic peoples.

In fact, of the ten to fifteen-thousand rebels under Pugachev’s command in 1773, only

1,500 were Cossack.242 A British diplomatic envoy to Saint Petersburg, Sir Robert

Gunning, reported that even members of the Russian Army deserted en masse to the rebels in the hope of escape from the terms of their service, stating that “though it is kept very secret, I am assured that part of the regiment detached by General Bibikov to attack the rebels, has gone over to them.”243

All of these participants originated among marginalized groups that were disadvantaged by the socio-political order emanating from the imperial center.

Essentially, the rebellion was the “culmination of frictions between peripheral forces and the central tsarist government,” which was seeking to better control its peripheral territories via “bureaucratization, integration, and control of the Steppe peoples.”244 The

242 Emelian Pugachev, “Manifesto,” excerpted in Russia: People and Empire, by Geoffrey Hosking, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 111.

243 Letter from Sir Robert Gunning to the Earl of Suffolk, 1773, excerpted in, Russia 1762-1825: Military Power, the State, and the People by Janet Hartley (Westport: Praeger, 2008), 115.

244 de Madariaga, Catherine the Great, 187.

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cooption of provincial institutions of control into a rebellion against the center parallels the effects of the same power gradient from center to periphery and peripheral inertia that was evident in the Stamp Act Crisis in North Carolina.

Pugachev laid siege to Orenburg City until April 1773, paralyzing the governor of

Orenburg Governorate inside. As in British North America’s Stamp Act crisis, local control was completely ineffectual at preventing unrest and violence. After defeating the

1,000-strong garrison at Fort Tatishchev, Pugachev’s forces ransacked the area for three days.245 Sir Robert reported that the German colony at Saratoff was entirely destroyed and that the rebels burned beyond use 2,063 of Kazan’s 2,873 buildings. The commander of one fort was flayed alive and his wife and daughter both murdered, and every single peasant working in the Simsk foundry were murdered.246

The rebellion flooded west, annihilating most of the small garrisons of regular and irregular forces in its way, and collecting still more marginalized peoples, such as the traditionally nomadic Bashkir.247 Although Astrakhan City did not fall into rebel hands, great swathes of the governorate’s western territory remained in a state of rebellion that was beyond the governor’s means to quell. The first imperial relief efforts were undertaken by regular army garrisons at Kazan and Samara under the command of

General Carr, and both were easily destroyed by the end of November, giving up still

245 Janet Hartley, Russia 1762-1825: Military Power, the State, and the People (Westport: Praeger, 2008), 114.

246 Hartley, Russia 1762-1825: Military Power, the State, and the People, 115- 116.

247 Benedict Sumner, “New Material on the Revolt of Pugachev,” Slavonic and East European Review 7, no. 19 (1928): 119-120.

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more recruits to the rebels, as well as arms and equipment. These events finally captured the attention of the Empress, and Catherine dispatched General Bibikov with a far more powerful force in December. By the following April, the rebellion was seemingly broken,

Pugachev having been defeated in battle and the siege of Orenburg lifted, but Pugchav himself escaped to fight another day.248

Collecting more followers amongst the highlanders of the eastern Urals, Pugachev was campaigning again by July, with the Russian Army once more in pursuit. The rebels reached Kazan, north of Astrakhan governorate, by the end of the month, largely destroying the town before the Russian field army arrived, decimating the rebel forces once more. Pugachev escaped again, at first with only a few hundred of his most dedicated followers, but by the time he descended into Astrakhan Governorate he had collected an impressive array of disaffected peasants and other marginalized peoples.

And once again the rebels made violent reprisals against local officials and landlords, hanging many and stealing or destroying their property. The climactic confrontation between the rebels and the military took place outside Tsaritsyn, Astrakhan’s second largest city, in September. This time, Pugachev would not escape. His forces caught by

General Michelson’s field army, which included a large contingent of Pugachev’s own people, the Don Cossacks, he had no option but to try to escape a third time, but was betrayed by his lieutenants, who realized the hopelessness of their situation and hoped to gain leniency from Saint Petersburg by handing him over.249

248 Sumner, “New Material on the Revolt of Pugachev,” 120.

249 Sumner, “New Material on the Revolt of Pugachev,” 121.

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For the ringleaders of the rebellion, leniency was in no way forthcoming.

Pugachev was beheaded, then drawn and quartered in Moscow in January of 1775. 324 further rebels were executed, 399 lost an ear, and 7,000 more suffered some form of corporal punishment. From a force that numbered 20,000 at its peak in 1774, more than

10,000 rebels had been killed. As in North Carolina following the War of Regulation, the vast majority of the surrendered insurrectionists, around 10,000, were required only to swear an oath of fealty before being released. Russian government officials estimated at the time that 1,572 nobles were murdered by the rebels, by hanging, shooting, stabbing, bludgeoning, beheading and drowning, along with 1,037 government officials and 237 clergymen.250

250 de Madariaga, Catherine the Great, 187.

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Chapter VI.

Conflict between Provincial and Imperial Institutions

As many have argued, the Stamp Act crisis in British North America served well to presage what would occur a decade later at the onset of the American Revolution. In examining the navy and the militia as the end of royal rule approached, the true dichotomy hinted at during the Stamp Act crisis in North Carolina is more fully revealed.

While peace had temporarily descended upon the province, underlying tensions continued unabated. Imperial government fiscal demands continued to increase as the decade progressed, while no efforts were made to reinforce North Carolina’s military garrison. When the breach between hegemonic government and peripheral subjects finally came, the provincial military was easily able to take control in the face of minimal local imperial resistance.

In May of 1775, New Bern’s newly established Committee of Safety called on

Governor Josiah Martin at the gubernatorial palace. The Committee’s spokesperson, Mr.

Aber Nash, informed the governor that the people of the town were under a “general alarm” because townsfolk had witnessed the signal cannons behind the palace being removed. Nash informed the governor that the town wished for the cannons to be remounted, and this meeting signaled the beginning of a struggle between the royal government and the colonists for the arms and ammunition kept by the province.251

251Letter from Josiah Martin to William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, June 30, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 43.

Echoing Governor Tryon a decade earlier, Governor Martin quickly sought the protection of the Royal Navy, going with his family to Captain Parry of HMS Cruizer, then the resident sloop of war at the North Carolina station. Not only did Cruizer provide

Governor Martin and his family with refuge from the rebels, but Captain Parry immediately dispatched a schooner with a well-armed crew to intercept an inbound merchant ship carrying military stores for the province, diverting it to his command.252

As the navy prepared for conflict, so too did North Carolina’s committees of safety. At the beginning of July, the Wilmington Committee of Safety ordered that “every white man capable of bearing arms, resident in Wilmington shall on or before Monday the 10th instant, enroll himself in one of the two companies there,” and decreed that any who failed to register themselves for the Committee would have their intentions considered as “inimical to the common cause of America.”253 North Carolina’s infant republican government lacked the difficulty that Governor Dobbs had experienced during the War of Regulation in trying to mobilize the militia. In 1775, those well-established, affluent eastern planters who had long dominated local government and the Assembly were finally usurping the prerogatives of the provincial government whose colonial imperatives had placed it at odds with them. The wisps of loyalist militia marching to oppose them were the very same poor, western colonists that the local elite had coopted

252 Letter from Josiah Martin to William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, June 30, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 50.

253 Minutes of the Wilmington Committee of Safety, July 07, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 72.

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the royal government into destroying during the War of Regulation, and the rebels still referred derogatorily to them as Regulators in 1775.

In July, Governor Martin decided that the guns of Fort Johnston posed too great a threat to the Royal Navy anchored in the river, especially as the fort counted less than half a dozen in garrison, while a “multitude [gathered] to attack it.” Judging the fort to be

“fit neither for a place of Arms, or an Asylum for the friends of Government” because of its small size and underdeveloped defenses, Governor Martin ordered the garrison and stores removed from it and the cannons laid on the beach under the protection of the

Cruizer’s guns.254 In the meantime, the militia continued to gather, cutting off the royal government in exile on the river from the colony and blocking the advance of the approaching highlanders intending to relieve them.

Governor Martin cautioned the province by proclamation in August of 1775 that

“no person whatever is entitled to hold exercise or enjoy any Commission or Authority over the Militia of this Colony but such as are Commissioned by His Majesty or His

Governor of this Province,”255 but the militia was already far beyond his control. After resigning his commission as the Colonel of New Hanover’s militia regiment, John Ashe continued to lead the militia as before, serving instead the republican government. In other counties, militia officers were promoted beyond their royal rank by the republican

254 Letter from Josiah Martin to William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, July 16, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 96.

255 Proclamation by Josiah Martin concerning the election of delegates to the Provincial Congress of North Carolina and militia officers and loyalty to Great Britain, August 15, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 150.

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government. Despite Governor Martin’s warning that anybody who “hath or have presumed to array the Militia and to assemble men in Arms within this Province without my Commission or Authority have invaded His Majesty's just and Royal Prerogative and violated the Laws of their Country to which they will be answerable for the same,” the republicans quickly gained complete control of the far more populous and well equipped eastern militia regiments.256 While during the Stamp Act crisis friction had been defused by Captain Lobb’s relinquishment of the captured trading ships, the effects of the imposition of Parliament’s Intolerable Acts would not be as easily defused. In 1775, civil unrest would evolve into armed conflict.

In September, Colonel Ashe’s militia finally acted against the royal government.

Hoping ultimately to destroy HMS Cruizer and her consort containing the province’s military supplies, the militia moved against Fort Johnston. In the ensuing exchange, the militia succeeded in destroying the fort, but did not secure the guns; in a further escalation, HMS Cruizer opened fire on the militia from the river, driving them off. This commenced a string of engagements between imperial and provincial forces, the warship firing on the militia whenever its movements seemed to the naval officers to threaten the ships themselves or the cannon ashore.257 Again echoing 1766, in November, the

Wilmington Committee of Safety decreed that no further provisions would be provided to warships, in consequence of the fact that “the Commander of the Sloop hath fired a

256 Proclamation by Josiah Martin, August 15, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 151.

257 Deposition of John Martin, September 04, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 133.

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number of times on the troops under the command of Col. Moore, without their giving any provocation for such conduct” and that “said Ships [are] endeavoring to carry off the artillery, the property of this Province, and the gift of his late Majesty of blessed memory, for our protection from foreign invasions.” Considering the “danger with which the inhabitants on Cape Fear River are threatened by the King's Ships now in the harbor,” the

Committee ordered that provisions necessary to repel the imperial warships be purchased.258

As the new year dawned, the navy and the militia progressed to open, sustained combat. Warned on the 14th of February that HMS Cruizer and her newly arrived sister- ship, Scorpion were heading up the river toward the town, the inhabitants of Wilmington collected their possessions and fled, while additional militia detachments reinforced the town’s defenses. Harassed by fire from the shore and limited by shallow water, the

King’s ships headed back down the river, but they did not proceed in peace; landing parties came ashore to seize livestock and vegetables, and to free slaves. Hearing of the incursion, Colonel Moore of the militia ordered Major Quince to advance to protect the western side of the river from further invasion. As the first detachment of militia approached the water’s edge, numbering only 15, the ship’s cutter was coming ashore and the two sides briefly exchanged fire, the naval force departing under the cover of three cannonballs from the Cruizer. At the same time, landing parties from HMS

Scorpion were going ashore on the east side of the river, raiding for supplies in the same

258 Minutes of the Wilmington Committee of Safety, November 20, 1775, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 336.

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way, and Colonel Moore was moving his subordinate elements accordingly.259 On the twentieth, loyalist militia approached the republican stronghold, termed “insurgents” by the rebels and characterized as consisting of “highland banditti…the old Regulators among them.”260 Their force numbering only 1,400, they would face 2,000 republican militia. Attempting a river crossing 17 miles north of Wilmington, the loyalists were surprised by the republicans and completely destroyed.261 In this way, North Carolina’s local elite finally vanquished its enemies of both of the colony’s prior large-scale disturbances – the western poor and imperial officials.

In Astrakhan, which lacked an Assembly or a social class capable of challenging the noble estate, and where provincial institutions were consequently far more aligned with imperial aims, circumstances following Pugachev’s Rebellion were very different.

While the imperial naval establishment remained small and the military establishment non-existent in North Carolina, the Russian government tightened its control on

Astrakhan and the neighboring governorates, deploying more soldiers and enacting harsher laws, ensuring the greater political incorporation of its periphery. Rebellions would continue to plague imperial Russia, but none would be as widespread as the

Pugachev Rebellion for more than 100 years. In contrast, imperial control in North

259 Letter from William Purviance to the North Carolina Provincial Council, February 24, 1776, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 466.

260 Letter from Josiah Martin to George Sackville Germain, March 21, 1776, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 486.

261 Letter from Josiah Martin to George Sackville Germain, March 21, 1776, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 491.

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Carolina rapidly deteriorated. It would seem that, with regard to administrative imperialism, Pugachev’s rebellion proved a warning for Russian policymakers that escaped British statesmen.

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Chapter VII.

Conclusions

Eighteenth century Russian and British colonialism can obviously be differentiated by the continental, contiguous accretion of territory that characterized

Russian imperialism, and the globally dispersed, littoral accumulation that marked British imperialism. Although both Russian and British society was delineated into rigid hierarchies of class, Russia’s estates were not only defined in law, but also administered differentially, even in the colonial context of the Governorate of Astrakhan. Do these differences constitute adequate grounds to segregate Russia’s colonization from Britain’s

– to proclaim Russian imperialism to be an exceptional phenomenon? This research suggests that in the realm of administrative imperialism they do not; despite the blatant geographical difference and the many subtler social differences which distinctly marked life and administration in eighteenth century Astrakhan and North Carolina, the mechanisms of government and the forces opposing them were remarkably similar.

Astrakhan and North Carolina were both administered in a “hierarchical, inequitable relationship…in which a metropole [dominated] a periphery.”262 The

“transnational connection” in each case was a web of “administrative imperialism,” where the dominating imperium established “formal (direct) control over the affairs of the colony…through a resident, imperial, administrative apparatus.”263 The simple

262 Suny, A State of Nations, 3-4.

263 Horvath, “A Definition of Colonialism,” 49.

dichotomy of controlling metropole and controlled periphery was incomplete in both cases, however. Instead, colonial officials often had to negotiate between imperial government diktats and the needs of colonists. In reality, theoretical “colonization by decree” was sometimes far removed from “colonization on the ground.”264 In the same way, both North Carolina and Astrakhan faced threats of attack from the forces of rival empires and indigenous groups displaced by colonialism. In Astrakhan, Caucasian highlanders like the Karbadians, supported by the Ottoman Empire, repeatedly raided the border, and in North Carolina the Cherokee, supported by the French, struck the western frontier, while Spanish privateers assaulted the eastern coasts.

The Russian and British empires were both ruled by monarchy, and despite the great variance in their legal privileges, both monarchs were in reality supported in the administration of their colonies by a panel of advisors, the Privy Council in the case of the British King and the Imperial Council in the case of the Russian Emperor/Empress.

Below the monarchical advisors, translating the informed commands of their sovereigns into actual imperial control were central government organs. The British Board of Trade served as the conduit between monarch and colony in North Carolina, while several of

Russia’s government colleges and the Chancellery of Guardianship of Foreigners exercised the same role for Astrakhan. In both cases, imperial government organs working in aid of colonial governance at the periphery were frustrated by powerful imperial military and fiscal departments, whose own agents fomented a great deal of peripheral resistance. In North Carolina, the Commissioners of Customs and the

Admiralty increasingly focused colonial resentment toward royal government, while in

264 Malitska, Negotiating Imperial Rule, 101.

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Astrakhan the College of Revenue, the College of the Army, and the latter’s commissary generated the same difficulties.

Both Astrakhan and North Carolina were administered by an imperially appointed governor, and each governor had a staff to assist him. In Astrakhan, the chancery was purely supportive of gubernatorial wishes, but North Carolina’s Provincial Council was an independent decision maker. In both cases, respective governors lacked control over appointment of the members of their assisting bodies, that right being reserved by imperial government. North Carolina also enjoyed a locally elected legislature that increasingly came to represent the interests of the local elite in opposing imperial control, but Astrakhan lacked a similar provincial body, and this very different dynamic proved to be at the core of differences in the manifestations of peripheral resistance in the two colonies when they did appear. Despite this striking difference, regional government in

Astrakhan was similarly forced to compromise with settlers in order to keep the peace, such as in the case of the Terek Cossacks not only failing to enforce customs duties collection, but actively evading those duties themselves.

North Carolina’s local government was centered around the county and its officials – the justices of the peace, sheriffs and constables – the majority of whom were firmly tied to North Carolina’s local elites. When their corruption and graft reached levels intolerable for North Carolina’s inhabitants and widespread unrest arose, local government means of enforcement proved entirely inadequate. In contrast, Astrakhan’s local government centered not on the county, but on the town and village, and in an extension of the general fusion of administrative and judicial functions found at every level of Russian government, locally elected or appointed bodies in towns and villages

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served as courts, known as rasprava and magistraty. While each of Astrakhan’s differentially administered groups, such as German Colonists, Cossacks, and townsmen were allowed their own internal courts that acted in accordance with their own cultural norms, appeals and matters affecting parties from different social classes were always administered by the imperial voevodas and governors in accordance with Russian law.

This contributed to a clash between imperial control and marginalized groups in the same way that enforcement of royal directives and the corruption of local elites did in North

Carolina.

Despite Great Britain’s ostensibly greater degree of political enfranchisement, only landowners with holdings valued at more than 40 shillings could participate politically, just as only guild members of a certain worth and free holders could contribute meaningfully in Astrakhan’s local political process, and this fact contributed to local unrest in both cases. Likewise, the dominance in North Carolina of the older, more affluent and established eastern counties mirrored the role of Astrakhan’s urban centers, where those with the most agency – nobles and guildsmen – were concentrated. Lacking institutions akin to modern police forces, when stunted civil administration failed to contain rebellion and insurrection, two more powerful mechanisms were relied upon by each provincial government: locally based paramilitary forces – the North Carolina

Militia and Astrakhan’s Cossack hosts – served effectively to quash internal and external threats alike when properly motivated, but both were often more concerned with the local exigencies of frontier life than with thoroughly implementing imperial directives. Regular military forces on the other hand were far more effective at imposing the predicates of the imperial center on the colonial periphery.

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Both Astrakhan’s paramilitary Cossack hosts and North Carolina’s paramilitary militia consisted of soldiers who were expected to be self-equipped and self-supporting in peacetime, and consequently, while North Carolina’s militiamen complained of the burden engendered for their civilian lives by provincial military service, Astrakhan’s

Cossacks found themselves constantly “negotiating between the demands of the state and the needs of their communities.”265 Because conditions along the imperial frontier in both colonies were harsh, both paramilitary establishments reported themselves woefully underequipped. North Carolina’s militia officers warned that their units were

“indifferently armed,” and that only “most had guns,”266 while of all the Cossack hosts defending the Terek, the best equipped still counted 48% of its soldiers as without mounts, and 36% without weapons.267

For North Carolina the Royal Navy represented imperial interests, while in

Astrakhan it was the Russian Army. Both bodies were resented for their inherent qualities, whether the detachment of their members from local interests, their brutal martial societies and the attendant influence on their members’ conduct, or the policies of forced service, but they also came to be opposed for their unswerving enforcement of imperial policies that were viewed in the periphery as burdensome and unfair. When ultimately neither imperial forces, nor the local populace would yield, in both North

Carolina and Astrakhan colonists and imperial military members came to armed conflict,

265 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 3.

266 Report concerning the militia in each county of North Carolina, 1754, William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 5 (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886), 162.

267 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, 102-103.

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with members of the locally based paramilitary elements often supporting peripheral forces against the imperial center. In both instances, local officials were targeted, whether for beating in North Carolina or hanging in Astrakhan, and destruction was widespread.

One may wonder in the face of these very many parallels in colonial administration between 1730 and 1775 why circumstances were so very different in each colony as soon afterward as 1776, when Astrakhan was ever more firmly under Russian control, while British control of North Carolina had broken down entirely. To explain in part this state of affairs, the differences of administration before 1776 can be pointed to.

Although this research suggests an overwhelming commonality in the overarching mechanisms of imperial control and the forces which opposed them in colonial Astrakhan and North Carolina, it also exposes a number of differences in the specific manifestations of each, especially with regard to the degree of social and political participation afforded to colonists. In Astrakhan, only at the lowest levels of government were representative institutions permitted, and these were overseen by the nobility, whereas North Carolina had an elected provincial assembly that was often able to oppose royal government, as well as a provincial council that was empowered to moderate the actions of the royal governor. Similarly, the Governorate of Astrakhan had no superior courts or even a separation between administrative and judicial functions, they being combined in the offices of voevoda and governor, while North Carolina’s judiciary often acted independently, opposing imperial interests.

As North Carolina’s socio-economic elite, who overwhelmingly dominated the province’s democratic government organs, became increasingly constrained by imperial policy, the very local government and local military institutions that had previously

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upheld imperial control were turned against it. In Astrakhan, the local elite might more accurately have been described as local manifestations of the imperial elite, especially following the “emancipation” of Russia’s nobles. While the wealthiest of Russian nobles may have preferred to retire to their estates, the poorer members of the ruling class sought out provincial government posts like those available in Astrakhan, knowing that distinguished service provided the potential for advancement up the Table of Ranks. In the same way, lacking the more democratic means of acquiring agency afforded to many

North Carolinians, Astrakhan’s most affluent local subjects sought advancement through cooption into the lowest levels of the ruling class, whether in the military institutions that garrisoned the governorate, or the institutional go-betweens that nobles organized to facilitate local administration. This divergence between Astrakhan and North Carolina can be glimpsed in local participation during two of the most significant challenges to imperial control considered in this thesis – the Stamp Act Crisis in North Carolina, and

Pugachev’s Rebellion in Astrakhan.

While very prominent members of North Carolinian society were identified as leading rebellion during the Stamp Act Crisis and the militia of the eastern counties mobilized itself against the government, Astrakhan’s officials at all levels largely opposed Pugachev’s Rebellion or fled, while Pugachev’s forces persisted in brutal attacks along the entire gamut of local elites. The ultimate response in Astrakhan, in concert with unrelated government reform and concurrent, externally focused military operations, was greater constriction and a more pervasive imperial military presence, while in North

Carolina tensions were resolved with a return to the status quo affected by conscious de- escalation on the part of royal officials.

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Although these differences of colonial administration in Astrakhan and North

Carolina figured significantly in resistance to imperial control even during the period of time under consideration here, they did not manifest fundamentally altered patterns or structures of resistance, nor did they suffuse divergent lines of control. When one refocuses scrutiny away from the societal and geographical differences so often employed in claiming Russian exceptionalism in colonialism, the many parallels in imperial control and frontier socio-political forces weigh heavily in establishing commonality between Russia’s contiguous and Great Britain’s maritime expansion.

The basic social and political structures maintaining imperial control in Astrakhan and North Carolina were indeed very similar, as were the lines of control and resistance between metropole and periphery. The dynamics between imperial government and provincial administration, as well as between provincial administration and local populace were largely identical, predicating strong internal challenges to control in both cases that were similarly motivated, and each colony also faced external threats from preexisting peoples displaced by colonialism and imperial rivals. Accordingly, in the realm of administrative imperialism at least, concepts already attached to European colonialism may be extended to include Russia, establishing another dimension of commonality that helps to unify the colonial experience without generalizing it, and further questions the notion of national exceptionalism.

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Chapter VIII.

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