John Dooly - A Changing Frontier

A Changing Frontier

The growing number of Baptists in the backcountry, members of a new Protestant religion that Anglican minister Charles Woodmason noted with great disdain, represented one of the many important changes along the frontier. Sanders Walker, one of the appraisers of Patrick Dooly's estate, had been a Baptist minister in South Carolina since 1767. He and his fellow locally ordained clergymen created their own revolution in filling a long-standing demand for ministers in the backcountry where the need could not be met by the traditional religions that required men like Woodmason to obtain formal training. That Baptists appeared in large numbers among all political factions on the frontier during the Revolution illustrates that this social change, like so many others, transcended the conflict of 1775-1783.(n12)

The South Carolina Regulator rebellion that broke out among backcountry people and literally at John Dooly's very door in Ninety Six in the late 1760s serves as an even greater example of what historian Jack Greene described as settlers on the southern frontier desiring "improvement" in the form of courthouses, schools, towns, and an environment conducive to trade and investment. Civil affairs on the South Carolina frontier proved so confused that Dooly's father, for example, once received a grant of land that appears in various colonial records as being in three different counties, none of which had a courthouse or any other form of local government. Rev. Charles Woodmason, a Regulator supporter, denounced what he viewed as a morally uninhibited culture in frontier South Carolina, but he also saw the growth of its population as dynamic (he claimed that ninety-four out of every one hundred brides in ceremonies he performed were obviously with child) and that its economy grew as fast. Its struggle became an economic revolution in the form of opportunities emerging so fast as to force a breakdown of any limitations placed on it. Thousands of frontiersmen like Dooly participated in that colonial revolution and demanded from South Carolina's government (what historian Hugo Bicheno termed as "Tidewater Rats" and "wealthy coastal slavocrats" with a "psedo-aristiocratic social structure") the right to the benefits of rule of law in the backcountry. As with almost all of the frontiersmen directly affected by that successful and sometimes violent popular uprising to force the establishment of courts on the frontier, Dooly's name appears on none of the surviving records, including on the list of pardons granted to one hundred and twenty Regulator leaders.(n13)