The local elite organized and petitioned, and also worked to suppress crime and operate some missing government functions such as courts.
Back in far-off Charleston the royal governor and the elected assembly agreed as to the wisdom of the demands and in 1769 enacted the appropriate legislation.
The two movements were not in contact, The regulators in North Carolina mobilized an army to fight the colonial militia but they were decisively defeated at the Battle of Alamance in 1771.
The South Carolina regulation helped catalyze the Revolutionary War, as the residents found the distant authority of London to be too slow in responding to their demands.
During this time, the inland settlers on the South Carolina frontier suffered more from violent crimes, including organized bandit raids.
In the colonial period on the western frontier, this was not seen as an honorable profession, and hunters were labeled as vagrants, bandits, and outlaws, and blamed for stealing livestock.
Their primary aim was to protect themselves and their assets from bandits; their secondary purpose was to get courts, churches and schools established in their quickly growing communities.
Coupled with the 1769 ordinance for the preservation of deer, which forbade fire hunting, the new law resulted in many hunters being whipped and banished from the area.
The cooperation between frontier and coastal colonists was so effective that by 1771, Governor Charles Montague had issued a full pardon for any actions taken by the regulators in his state.