The Invisible Line (4 page)

By August 9, Powell was deep in the backcountry, seventy miles up the Pee Dee River from his plantation, forty miles below the North Carolina border, and within marching distance of Gideon Gibson's home. The rebel lived along the river in a place of rolling hills called Mars Bluff. Powell assumed his command by recruiting a “posse comitatus” twenty-five strong. Thirty-five more from local militia companies made a total of sixty men. But Powell knew the posse was not large enough to arrest Gibson. “By all Accounts,” he remembered, “Gibson was Guarded by a large Body of men and could in an hour raise three hundred more.” Powell sent orders out to several militia commanders nearby, asking for one hundred additional men in five days' time. With a force of 160, he entertained a “hopefull Expectation” that he could crush Gibson.
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At the same time, Powell invited Gibson to negotiate the terms of his surrender. Powell thought meeting with Gibson “might perhaps have a good effect” and was confident that he could talk sense into the rogue. After all, Gibson had not always been a threat to public order. Before the summer of 1768, he had led as honorable a life as a man could lead in the backcountry. Although his holdings were dwarfed by Powell's plantation, Gibson was one of the largest landowners in the Mars Bluff area, with hundreds of acres of fields and cowpens. His family had been one of the first to settle the backcountry in the 1730s. Besides the fact that the Gibsons were free people of color, there was little to distinguish them from other prosperous planters anywhere in South Carolina. They negotiated land deals, rounded up stray horses, loaned money, administered wills, and helped establish a church. They bought and sold slaves and gave them as gifts to family members.
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Despite the Gibson family's relative success, South Carolina's backcountry was indisputably wild. In Gideon Gibson's world, the line between civilization and savagery was palpably thin. Life in the wilderness was never secure. In early 1760 thousands of Cherokees had attacked the backcountry, upending thirty years of economic and social ascent for the Gibsons. British and colonial soldiers had battled and starved the tribe into submission by December 1761, but the conflict left a landscape smoldering with torched homes, laid low by pox and hunger, and littered with the mutilated corpses of Indians and settlers. Dazed soldiers and survivors roamed the wilderness, scrounging for food, while the breakdown of civil society attracted debtors and runaway slaves, thieves and poachers, and gangs of “banditti.”
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Farmers in Gideon Gibson's position found themselves robbed repeatedly of their cattle and horses. Outlaws invaded their homes and stole money and other possessions in brazen, sadistic attacks. They gouged out victims' eyes, stuck their feet into fires, and branded them with glowing pokers. Newspapers reported that bandits were kidnapping and raping women and luring them into lives of crime and vice. With scant law enforcement and no courts in the backcountry, the farmers had to transport criminals more than a hundred miles to Charlestown to bring anyone to justice—a long, difficult, and expensive journey. If a witness could not travel there or arrived late, the defendants went free. “The honest Man is not secure in his Property,” landowners complained, “and Villainy becomes rampant with Impunity.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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