Watauga

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The Nicholas who settled on the Corotoman died young (ca. 1628-72), but the younger son who went to Baltimore was granted a long life (1657-1730). His grandson the chapel builder, who became a Quaker in Pennsylvania and a pioneer in Virginia, died at middle age ( (ca. 1702-52). But the great grandson, Nicholas of Watauga (1724-1818), born during the reign of George I, while the American colonies were still no more than a narrow fringe of settlement along a rim of coastline, lived through the reign of George II, saw George III overthrown and a new American republic established on unheard of principles. He experienced the presidential administrations of all four founders. His birthplace swelled with new immigrants. The wilderness was no longer impenetrable, opportunities beckoned all the way to the Mississippi basin. Nicholas lived on to see one more Virginian, James Monroe, assume the presidency.

His family had moved from Baltimore to Virginia while Nicholas was still a boy. Already at sixteen he married a Baltimore girl, Ruth Acre. Their first children were born in Virginia (Richard, Elizabeth, William, and Sarah). In their eyes, the whole country may have seemed on the move. New settlers arrived in Bedford, and pioneers were passing on southward down the Great Wagon Road. The young couple together with friends and relatives--the Talbots, for example--themselves explored on down the Blue Ridge into Rowan County, at that time still a part of North Carolina. Three more sons were born to them there, Nathan, Amon and, yes, a Nicholas. They found the Carolina backwoods in the latter half of the eighteenth century much wilder than the Virginia countryside where their parents had settled. Along with fellow Englishmen from the tidewater, Carolina took more recent immigrants from Pennsylvania, or even directly from Europe. It was a more diverse populace, and developed a new class consciousness. The long familiar distinction between gentry and servant became blurred in the backwoods.

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Life in their America was described by one Francis Baily, a young British banker and later a noted astronomer. In his tour of the former colonies (1796-7), Baily reported the breakfasts remarkable, not so much for the prodigious quantity as for the way all the guests sat around the same table without regard to rank or station. Even the prices seemed indiscriminate:

If our table were spread with all the profusion of American luxury, such as ham, cold beef, fried chicken &c. &c., (which are not uncommon for breakfast in this part of the world), or whether we sat down to a dish of tea and hoe-cake, our charge was all the same. The accommodations we met with on the road were pretty well, considering the short time this country has been settled, and the character and disposition of its inhabitants, which are not those of polished nations, but a character and disposition arising from a consciousness of independence, accompanied by a spirit and manner highly characteristic of this consciousness. It is not education alone that forms this character of the Americans: it stands upon a firmer basis than this. The means of subsistence being so easy in the country, and their dependence on each other consequently so trifling, that spirit of servility to those above them so prevalent in European manners, is wholly unknown to them; and they pass their lives without any regard to the smiles or the frowns of men in power. (p. 42)

Baily, with his strong British class consciousness, was especially sensitive to the rude and sometimes filthy living conditions on the frontier. He spoke of three "classes" of settlement, finding that the coarseness of manners, food, and shelter was gradually refined as new waves of settlers arrived. We might today speak of three developmental stages. It seems probable that the Hailes were seldom really out at the true wilderness frontier, but may have belonged to the second or third wave, moving in to occupy lands still relatively cheap but already cleared of the most vicious Indian resistance, where a modicum of cleanliness and regularity was becoming possible.

The subsistence farmers in the Carolina backwoods became alienated from the ruling English elite on the coastal plain. They called Governor Tryon's new residence "Tryon's Palace."

Although by no means an evil man, Tryon's burgeoning administrative personnel did actually find profit in malgovernance. And times were changing.   England, having its own troubles, sought new revenues from the colonies. The notorious Stamp Act in 1765, and then the Quartering Act (which required colonials to provide housing and food for the Redcoats) provoked calling of the Continental Congress at Philadelphia. Yet further taxes levied in the Townsend Act (1767) set the stage for the sensational Boston Tea Party in Massachussetts. The Sons of Liberty were popular mong Carolinians, as were genuine revolutionary rabble rousers from New Jersey.

       Less touted by academic historians, but more informative is the eloquent "Nutbush Address" by a North Carolina school teacher, George Sims on June 6th, 1765, for which the governor jailed him. Sims explains in detail how public officials and legal counsel frequently ruin a poor farmer with fees and court costs alone. He makes the argument that where there is no law, failure to comply with the arbitrarty demands of lawless officers is no transgression. That is why "well regulated society" is essential. Sims's line of thought provoked disussion during the ensuing years, as we can tell by the persistence of his term "regulate." Organized resistance to the Carolina legal establishment spread. From a meeting in April of 1767, we learn that Governor Tyron's officials were demanding $15 for a marriage license when the legal rate was $1. On this occasion they petitioned the governor for redress of such grievances. On March 22nd, 1768 "Regulator Advertisement Number 6" announced a meeting to "regulate" the payment of taxes. The keynote of the subsequent agreement was: "An officer is a servant of the publick, and we are determined to have the officers of this country under a better and honester regulation than any have been for some time past."

          On the sparsely populated countryside, any crowd of people suggested danger. Assembly for the purpose of protest, like these Regulator meetings, frightened the authorities. In the spring of 1771, Governor Tyron went out to meet with the Regulators, bringing along some heavy artillery. He ordered their emissary shot, and routed the Regulators at the so-called Battle of Alamance.   He hanged several of their leaders, including Benjamin Merrill, captured later, after that tedious English fashion of hanging, drawing and quartering. During this period of violence, many inhabitants of Rowan County (the northwest section of North Carolina) moved into the Watauga region. Perhaps the Hailes were already settled there.

       The Watauga Petition of 1776, sometimes referred to as the first American Declaration of Independence, was an early effort on their part toward self government. The John Haile whose signature appears on this document is Nicholas's nephew (born 1743, his brother George's son). John fought together with Matthew Talbot at King's Mountain in October of 1780. This was the decisive battle between Loyalist colonials and Patriot colonials--Americans on both sides. The cousins John and Matthew fought as Patriots. Needless to say, both had once been as loyal to their king as their forebears of centuries past--or their cousins on the other side.

        The Nicholas Haile family, who had pressed on from Bedford beyond the mountains into the Watauga valley,had returned home to Baltimore before the outbreak of hostilities. The older brothers (Richard, Nathan, and Amon) joined Washington's Continental Army, but when peace returned the extended family, Nicholas and his brothers George and Shadrack, together with their children, headed back down the Blue Ridge for the Watauga.

        Perhaps they were no more accepting of the federal government in Philadelphia than they had been under British royalty. In 1787, inhabitants of the Watauga valley petitioned North Carolina for an independent state of Franklin. Two of the signatories to the Franklin Petition were Nicholas's brother Shadrack (b. 1735, in Baltimore), and Shadrack's son of the same name. These men of the fourth and fifth generations on American soil represented a populace now formally separated from England, long since having asserted its own distinctive character. When they called themselves Patriots, that certainly did not mean they championed a powerful American government. Not only had they signed the Franklin Petition for independence from North Carolina. In the very same year they were among those refusing to ratify the Constitution. It is revealing that the elder Shadrack was able to sign his name, while his son marks the Franklin Petition with his X.

The New Republic and its Western Waters

        The Haile boys who had served under George Washington were affected by one of the major issues confronting the new government in Philadelphia: its debts to the veterans. So long as their revered general was Head of State, factionalism remained furtive, and partisanship was despised. Just as soon as the first president stepped down, two fairly distinct mind sets became dominant. There were those who, like Washington himself, favored the strongest possible executive. Washington's successor, John Adams, and especially Washington's favorite, Alexander Hamilton, felt the same way. Hamilton argued for a national bank to enable payment of the Continental Army. Theirs was the so called Federalist view. It appealed particularly to the commercial class in New England, possibly because they had cause to desire reconciliation with their counterparts in England.

        Agricultural people like the Hailes, on the other hand, were still apprehensive of government in any form, and jealous of local control. They had little interest in Europe and no desire for reconciliation with England. Quite the contrary, they were still in mortal combat with the Redcoats' old allies, the Cherokees, who still struggled against white settlement in the Watauga valley. As the Watauga Petition shows, the settlers did not really want a federal government. They naturally sympathized with the Virginians' anti-Federalism. In admiration of the radical new republic set up in France, some began to call themselves Republicans. This was the sentiment of the Virginia leadership, Jefferson as well as his successors, Presidents Madison and Monroe. Nicholas and his sons may themselves have been francophiles (Lafayette became a favorite given name), and they cherished Jeffersonian hostility toward England.

        They were also opposed to concentration of wealth and power, especially in government. They did not favor Alexander Hamilton's proposal for a national bank to pay off the new republic's war debt. They liked Jefferson's objection that the veterans had already sold their claims to speculators for cash money, anyhow, and at a discount.   But the Hamiltonian principle prevailed for a time, and the national debt was honored. Now the infant republic still stood at a crossroads. Was it to grow into the powerful nation Washington, Hamilton, and Adams envisaged? Or would a free citizenry, the ideal of Jeffersonian Republicans, remain beyond the reach of national taxes and federal compulsion? The question loomed portentously when the Federalists under the Adams administration passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. In 1799, the Kentucky Resolution and the Virginia Resolution (composed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively) declared these federal laws null and void, as being beyond the Constitutional powers of the new government. It was the first intimation of states rights, and of the possibility that states might withdraw from the recent Union.

        And then in 1800, Thomas Jefferson himself succeeded to the presidency. After two terms he was followed by his Virginian protégés. James Madison found his new nation again in conflict with Great Britain. His fellow Virginians were now quite willing to supply the national force they had hitherto despised. This time the opposition was taken up by the merchants in New York and New England. They valued their good relations both with their British business associates and with Indian tribes allied with Great Britain. The Congress waffled. Madison did not get much funding for the military. Hostilities with with the Indians were about to strike home to the Haile family again.

        Nicholas had already made out his last will and testament, dated in April of 1807. Actually more than a decade of life was yet left to him, and he was to outlive the youngest son mentioned in the will.

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        Joshua Thomas Haile (1767-1813), like his father and grandfather, had grown up in Baltimore County. The great event of his boyhood had been the War of Independence, which accounted for his parents' move back to Baltimore. Andrew Jackson, born in in the same year as Joshua, could personally testify to brutality under the sword of British officers. Joshua may not have acquired Andrew's profound hatred of all things British, but he may very well have had similar memories of the Red Coats. As an eight-year-old with three brothers in the Continental Army, young Joshua surely gazed in awe upon all of George Washington's Patriot soldiers. He married the daughter of a captain in the Continental Army, Joshua Stephensen of Baltimore. After Independence was won, the young couple followed the family back to Tennessee. Mary produced ten children there before leaving her husband a widower in his middle forties. With the children to look out for, the youngest among them just seven, Joshua might well have thought himself exempt from military service.

        At this time the southern boundary of Kentucky, running across the mountainous Cumberland wilderness, existed only cartographically.   "Kentucky" often referred to the entire mountainous area beyond the Appalachians, where Nicholas Haile's family had settled. Volunteers from this area made up a large part of General William Henry Harrison's troops combating Tecumseh's Indian Confederation in Indiana and Ohio. They suffered serious setbacks during the winter of 1812-13. Reports were received of terrible Indian atrocities, especially after the Battle of Raisin River. Joshua, not free of animosity toward the British and toward the Cherokee, volunteered for Colonel Stewart's Kentucky militia in Knoxville on May 29th of 1813, for five years. His troop was immediately dispatched into the Indian infested forests of Ohio, no doubt arriving in time to take part in the sieges of Fort Meigs and Fort Stephenson that summer. Although ultimately victorious, the Kentuckians are reported to have suffered 64% of all casualties in the War of 1812. Joshua was one of those casualties, but the record shows only that he died on September first of the year of his enlistment, in the wartime Ohio capital, Chillicothe, the militia station where the wounded were returned from the battles.

     The British were finally defeated two years later by Joshua's countrymen, the Volunteers from Tennessee. Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans came just in time to quash yet another plan to secede from the Union, this time by New Englanders, who had been opposed to the war all along. Massachusetts' governor had already sent a secret delegation to England to work out a separate peace. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont, at the Hartford Convention in the winter of 1814-1815, questioned the constitutionality of the Madison administration, and deliberated expelling the southern states from the Union. Joshua had died for the Union, but at the wrong time.

        Since Joshua's short career links the early tidewater family with its Western descendants, his death may offer an opportune point at which to review that old colonial frame of mind which Joshua had inherited. On the one hand, the fierce loyalty which characterized an agrarian population constantly at watch over family and community are beyond our experience today, as is the temper of a father shielding his household against marauding savages. On the other hand, we may in our world have a heightened appreciation for Joshua's economic incentives. They may help us appreciate Joshua's motive for leaving his family to go to a far away fight in Ohio.

        In Joshua's mind, land was still the basis of all wealth. Land had to be inherited, obtained by head right, or awarded as bounty for service. The Hailes had as yet no experience with a money economy. They knew neither wages nor monetary expenditures. They understood economics in simple terms of land, livestock, and crops. Land had lured them from Baltimore to Virginia before the War for Independence. Land was what drew them back to Watauga as soon as the war was over. Bounty land may have been part of Joshua's motive in 1813, for forsaking his children and joining the militia. Joshua's daughter Bethsheba applied for the deceased soldier's service bounty in behalf of herself and her siblings.

Soil Capital

            Obviously, capital in an agrarian world (land) is not quite the same as what we call capital in our industrial times. We think of capital in monetary terms. Money, the economist likes to observe, is fungible. Land is not. In an industrial economy money is closely identified with wages and living expenses. The value of a currency fluctuates with the productivity achieved by men and machines. Moderns do not think of their wages as capital, or treat them as such. They may even contrast wages with capital.

        Land, on the other hand, is necessarily capital, and has no other economic function. It may incidentally supply expendable income, but "spending money" provided by a "money crop" is lagniappe, clearly distinguishable from the land itself. The agrarian mind does not view its capital in our industrial, democratic way. Land, unlike money, cannot be confused with income and outgo. Granted, land can provide a living in return for its owner's diligence and frugality, by the grace of God. But first of all the land must be conserved, then improved by hard labor. In addition to the social standing and sustenance land provides, the soil may sometimes yield up an increase. A few years down the line, the landsman may even accrue a surplus. In that case, he can acquire more land. Joshua's incentive to acquire land needs to be understood from that agrarian point of view held by his father and grandfathers. That is probably what cost him his life.

        The four Nicholas's had watched the old world change round about them. In their first century the colonists had been able to open the physical landscape westward, then to the south. During the second century, they had finally acquired independent control over it. They had taken on their own distinctive character, marrying into their own homogeneous community and developing their Protestant, backwoods culture. They maintained their distinctive qualities while everything about them changed. All these families, the Haile / Travers / Merryman/ Garrett / Stone / Long / Mead / Talbot /Acre / Stephenson bloodline, had one thing in common: all had elected to leave their community for wilderness abodes.

    They were not and had never been the good solid folk who stayed home. Nor did they resemble their staid Puritan contemporaries in Massachusetts. Their seed constituted a westward rolling phalanx which seems to have contained its own restless search for newground. Already Nicholas of Baltimore, son of an "adventurer," had left his father's new home in Virginia for Maryland. The next Nicholas seems to have followed Quakerism along the mountain range from Pennsylvania into Virginia. His son, Nicholas of Watauga, shuttled between Bedford, Rowan County (at that time the nortwestern section of North Carolina), and back to Baltimore County in Maryland. Their tobacco growing culture remained fairly profitable but problematic and opportunistic. The loss of the family's youngest boy, Joshua, to an indeterminate war in remote Ohio brought hardship, but no radical change in the next generation's outlook.

    The old agrarian economics still prevailed in the minds of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as it did in the South and on the frontier. Joshua's children continued their frugal farm ways in Tennessee. To such people, spending money is akin to frivolity, and taxes are the germ of tyranny. Nevertheless, commerce and industry were becoming dominant all around them. Prosperous business people did know the value of money. They recognized the benefits in a strong nation and cherished a government able to bring force to bear. The division between the frontiersmen and the businessmen became most apparent when it came to raising revenue. At this time, government's major funding source was tariffs on imports. Incidentally, tariffs had side effects which worked ill for the farmer, good for the manufacturer. The economic divide between farming and manufacturing worked as a regional divide. In the northeast a new, modern capitalism took form. It would quickly marginalize the old capitalism based on soil.

Independence and Servitude

    For settlers in the Carolinas, the quarrel with England had related to their intense drive for new lands. When the Royal Colony of North Carolina was demarcated from Virginia in the late 1720s, the king encouraged settlement from both sides of the Atlantic. But the his own treaties with the Indians barred encroachments on their lands. Royal treaties thus set up obstacles for enterprising hunters, traders, surveyors and farmers. The correspondence of William Mead and Matthew Talbot with John Blair (excerpted above) offers a good example. Blair assures the Indians that if Mead is shown to be in the wrong, he will certainly be punished. If, on the other hand, the Indians had in fact looted and killed, then Colonel Washington would not support their "folly." One can understand how Mead and his friends might have chafed at such unequal treatment.

    Nicholas's son-in-law Matthew Talbot was a signatory to the Watauga Petition, desiring independence of North Carolina (this was before the American Declaration of Independence). Another signatory was Nicholas's nephew John (George's son, Crowe, p. 38). Both men fought against the Loyalists in 1780 at The Battle of Kings Mountain, which marked the decisive phase in the American War for Independence. Although Haile and Talbot called themselves Patriots, it was their homeland they loved, not the government. North Carolina refused to ratify the Constitution; Nicholas's own son and grandson signed the Franklin petition in 1787, proclaiming a new republic west of the Appalachians, independent of the United States.

    The illiteracy which the younger Shadrack Haile demonstrated on this occasion was only one of the consequences of wilderness living. Another was their hand-to-mouth economy. A family's possessions lay exclusively in land and the labor to till it. Clans tried to stick together. There were lots of double cousins. Children made an indispensable asset. The mother loved to name a son Shadrack, because it promised at least two more boys to come. She routinely produced a child every two years, so that a brood of fifteen is not unusual. If a father died and left minor children, they would be welcomed by other land owners as indentured servants, as was the fortune of at least one of Nicholas's grandchildren, Joshua's son.

        The Carolinians' allegiance to the soil went back to feudal concepts, which Nicholas Haile had brought unrevised over to the Corotoman in the mid 1600s. Nicholas understood "his" land as enfeofed, that is to say, as granted by his liege lord Charles II in return for loyalty and services. Nicholas, in turn, was lord to his own servants, to whom he granted their living in the king's colony. At home in England they would have been called villeins, or serfs: they were free, but no less bound to the land than was their lord himself. Nicholas and his transported servants brought these traditional attachments with them, including the indenture, also an ancient English institution. Indenture was a written contract which took its name from the distinctive wavy cut along the top of the document. Indentures had long been customary in England between master and apprentice, spelling out their mutual obligations for a specified term. Scholars estimate that the vast majority of all immigrants to the early colonies came as indentured servants. Nicholas and his progeny relied on this institution to raise their tobacco.

    Indenture bound the worker, in return for passage to Virginia, to a number of years' service to his master, usually four to seven, but subject to extension for infractions. The master was in turn bound to provide sustenance, shelter and, at the end of the term, a new suit of clothes and other assistance. Nicholas obtained his initial land grants in return for transporting his indentured servants. He subsequently had to make more than one transatlantic voyage. The tedious and faithful labor required by tobacco growing was by no means plentiful in Virginia; Nicholas's progeny continued the same practice. There is record, for example, of one William Obrel, a convict indentured to Nicholas's grandson George in Baltimore County, for Obrel ran away in March of 1770 (Crowe, p. 18). Indentured servants could also be purchased in America. When this same George was about to move to Watauga, he

paid the passage of eight Irish bondsmen, off the block, Baltimore, and took them with him and his family to his new home. They all worked out their time, married and made good citizens. He also took with him several negro slaves. (quoted from personal papers of the Gresham family in Jonesborough, TN by Crowe, p. 31)

An application for a Revolutionary War pension by one Peter Finn, who claims to have served at Valley Forge, tells how his "former guardian Nicholas Haile" had hired him to go along to North Carolina. After coming to Watauga, Finn again volunteered for military service, and was among the Patriots at Kings Mountain. So we see that the Haile family was still acting as "guardians" of indentured servants on their move from Virginia to Tennessee, when Nicholas was a man in his fifties.

            When the first Nicholas was bringing indentured servants to the Corotoman in the previous century, Britain was already introducing Negro slavery into her Caribbean sugar plantations. When she opened the dense back country of South Carolina in the 1720s, Britain imported extensive slave labor. Raw hands from Africa, however, were ill suited to the cultivation of tobacco, and remained impractical in Nicholas's Virginia, for the time being. Nonetheless, his son Nicholas of Baltimore does mention "three old negroes" in his will of 1729. In the next century, Nicholas of Watauga mentions only one Negro in his will, whom he sets free. But this testator, now in his eighties, may have already disposed of others.   I do have to reproduce below a document showing that this Nicholas's grandson was involved in slave negotiations as late as the 1840s. At that point I will discuss how a new commodity, cotton, contributed to the slave economy and I speculate on the broader implications for our family. Slavery is a practice so sensationally condemned that historians tend to develop its ethical and moral grievousness more fully than they detail its social and economic emergence. It may be that the latter contexts can be made more understandable by means of individual experiences, as in these six generations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee.

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