The people of North Carolina were likely to prove much more intractable than those of South Carolina and Georgia. They were chiefly descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers--stern Presbyterians and ardent lovers of liberty. When Tryon was their governor, they had resisted his tyranny under the name of Regulators, and at Mecklenburg had published a declaration of independence more than a year before Congress took the same attitude of defiance. Such were the North Carolinians; and their State was destined to be the scene of many battles in which the power of Britain was bravely resisted. Having made the necessary dispositions Cornwallis entrusted the command on the frontier to Lord Rawdon and returned to Charleston in order to organize the civil government of the province and to establish such regulations as circumstances required. But Cornwallis showed himself more a soldier than a politician, and more a tyrant than either. Instead of endeavoring to regain, by kindness and conciliation, the good will of a people whose affections were alienated from the cause in which he was engaged, Cornwallis attempted to drive them into allegiance by harshness and severity. Indeed, many of the British officers viewed the Americans merely in the light of rebels and traitors, whose lives it was indulgence to spare; treated them not only with injustice, but with insolence and insult more intolerable than injustice itself; and exercised a rigor which greatly increases the miseries without promoting the legitimate purposes of war. By the capitulation of Charleston, the citizens were prisoners on parole, but successive proclamations were published, each abridging the privileges of prisoners more than that which had gone before. A board of police was established for the administration of justice, and before that board British subjects were allowed to sue for debts, but prisoners were denied that privilege; they were liable to prosecution for debts, but had no security for what was owing them, except the honor of their debtors, and that, in many instances, was found a feeble guarantee. If they complained they were threatened with close confinement; numbers were imprisoned in the town and others consigned to dungeons at a distance from their families. In short, every method, except that of kindness and conciliation, was resorted to in order to compel the people to become British subjects. A few, who had always been well affected to the royal cause, cheerfully returned to their allegiance, and many followed the same course from convenience. To abandon their families and estates and encounter all the privations of fugitives required a degree of patriotism and fortitude which few possessed.