The Invisible Line
Page 3
At first, landowners like Gibson implored the Assembly to create new courts in the backcountry, build jails and workhouses, and even establish public schools so that children would not “naturally follow Hunting—Shooting—Racing—Drinking—Gaming, and ev’ry Species of Wickedness.” But the Assembly, in Charlestown, was too far removed and too preoccupied with the growing controversies between the colonies and England to make any meaningful response. Moreover, one royal officer, the provost marshal, held the right to exercise law enforcement duties over the entire colony—and collect regular fees for doing so. In charge of running the jail and serving all writs, warrants, and other court documents in the province, the provost marshal earned “bag[s] of dollars and doubloons of gold.” The Regulators’ insistence on local courts and law enforcement directly threatened the value of the provost marshal’s office. The colonial government appeared at best stymied by and at worst indifferent to the backcountry’s plight, and farmers increasingly saw themselves as being denied “the Rights and Privileges of British Subjects.”8
By early 1767, backcountry farmers had resolved to restore order themselves. Their movement would not be a rebellion. Rather, they described it as a “Regulation.” Tired of being ignored by Charlestown, troops of Regulators took it upon themselves to enforce the law and spent two years scourging the countryside. They shot and hanged bandits, burned their nomadic settlements, lashed men and women hundreds of times, and banished incorrigibles from the colony. The vigilantes turned on “all idle persons, all that have not a visible way of getting an honest Living”—namely, anyone who chose to survive by hunting and foraging, a short step in the Regulators’ eyes to livestock poaching and outright banditry—and forced idlers to work every day except the Sabbath “on pain of Flagellation.” All along the Great Pee Dee River, backcountry landowners joined the Regulator movement with what one observer called “indefatigable Ardour.” Befitting his relative wealth and power, Gideon Gibson served as their captain.9
For a time respectable landowners along the coast had widely sympathized with the Regulators, understanding them to be the “Honest Party,” “People of good Principles, and Property, who have assembled . . . professedly with the View of driving all Horse-Thieves, with their Harbourers, Abettors, and Other Vagabonds from amongst them.” But in the summer of 1768, the Regulation took a radical turn. Many of its victims had gone to Charlestown, sued or brought criminal charges, and secured judgments against the Regulators. Facing legal actions that were costly and difficult to defend, the Regulators resolved that the court in Charlestown no longer had jurisdiction over them. The colonial government, they wrote, had become “not a Protection but an Oppression.” When officers of the court rode into the backcountry to serve Regulators with legal papers, they were pulled off their horses, chained to posts for days, and flogged. Some were forced to eat the papers. Those who escaped or were released fled to Charlestown with a chilling message: the Regulators now ruled the backcountry.10
In July 1768, to satisfy judgments levied against local Regulators, Robert Weaver, a Pee Dee merchant who also held the office of magistrate, started issuing warrants seizing their property. Weaver had a long, unhappy history with Gibson—earlier in the decade, in the heat of doing business, Gibson had objected to his prices and shouted, “You are a hog thief!” In an area where livestock thieves were grouped with rapists and murderers, Gibson’s words were the height of insult. Weaver sued for slander, seeking thousands of pounds. Despite the plaintiff’s political connections, the jury awarded him a mere twenty shillings.11
Weaver entrusted a militia lieutenant with serving the property warrants, but vigilantes kidnapped the officer and brought him to Gibson’s house. Weaver drew up a demand for the lieutenant’s immediate release and charged the militia’s sergeant, the local constable, to deliver it. A company of fourteen local men marched on Mars Bluff in the depths of summer. When the militia reached Gibson’s fields, they saw, according to one account, a “great number of People.” The Regulators were arranged in two lines—a battle formation. They were not going to give up their prisoner. The company kept marching until they could see the vigilantes’ faces. Gibson was leading the mob. Five of the militia approached. The Regulators waited to receive them, then surrounded them and beat them to the ground.12
Standing with his men, Gideon Gibson turned his attention to the remaining members of the militia company. He recognized several. They all lived close enough to one another that they had crossed paths before. Three in the company, he saw, were from the same family: William White; his father, James; and his brother Reubin. Gibson likely knew that William White made his living as a cooper—and had a wife and eight children waiting at home. But Gibson casually, even triumphantly, called for his slaughter.
“Shoot down Billey White,” Gibson called, “for I have got Reubin, and if you kill Billey we will manage the rest easy enough.”13
The Regulators advanced. William White drew his sword but was overtaken before he could strike. As fighting raged on all sides, James White pulled his son from the ground, and together they tried to flee the battle. James stumbled, and when William stopped to help him, several guns fired at close range. William felt himself raked, staggered into a run, and collapsed. When he regained consciousness, several men were shading him. His clothes, his skin, were soaked with blood. One ball had grazed his hip, and a second had passed five inches along the bone of his right arm, from near his shoulder to below his elbow. William knew his arm was “totally shattered.”
“Shoot him thro’ the head at once,” said one of Gibson’s Regulators.
“No Damn him he can’t live long,” said another. “Let him feel himself die.”
Instead of spilling his brains into the ground, the men picked William White up and dragged him to Gibson’s house. They threw him on the floor and left him “weltering in his own blood.” All around him was the sound of torment. The Regulators had rounded up the other militiamen and on Gibson’s orders were whipping them as many as fifty times. Finally Reubin White, his back bloodied, asked if he could take his brother home, and Gibson’s Regulators released the Whites to the swamp and wilderness.14
When news of the riot at Mars Bluff reached Charlestown, any remaining sympathy for the Regulation evaporated. In August 1768 the Regulators came to be regarded along the coast as a “desperate Gang,” a “Rogues Party” intent on ruining the colony. They were depicted as all the more dastardly because, in William White’s words, they included people “of different Colours (viz.) Whites, Blacks and Mulattoes.” A colony with a slave majority now faced the specter of blacks whipping whites. If slaves joined the melee, the Regulation could overwhelm South Carolina. The province’s rulers devised a conciliatory strategy in response to the incident, proclaiming “a most gracious Pardon” to all “divers[e] dissolute and disorderly persons” who had “daringly resisted the King’s process.” At the same time, the pardon specifically excluded “Gideon Gibson and others who attacked a Constable and his party . . . near Mar’s Bluff.” With this policy to divide and conquer, George Gabriel Powell rode inland to isolate and destroy the rebellion’s most subversive leader.15
GEORGE GABRIEL POWELL RETURNED to camp well pleased with his strategy and powers of persuasion. On Sunday, August 14, 1768, he had talked with Gideon Gibson in the forest for more than an hour. After negotiating terms, the Regulator captain had “solemnly promised to deliver himself up” the next morning. “Indeed I had not the least doubt but that the man would have fulfilled his promise,” Powell wrote.16
Unlike many of his countrymen, Powell remained unfazed by the Regulation. “I had heard much of the riotous behaviour of the regulators in General,” he wrote, “yet as several of them are men of good property I flatter’d myself that they might be . . . induced to admit that the method they were pursuing was not the proper mode to bring about their wis[h]ed for purpose.” Powell had endured tougher challenges in his life. As a young man, he had served two years as governor
of the bleak South Atlantic island of St. Helena, midway between Brazil and Angola, where he had been born and where his father had made a fortune by marrying a succession of widows. Ousted after a series of scandals, financial and otherwise, Powell had set off for Carolina’s green shores, where he found wealth and respect. An observer described him as a “Shrewd cunning subtle Fox.” In politics and life he was known to be flexible: “the greatest Mimic in Nature . . . [a] proteus—can transform himself into any Shape or Colour—Can be any thing—Laughs at all Things Civil and Sacred.”17
Reports of extreme brutality, even of blacks flogging whites, hardly ruffled a man who occupied as lofty a position as Powell. His father had been known on St. Helena for astonishing cruelty to his slaves: he once was fined forty shillings for whipping an eight-year-old boy bloody and then throwing him onto a bed of nettles that slowly stung him to death. When Powell himself was unsatisfied with the quality of a new “wigg of some hair,” he had the English wigmaker held down while a “Black boy” administered “fifty lashes upon his bare breach.” Regarding all men, black and white, as his inferiors, Powell cared little that Gibson had color in his face, nor did it make sense to treat Gibson differently because of it.18
In the backcountry, after all, Gibson was indisputably one of the elite. If the family’s race had been a source of alarm, all controversy had been extinguished a generation earlier. Gideon Gibson descended from some of the first free people of color in Virginia. In the seventeenth century the English had had little experience with slavery, and the success of tobacco growing had hardly been assured. For much of the century, the meaning of slavery and the place of Africans in Virginia society remained unsettled. While the English had long imagined that Africans were savage and inferior—even before they encountered people with black skin—slaves who arrived in early Virginia steadily undermined most rationales for being treated as such. They learned to speak a new language, accepted Christ, and were baptized. They turned to courts when they were wronged. They socialized, drank, ran away, and formed families with English men and women. Many, the Gibsons among them, negotiated better terms for themselves: more independence, earnings they could keep, even freedom.19
In 1672 near Jamestown a woman named Elizabeth Chavis successfully sued for the freedom of a boy named Gibson Gibson, or Gibby Gibson. Chavis was a free woman, and Gibby was her son. In the previous decade, Virginia’s rulers had sought to codify slavery, secure the labor force, and prevent slaves from forming rebellious alliances with servants. Among the enactments was a law mandating that the children of a union between a slave and free person would follow the status of the mother. Although this rule of maternal status—“birth follows the belly”—resulted in widespread rape and generations of light-skinned slaves, it also formed the basis for the first communities of free people of color. English servant women had children with African men in numbers that continually alarmed Virginia’s lawmakers. In certain courts, practically the only record that slavery existed consisted of cases of “mulatto bastards” born to English women. In the seventeenth century, thousands of mixed-race people were born into freedom. After Gibby Gibson was set free, he and his brother Hubbard spent half a century amassing land and slaves.20
The lives of the Gibsons and other free families of color were not easy. Greatly outnumbered by both the slave and white populations, they went into and out of debt, had trouble holding on to property from one generation to the next, and remained vulnerable to enslavement. As the seventeenth century turned into the eighteenth, Virginia’s legislature steadily restricted the rights of free blacks to own property, travel, bear arms, and more. Although such laws were designed to lock free people of color into an inferior status, they paradoxically encouraged blacks to marry Europeans. Whites in the family gave their spouses and children stronger claims to freedom and had immediate economic advantages—while black women were subject to heavy taxes, white women were not. Increasingly harsh laws did not separate Africans and Europeans. To the contrary, they spurred some people of African descent to try to escape their classification.21
In the early 1720s Hubbard Gibson and his children left Virginia and bought property in North Carolina along with several other families of color. Virginia’s legal restrictions had narrowed the opportunities for free people of color, but also set them in motion, driving them to places where they could experience something approaching liberty. In the mid-eighteenth century hundreds were migrating north into Maryland and Delaware and south into the Carolinas. Their ultimate destinations were places on the frontier that needed settlers. There the Gibsons and others could find land, wealth, status, and acceptance.22
Moving to South Carolina in 1731, the Gibsons traveled through the kind of wilderness where many people came to hide. Even so, the family’s arrival managed to attract widespread alarm. At the time the colony consisted primarily of a stretch of rice and indigo plantations along the coast. Ten thousand free people were living among twenty thousand slaves. For more than two decades, South Carolina had been majority black, and every year thousands of new men and women, transported from the West Indies and directly from West Africa, walked in irons down Charlestown’s and Georgetown’s wharves. Most would work on the rice plantations, toiling in gangs that hardly ever saw a white face, speaking a language mostly of their own devising. Large numbers of slaves could produce thousands of barrels of rice; they made plantation owners rich. But by the 1730s, free colonists were reading regular accounts of slave uprisings in the West Indies, on slave ships—always nearby or drifting closer. Many grew convinced, as one ship captain wrote upon visiting Charlestown in 1734, that their slaves lived on a “Foundation of Discontent” and were “watch[ing for] an Opportunity of revolting against their Masters.” Colonists who encountered the Gibsons wondered if their caravan of dark men, pale women, and children somewhere in between would “be of ill Consequence to this Province,” flouting the strict line between slave and free that black and white had come to represent. Perhaps they were moving through the colony specifically to foment rebellion.23
When word of the Gibsons’ arrival reached Charlestown in 1731, the Assembly convened a committee to investigate, and Governor Robert Johnson summoned Gideon Gibson’s father—also named Gideon Gibson—for a personal audience. After meeting the man, the governor reported that the new arrivals were exactly the kind of people the province needed to settle the frontier. “The account he has given of himself is so Satisfactory that he is no Vagabond that I have . . . permitted him to Settle in this Country,” Johnson wrote. The elder Gibson was a carpenter who had owned land and paid taxes in Virginia and North Carolina, and his wife and others in their clan were “White women Capable of working and being Serviceable in the Country.” If Governor Johnson harbored any worries as to whether the family—by words, deed, or example—would encourage slaves to kill their masters, he was reassured that Gibson had come with “seven negroes of his own.” Gibson had a skilled trade, a white wife, and a personal stake in slavery. His racial designation seemed to lose its meaning. “They are not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people,” the governor wrote .24
Not only could the Gibsons stay in South Carolina, but they also were granted hundreds of acres in the backcountry. Their land at Mars Bluff was in an area known as the Welsh Tract, where dozens of Welsh Baptists had moved from Pennsylvania intending to grow “Hemp, flax, Wheat, Barley &ca.” Other farm families soon joined them in the wilderness, Scottish and Irish and free people of color migrating from Pennsylvania and Virginia and North Carolina. Many were dissenters from the Church of England, Baptists and Presbyterians, receptive to charismatic “New Light” sects whose young, illiterate preachers railed against the Anglican ministry and other authorities tainted by devilment. A century later a Welsh Tract descendant would remember the original settlers as “more jealous of their liberties than even the English, and far more irascible.” The Gibsons—reputedly ornery, never content with their station, continually challenging attempts to cla
ssify them—fit right in.25
The family settled along the bluffs that rolled alongside the Pee Dee River, which offered the best protection from Indian attack, and began the endless task of clearing forests and draining bogs for cowpens and fields. They grew corn and cash crops and drove cattle and hogs to the coast. They endured “bilious fevers,” the reek of fermented indigo, and clouds of flies and biting insects. After slave rebels nearly sacked Charlestown in 1739, the province allowed people of color considerably less freedom, but suspicion and surveillance in the low country did not much affect the Gibsons’ lives upriver. As the next generation came of age, they married into neighboring families. In 1767, when local landowners resolved to regulate the “Indolent, unsettled, roving Wretches” who threatened their property, it was only natural that Gibson would lead the way.26
It was unremarkable that a man of color could be a Regulator captain. Gibson was rich and respected. He conveyed no qualms that many of the people targeted by the Regulators had dark skin. He was secure enough in his status that he could insult a magistrate and coldly order his men to shoot at the local militia—their neighbors—and lash the survivors. By the time Gideon Gibson swore his allegiance to the Regulation, he was not black. He was not white. He was a planter.27
POWELL AWOKE ON MONDAY, August 15, 1768, expecting to receive his prisoner. Instead, a messenger arrived with a letter from Gibson “signifying that he had altered his Resolution” and promising to surrender at a later time. Perhaps stung that Gibson had flouted his authority and breached a pact of honor, Powell felt that he had been “egregiously mistaken” in his measure of Gibson and abruptly shifted his strategy. As the day grew hotter, Powell rode out to meet a troop of militia reinforcements, who had halted in the woods half a mile from his camp. He would not need to negotiate with Gibson any longer.28