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The Road
to Independence
As you read, look for:
• ways in which Great Britain tried to tighten its
control over the American colonies
• vocabulary terms Proclamation of 1763, Stamp Act
This section will help you meet the
following objective:
8.2.01 Trace the events leading up
to the Revolutionary War and
evaluate their significance.
North Carolinians were caught up in more than just the
troubles of the Regulation during the 1760s and the 1770s.
The British Parliament (governing body) began to change
the way the thirteen American colonies were governed. The
new policies were designed to make Americans pay heavier
taxes and be more under the control of the British. Residents
of each of the colonies began to protest how the British went
about changing rules without consulting them. In particular, the colonists were angry that the British would pass laws
without having the colonists’ representatives be part of the
process. “No taxation without representation” became the
slogan used to protest against this unfairness. Over the
course of twelve years—from 1763 to 1775—these protests
led to greater arguments and, ultimately, violence. The result was the War for Independence that was part of the
greater American Revolution.
The British passed two policies in the 1760s that particularly hindered North Carolina’s ability to grow and develop.
King George III issued the Proclamation of 1763. This ruling forbade settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.
The king had a good reason for the proclamation. He wanted to stop the
fighting between the Indians and the settlers. Some North Carolinians,
however, already had plans to move over the mountains. Daniel Boone
and others actually explored all the way into what became the states of
Tennessee and Kentucky in the late 1760s. Boone set up a base camp for
his trips at the site where the town of Boone is today. After the Battle of
Alamance, hundreds of Regulator families ignored the Proclamation Line
and moved into the valleys of the Tennessee River. That area had been
designated an Indian reserve.
Map 15
The Proclamation
Line of 1763
Map Skill: Which colonies did
not border the Proclamation
Line?
Section 1: The Road to Independence
157
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CAROLINA CELEBRITIES
Daniel and Rebecca Boone
One of the celebrated marriages in
U.S. history began in North Carolina
on August 14, 1756. On that day in
present-day Davie County, Daniel Boone
and Rebecca Bryan were married.Their
marriage lasted more than a half century.Their love story took them repeatedly to the edges of the early American
frontier, as they became the prototypes
for the male and female pioneers.
Daniel and Rebecca met in 1754.
She was fifteen; he was nineteen.
Both of their families had come to the
backcountry on the Great Wagon Road.
Their fathers were among the first public officials of Rowan County.
It was love at first sight. After the
wedding, Daniel’s hunting took him away for months at a time.
In the 1760s, he became one of the first Anglo-Americans to
cross the Appalachian Mountains and explore Kentucky. He
was gone for two years. A Moravian missionary from Wachovia
visited Rebecca during this time. He described her as “a quiet
soul” who nevertheless had “fear in her heart” about the safety
of her husband. She had good reason. At one point during
Daniel’s trip, he had to jump off a cliff to escape Indians.
While Daniel hunted through the years, Rebecca stayed
home, farmed, and raised a lot of children. From the ages
of seventeen to forty-one, Rebecca had ten children—four
daughters and six sons. In addition, she raised six orphans
from her family and another child that Daniel rescued from
Indians.Two of her sons were killed by Indians, and a daughter was kidnapped. Daniel rescued the daughter, but later
was himself captured and thought for months to be dead.
The Boones lived in one log house—located near today’s
Farmington—for ten years, the longest they lived in any
158
Above: This lithograph, created in 1874, is entitled
“Daniel Boone Protects His Family.” It shows Boone as
an Indian fighter defending Rebecca and their child
from Indian attack.
one house during their marriage. For a while, they lived in
a cabin on the upperYadkin River west of the future town of
Wilkesboro. Then, in 1773, the Boones ignored the Proclamation Line and led a group of families toward Kentucky.
The death of their son turned them back, but the Boones
tried again after Daniel cut the Wilderness Road in 1775.
The Boones moved around a lot, as Daniel tended to be
restless. Once they operated a tavern on the Ohio River, and
Rebecca cooked for whoever was passing by. After they
moved to Missouri, Rebecca died in 1813, having made
apple butter just days before. Daniel passed away seven years
later, but, as a family member said, “After Grandmother
Boone died, he was never contented.”
Chapter 5: The Struggle for Independence
Stamp Act Riots
The second new British policy was the
Stamp Act, passed in 1765. Since the British needed more money to pay for the
French and Indian War, they took steps to
increase the taxes they collected from the
colonists. The Stamp Act required stamps
be used on all kinds of documents. During the 1700s, ships often sailed without
paying customs duties. The Stamp Act required all ships to have their records
“stamped” with an official seal, and those
stamps had to be bought from a customs
official. The purchase of the stamps was
like a departure announcement. Customs
officers knew they should visit the ship to
verify that the cargo was what the captain
said it was. Cheating on buying the stamps
or paying the customs duties would lead
to the ship being seized. The captain
would be taken to a court in Nova Scotia,
Canada, where he would be charged and
tried by a panel of judges, not a jury.
No jury? This meant being treated like
a pirate! And this violated “the rights of Englishmen” that colonists up
and down the Atlantic Coast had come to expect. Mobs protested the
Stamp Act in every colonial port. They often threatened the stamp agents
with bodily harm unless they resigned and burned the stamps. In North
Carolina, reported one royal official, “Not one advocate[d] for the stamp
duty.” When the General Assembly protested the new law, Governor
Tryon sent the representatives home. Soon Edenton, New Bern, and
Wilmington passed petitions condemning the governor. When the first
ship with stamps from London arrived at Brunswick, local leaders—including Hugh Waddell, a hero of
the French and Indian War—told
the captain they would not allow
the stamps to be sold. When the
British seized two ships because
their captains sailed without
Some of the documents
stamps, Waddell and five hundred
that were supposed to be
men destroyed the documents that
stamped were newswould be used in court against the
papers, playing cards,
ship captains. The situation almost
checks, deeds, contracts,
led to open rebellion in the Cape
insurance policies,
Fear. At the last moment came
permits, and wills.
news that the British Parliament
had cancelled the Stamp Act.
Above: As a warning to those who
might import tea, Boston patriots
tarred and feathered tax collector
John Malcolm, forced him to drink
tea, and threatened to hang him.
Section 1: The Road to Independence
159
THE ART OF POLITICS
Violent opposition in the colonies to the Stamp Act led Parliament to repeal it in March 1766.
This cartoon, entitled “The Repeal or the Funeral Procession of Miss Americ-Stamp,”
makes fun of British reaction to the repeal.
The cancellation of the stamp duty in 1766 quieted matters for a while,
but the colonists and the British continued to quarrel. While North Carolina was swept up in the Regulation, leaders in Virginia, Massachusetts,
and other colonies continued to assert the political rights that colonists
had come to expect. When the North Carolina General Assembly protested that the king was not doing enough to help the colony develop
economically, a member of Parliament claimed that North Carolinians
were “derogatory to his Majesty’s honor.” In 1769, Governor Tryon once
again sent the Assembly home because it was too critical of the British.
Even though the Regulation showed that the British would use force to
get what they wanted, some North Carolinians continued to disobey. Daniel
Boone joined with Judge Richard Henderson to start the Transylvania
Company, a group designed to settle farmers west of the Appalachians.
When the king would not charter Queen’s Academy in Charlotte (a Presbyterian attempt to open a college in the colony), the Scots-Irish opened
the school anyway. By the time the War for Independence started, it had
eighty students, including Robert Henry.
160
Chapter 5: The Struggle for Independence
Figure 9
Steps Toward Revolution
Legislation
Date
What It Did
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Proclamation
of 1763
1763
Set boundaries for western settlement
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Sugar
Act
1764
Lowered tax on sugar, molasses, and other
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products, but tightened customs enforcement
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Stamp
Act
1765
Taxed certain types of documents
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Declaratory
Act
1766
Stated that Great Britain had the right to tax
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
the colonies
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Townshend
Acts
1767
Taxed glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea
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Tea
Act
1773
Gave East India Tea Company the sole control
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of tea trade
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“Intolerable”
Acts
1774
Closed port of Boston
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The two sides continued to disagree. Violence broke out in occupied Boston in 1770, the same year
Regulators rioted in Hillsborough.
When the British announced new
steps to control the colonists, North
Carolinians joined in the protests.
Matters came to a head in 1773,
when Bostonians disguised themselves as Iroquois Indians and
dumped hundreds of boxes of tea
into their harbor. They were protesting the exclusive right to sell tea
given the East India Company by
the British Crown. Bostonians and
other colonists believed such controls went against their rights to a free
marketplace. The event has been known ever since as the Boston Tea Party.
The Edenton Tea Party
When the British closed down the port of Boston to punish the city
for the loss of the tea, the other colonies agreed to buy nothing from the
British or send any of their goods to England until matters improved. In
1774, Salisbury’s leaders passed the Rowan Resolves, a series of statements in which their citizens pledged not to import British goods. Rowan
County citizens were encouraged to use their own homemade products.
The same year, North Carolina leaders sent a ship to Massachusetts full
of corn, wheat, and salted pork to help the citizens of Boston.
Above: Patriots at the Boston
Tea Party in December 1773
crudely disguised themselves as
Native Americans. In fact,
they were farmers, merchants,
artisans, and apprentices.
Section 1: The Road to Independence
161
Above: North Carolina had its own
tea party. Penelope Barker (left)
organized an “Association” of
fifty-one women who pledged not
to drink tea. A British cartoonist
drew this unflattering picture
of the Edenton Tea Party (right).
In October 1774, fifty-one women from around the Albemarle Sound
met at the home of Mrs. Elizabeth King on the village green in Edenton.
Under the leadership of Penelope Barker, they promised they would drink
no more British tea or use other imported materials. Mrs. King served
herbal tea that day, and the event was reported all the way back to England. Since that time, North Carolinians have remembered it as their
own Edenton Tea Party.
By 1775, Boston and the British were so hostile to one another that
fighting broke out when soldiers were sent to seize weapons and ammunition the leaders of the rebellion were hiding in the town of Concord.
Shots fired in Lexington led to a battle at Concord that started the American War for Independence. Those shots were said to be “heard round
the world.” Very soon, North Carolinians heard about them and took
action to join in the struggle for independence.
It’s Your Turn
1. Why did the king want to keep the colonists east of the
Proclamation Line?
2. What did the Stamp Act require?
162
Chapter 5: The Struggle for Independence