Most stories about America’s founding point to two cities. Boston, where the tea went into the harbor. Philadelphia, where the men signed their names. Freedom and Glory sits a long way from either one, in Hillsborough, North Carolina, where some of the earliest moves toward independence happened a few minutes from our front door.
On the newest episode of Tales of American Spirit, Liz Morris and Bill Lumet sit down with Kelly Arnold of the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough. What starts as a local history lesson turns into something you don’t expect: the story of a small backcountry town that helped build a country, told by a guide who makes you feel like you were standing in the street watching it happen.
Here is the part that surprised us most.
Before the Revolution, Hillsborough had its own rebellion. Farmers from the surrounding country, called the Regulators, came into town to protest officials who were overcharging them on taxes and seizing their land when they could not pay. It boiled over into a riot in 1770 and hangings the year after. You might expect those angry farmers to become the local face of the Revolution a few years later. They did not. The men who put the Regulators down, the lawyers and officials living in town, are the ones who went on to lead the fight against Britain. The people asking for fairer government got crushed by the people who later declared their own.
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Kelly walks through how a town that small ended up mattering so much, and why the people who ran it landed on the side they did. It is a knottier, more honest picture of the founding than the one most of us got in school.
The heart of the episode is a meeting. In August of 1775, with the royal governor fled and hiding near the coast, 213 delegates came to Hillsborough and spent the better part of a month building a government in plain sight. They set up their own currency, drew their own military districts, and made plans to manufacture weapons, paper, and cloth, all while still, on paper, professing loyalty to the king.
Kelly has the best description of that moment we have heard. She compares it to a breakup, the kind where nobody has said the final word yet but one person has started quietly gathering their things. We will let her tell that part. It is worth hearing in her words.
What makes the conversation land is not the dates. It is the way Kelly keeps pulling 1775 into the present, whether she is talking about how slowly the news traveled, or how a town of a few hundred suddenly swelled with the most powerful men in North Carolina, or why independence was a far slower and more reluctant thing than the fireworks version suggests. The argument took years. People were frightened, families divided, and it very nearly went another way.
If you have driven past one of those brown Historic Hillsborough signs and wondered what the fuss was about, this is the episode that answers it.
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A few things we are leaving for Kelly to tell you in the episode:
Edmund Fanning became the most hated man in town, and what he did to the farmers who came to pay their taxes is hard to forget.
When the delegates needed a safe place to meet, the choice of Hillsborough came down to one thing, and it wasn’t comfort.
A few months later, a single battle turned wavering North Carolinians into committed revolutionaries.
And in our Flags of Change segment, the story of a flag born right down the road, founded by officers who laid down their weapons and went home, and the Roman farmer who gave the whole thing its name.
You can also catch Kelly and the Alliance in person. They run guided walking tours of Hillsborough on Saturday mornings, and in September they host the Outlandish Hillsborough Scottish Festival, which ties the Outlander series back to the very Regulator history this episode digs into.
Listen to the full episode of Tales of American Spirit wherever you get your podcasts.
