Existing comment:
The Colonial Crisis Begins:
North Carolinians wholeheartedly joined the protests taking place throughout the colonies in 1765 in response to the Stamp act. The act required stamps purchase from British agents to be placed on all documents, newspapers and even playing cards distributed in the colonies. Residents of the Lower Cape Fear area, which would become a center of revolutionary activity in North Carolina, gathered in Wilmington several times that fall to protest the act.
In the midst of the Stamp act controversy, William Tryon, North Carolina's recently appointed royal governor, arrived in the colony. His tenure was consumed by increasing unrest in the assembly over British policies and by the Regulation, a movement led by farmers in the North Carolina Piedmont. The Regulation aimed to secure greater representation in government for the rural western counties and put an end to corrupt practices by local officials. Five years of escalating protests, including petitioning the governor and refusing to pay taxes, culminated in 1771 in the battle of Almanance, where Governor Tryon's colonial militia defeated the rebellion. Many of Tryon's soldiers, who were from the more prosperous eastern towns that the Regulators resented, later led North Carolina into the American Revolution. Tryon left North Carolina later that year to become royal governor of New York.
Josiah Martin, Tryon's successor, did not become the strong royal governor that the Crown needed. By August 1774, North Carolina patriots had begun to assume authority over the daily governance of the colony. Local committees of safety and an assembly dominated by patriots guided North Carolina's protests of British taxes and other perceived oppressions, controlled its judicial system, issued its currency, and prepared its military defenses. Governor Martin zealously, but ineffectively, tried to halt the growth of the American rebellion. |