a change took place in both leaders and methods. During the
Regulators' career of violence they were under the sway of an agitator
named Hermon Husband. This demagogue was reported to have been expelled
from the Quaker Society for cause; it is on record that he was expelled
from the North Carolina Assembly because a vicious anonymous letter was
traced to him. He deserted his dupes just before the shots cracked at
Alamance Creek and fled from the colony. He was afterwards apprehended
in Pennsylvania for complicity in the Whisky Insurrection.

Four of the leading Presbyterian ministers of the Back Country issued a
letter in condemnation of the Regulators. One of these ministers was the
famous David Caldwell, son-in-law of the Reverend Alexander Craighead,
and a man who knew the difference between liberty and license and who
proved himself the bravest of patriots in the War of Independence. The
records of the time contain sworn testimony against the Regulators
by Waightstill Avery, a signer of the Mecklenburg Resolves, who later
presided honorably over courts in the western circuit of Tennessee; and
there is evidence indicating Jacobite and French intrigue. That Governor
Tryon recognized a hidden hand at work seems clearly revealed in his
proclamation addressed to those "whose understandings have been run
away with and whose passions have been led in captivity by some evil
designing men who, actuated by cowardice and a sense of that Publick
Justice which is due to their Crimes, have obscured themselves from
Publick view." What the Assembly thought of the Regulators was expressed
in 1770 in a drastic bill which so shocked the authorities in England
that instructions were sent forbidding any Governor to approve such a
bill in future, declaring it "a disgrace to the British Statute Books."

On May 16, 1771, some two thousand Regulators were precipitated by
Husband into the Battle of Alamance, which took place in a district
settled largely by a rough and ignorant type of Germans, many of whom
Husband had lured to swell his mob. Opposed to him, were eleven hundred
of Governor Tryon's troops, officered by such patriots as Griffith
Rutherford, Hugh Waddell, and Francis Nash. During an hour's engagement
about twenty Regulators were killed, while the Governor's troops had
nine killed and sixty-one wounded. Six of the leaders were hanged. The
rest took the oath of allegiance which Tryon administered.

It has been said about the Reg