Husband and Franklin kept up a correspondence through John Willcox,[8] a merchant of Cross Creek, now Fayetteville, North Carolina, who went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, twice annually to purchase goods.
He was jailed for speaking out and then set loose when an angry mob of armed backwoods farmers was coming to free him.
A small powderhorn used by Husband's cousin, Harmon Cox, at the Battle of Alamance and later carried by Husband when he fled to Somerset County, Pennsylvania, was donated to the Alamance Battlefield North Carolina State Historical Site by a descendant, Nick Sheedy, in 2008.
After the "rebellion" was crushed at the Battle of Alamance, Husband fled to Maryland under the name "Tuscape Death" and later called himself "Old Quaker".
He called for progressive taxation, paper money, and, as a proponent of greater participation of common people in government as well as in religion, more democracy.
In 1782 he released a pamphlet entitled "Proposals to Amend and Perfect the Policy of the Government of the United States of America" where he argued in favor of smaller legislative districts and legislatures for each county in order to maximize the influence of voters.
His outspoken nature and reputation for radicalism drew him into the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), where he served as a delegate to the Parkinson’s Ferry and Redstone meetings attempting to moderate the violent resistance to the excise tax on whiskey championed by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
When federal troops marched over the Allegheny Mountains, ostensibly to put down the revolt, they found no rioters but a lack of provisions which led them to thieve from local farmers, from which they acquired the ignominious name of the "Watermelon Army".
[1] After spending about six months in prison, at the age of 70, Herman Husband died about June 19, 1795, in a tavern outside Philadelphia, on his journey home.