us implore the protection of that infinite good and gracious Being, " by whom kings reign and princes decree justice."
" Nil despcrandum."
Nothing is to be despaired of.
[John Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Boston, 1768), 30-35.
150. Riot of the North Carolina Regulators (1770)
Henderson was an associate justice of the province of North Carolina, holding a Superior Court where the riot described below occurred. This is a typical example of the many local disturbances of the period throughout the colonies. — Bibliography : Moore, North Carolina, I, ch. vii ; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History, VI, 80-82.
WITH the deepest concern for my Country I have lately been witness to a scene which not only threatened the peace and well being of this Province for the future, but was in itself the most horrid and audacious insult to Government, perpetrated with such circumstances of cruelty and madness as (I believe) scarcely has been equaled at any time. However flattering your Excellency s prospects may have been with respect to the people called Regulators, their late conduct too sufficiently evince that a wise, mild and benevolent administration comes very far short of bringing them to a sense of their duty. They are abandoned to every principle of virtue and desperately engaged not only in the most shocking barbarities but a total subversion of the Constitution.
On Monday last being the second day of Hillsborough Superior Court, early in the morning the Town was filled with a great number of these people shouting, hallooing & making a considerable tumult in the streets. At about 11 o'clock the Court was opened, and immediately the House filled as close as one man could stand by another, some with clubs others with whips and switches, few or none without some weapon. When the House had become so crowded that no more could well get in, one of them (whose name I think is called Fields) came forward and told me he had something to say before I proceeded to business. The accounts I had previously received together with the manner and appearance of these men and the abruptness of their address rendered
