More than two years before the Boston Tea Party of 16 December 1773, and 800 miles south of Boston, cracks had already been forming in the tense relationship between the provincial royal governments of the 'Colonies', and the settler community. As with the urban Bostonians, the 'backcountry' folk of North Carolina also wanted government taxation policy to be better regulated, and so they took for themselves the name of 'Regulators' *.
The backcountry of North Carolina had been gradually settled with Ulster-Scots emigrants heading south out of Pennsylvania. One of them was Rachel Craighead, the daughter of Donegal-born Alexander Craighead, a Covenanter Presbyterian minister whose sermons had been printed by Benjamin Franklin, including one from 1743 which had ‘denounced the monarch of Great Britain a tyrant'. In fact, their family and the Franklin family were intermarried through their Holmes relatives. In 1766 Rachel married Rev David Caldwell, who in one of his surviving sermons reminded his congregation that “our forefathers, or many of them, sacrificed at Londonderry and Enniskillen their lives, that they might hand down to us the fair inheritance of liberty”.
In the aftermath, some from Alamance, and others, decided to leave North Carolina and the reach of the Governor. They headed almost 200 miles directly westwards, up into the Appalachian Mountains - and right up to the colonial boundary of North Carolina that had been established by the Royal Proclamation of 1763. But they kept going, defying the Crown boundary, and into Cherokee country. One of them, James Robertson, had already explored the area back in 1769-70.
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• MAY 1772 - THE 'WATAUGA ASSOCIATION'
They were now beyond the reach and boundaries of the British colonial governments. They could self-govern. In 1772 they did a deal with the Cherokees - the Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbade anyone from privately buying land from Native Americans, so they shrewdly agreed a ten year lease of a tract of land at a place the Cherokees called Watauga. There they established their own self-government, based on the system of Virginia and not that of North Carolina. These governing principles for the new community were known as the Watauga Association. The last British Governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunmore, wrote in 1774 that Watauga was "a dangerous example to the people of America of forming governments distinct from and independent of his majesty's authority." . It is commemorated on a plaque in today's Elizabethton in east Tennessee, with the names of those involved:
• Committee of Thirteen
John Carter, Chairman. Charles Robertson. Zach Isbell. Jas. Robertson. James Smith. Jacob Womack. John Sevier. John Jones. Robert Lucas. William Bean. George Russell. William Tatham. Jacob Brown.
• The Five Commissioners.
John Carter, Chairman. Charles Robertson. James Robertson. John Sevier. Zach Isbell.
John Carter's original house still stands. In 1976, Fort Watauga was reconstructed for the Bicentennial celebrations (Wikipedia here).
It's a special area, the Appalachian apex where Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia meet. A few generations later it would be the birthplace of recorded country music. And also where, just 40 miles north in Abingdon, Virginia, it would be the region where Rev Charles Cummings would author the Fincastle Resolutions on 20 January 1775.
"... In the decade preceding the Revolutionary War, frontier settlers migrated into the western parts of North Carolina, settling on lands along the Watauga River that belonged to the Cherokee Indian Nation. Many were Scotch-Irish who had traveled to the area through the Shenandoah Valley down the Great Wagon Road, while others were settlers who wandered westward over the mountains after the collapse of the Regulator movement in North Carolina. In May 1772 these settlers, led by John Sevier and James Robertson, established the Watauga Association, which boasted the country’s first majority-rule system of government, and the first written constitution in America. The Watauga Association negotiated a ten-year lease with the Cherokees, and later purchased the land from the Indians. In 1776 the Watauga settlement was annexed to North Carolina, then was ceded to the federal government in 1784, briefly comprised the State of Franklin, and finally became part of Tennessee when it attained statehood in mid-1796..."
- from Genealogical.com
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In his landmark The Winning of the West, published in 1889, future President Theodore Roosevelt said of the Watauga pioneers: “They formed a written constitution, the first ever adopted west of the mountains, or by a community composed of American-born freemen ... They were the first men of American birth to establish a free and independent community on the Continent.”
• Read the whole chapter on Archive.org here
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• My 2017 post is here.
• Here's a concise description on TennesseeEncyclopedia.com
• Here is the account in The Annals of Tennessee by J.G.M. Ramsey (1853). His father Francis was one of those involved in Watauga.
• Here is a paper by A.V. Goodpasture from April 1898
• An account from 1899
• Here is how a Tennessee school textbook from 1900 told the story.
• Northern Ireland author Billy Kennedy also featured Watauga in his 1995 book The Scots-Irish in the Hills of Tennessee, which was reproduced in his 1997 book The Scots-Irish in the Carolinas.
* These tensions were written up by Hugh Williamson, a 'son of Ulster' who was an eyewitness of the Boston Tea Party, in his History of North Carolina – you can read the details here in chapter 9. He's pretty critical of the Regulators and the whole episode that unfolded at Alamance.
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