ulators that they were not cast down by
their defeat at Alamance but "like the mammoth, they shook the bolt from
their brow and crossed the mountains," but such flowery phrases do
not seem to have been inspired by facts. Nor do the records show that
"fifteen hundred Regulators" arrived at Watauga in 1771, as has also
been stated. Nor are the names of the leaders of the Regulation to be
found in the list of signatures affixed to the one "state paper" of
Watauga which was preserved and written into historic annals. Nor yet do
those names appear on the roster of the Watauga and Holston men who,
in 1774, fought with Shelby under Andrew Lewis in the Battle of Point
Pleasant. The Boones and the Bryans, the Robertsons, the Seviers, the
Shelbys, the men who opened up the West and shaped the destiny of its
inhabitants, were genuine freemen, with a sense of law and order as
inseparable from liberty. They would follow a Washington but not a
Hermon Husband.

James Hunter, whose signature leads on all Regulation manifestoes just
prior to the Battle of Alamance, was a sycophant of Husband, to whom he
addressed fulsome letters; and in the real battle for democracy--the
War of Independence--he was a Tory. The Colonial Records show that those
who, "like the mammoth," shook from them the ethical restraints which
make man superior to the giant beast, and who later bolted into the
mountains, contributed chiefly the lawlessness that harassed the new
settlements. They were the banditti and, in 1776, the Tories of the
western hills; they pillaged the homes of the men who were fighting for
the democratic ideal.

It was not the Regulation Movement which turned westward the makers of
the Old Southwest, but the free and enterprising spirit of the age. It
was emphatically an age of doers; and if men who felt the constructive
urge in them might not lay hold on conditions where they were and
reshape them, then they must go forward seeking that environment which
would give their genius its opportunity.

Of such adventurous spirits was James Robertson, a Virginian born of
Ulster Scot parentage, and a resident of (the present) Wake County,
North Carolina, since his boyhood. Robertson was twenty-eight years old
when, in 1770, he rode over the hills to Watauga. We can imagine him as
he was then, for the portrait taken much later in life shows the type
of face that does not change. It is a high type combining the best
qualities of his race. Intelligenc