Storyline
How Orange County’s Revolutionary authorities used the oath of allegiance: the 1775 efforts to win over former Regulators and people of scruple, Michael Holt’s oath, the Loyalist estates inventoried, the county court’s citations of suspects and merchants, the sixty-day orders to leave and the 1782 commissioner of confiscated estates.
In briefDuring the Revolution, Orange County's new authorities sorted friends from enemies by an oath of allegiance. In 1775 the Provincial Congress at Hillsborough tried persuasion with former Regulators and people of scruple. By 1777 the county court was jailing a man who refused the oath and ordering merchants who had traded with Britain to swear or leave within sixty days. Magistrates tendered the oath district by district in 1778, Loyalist property was inventoried, and in 1782 the Assembly named a commissioner of confiscated estates for the Hillsborough District.
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No works in the index are currently linked directly to this storyline. The works below provide background on Colonial Orange County.
In August 1775 the Provincial Congress at Hillsborough named thirteen of its members, among them Memucan Hunt of Granville County, to confer with inhabitants who held religious or political scruples and to bring them by argument and persuasion into support of the American cause. It also agreed to protect former Regulators who broke the oath of allegiance forced on them after Alamance and named Richard Caswell, Maurice Moore and Henry Pattillo to persuade them to join the cause; William L. Saunders later remarked on the irony, since Pattillo had joined in denouncing the Regulators in 1768. In February 1776 Michael Holt took a commission from Governor Martin and started for the Loyalist gathering at Cross Creek, but turned for home with some of his men; after his arrest he was permitted to take the Whig oath of allegiance, as James Hunter later was. On May 1 the congress named John Butler and William Tate to list the property of Orange prisoners sent out of the province or out on parole or bail, guard it against waste and see that their wives and children did not go without. George Micklejohn, the Hillsborough rector, taken prisoner after Moore's Creek and paroled, took the oath before the Halifax Congress on November 24, 1776 and was discharged.
Under the new state the oath served as a test: those who would not swear allegiance could be jailed or sent away. In May 1777 the county court jailed Charles Richardson, called before it as a suspicious person, until he took the oath and paid the fees. That August, under a state act, the court cited fourteen merchants and agents who had traded with Britain, among them James Hogg; only Nathaniel Rochester and John Hogan took the oath, and the court ordered all who failed to appear or to swear, Quakers excepted, to leave for Europe or the West Indies within sixty days. The court named two magistrates in each district to tender the oath to people suspected of disloyalty, and they returned lists of those who took and refused it to the May 1778 term, when Hogg, William Johnston and Samuel Strudwick were cited again and those who still declined were given sixty days to leave. In April 1782 the Assembly at Hillsborough elected William Moore commissioner of confiscated Loyalist estates for the Hillsborough District.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 9 dated events in the chronology →
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows them all.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
Background reading on Colonial Orange County. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
A picture book set in the Eno River valley of Orange County in 1776. Four red wolf pups are born in a woodland den and spend their first summer and fall learning to hunt and howl with their family, while nearby a young widow, Sally Few, keeps her household going as the Revolution unsettles the countryside. Eileen Heyes wrote the story, published in 2025 by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History with color illustrations and maps, 42 pages.
Stewart E. Dunaway's life of Edmund Fanning (1739-1818), the colonial officeholder in Hillsborough whom the Regulators singled out and who left North Carolina as a loyalist, together with the Fanning family's genealogy. Self-published through Lulu in 2011, 223 pages with illustrations, facsimiles, genealogical tables and maps. Topics include American loyalists and Hillsborough and Orange County biography and genealogy.
Suzanne Adair's 2011 mystery, one of her Michael Stoddard novels, set in Hillsborough during the Southern campaign of the American Revolution and written as a historical thriller. Adair is a North Carolina author.
Stewart E. Dunaway's account of the Battle of Lindley's Mill, fought in September 1781 after the Loyalist David Fanning raided Hillsborough and carried off Governor Thomas Burke. Burke, Fanning and the Lindley family, whose mill gave the fight its name, are the people at its center, with the Revolutionary campaigns in North Carolina as the frame. Published in 2009.
Stewart E. Dunaway's transcription of letters exchanged between Jesse Benton and Thomas Hart from 1780 to 1790, concerning Hart's affairs at Hartford, his place at Hillsborough. The letters concern the economic and social conditions of Hillsborough in the eighteenth century and the Revolution in North Carolina. Self-published through lulu.com in 2009, 68 pages with illustrations and facsimiles, and part of the library's Wall Local History Collection.
David Lindsay Neville's genealogy of the descendants of Matthew McCauley (1750-1821), one of the landowners who gave land for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Lloyd and Neville families come into it as well, and Orange County genealogy is its field. Compiled in 2001.
Cleo Greer Hogan and Charles Edward Hogan's genealogy of the descendants of Colonel John Hogan (about 1745-1792) and Mary Lloyd Hogan of Orange County, North Carolina, and Montgomery County, Tennessee. Self-published in 1998 in one illustrated volume with various pagings, it follows the family from the Orange County Piedmont to Tennessee.
Marshall L. Smith's brief life of William Churton, 1710 to 1767, the surveyor who laid out Hillsborough in the 1750s, with notes on the Churton family. Self-published in Hillsborough in 1998, 22 unnumbered pages with illustrations and maps.
Stewart E. Dunaway's earlier compilation of the Jesse Benton papers from Hartford at Hillsborough, covering 1780 to 1790, self-published in 1991, 68 pages with illustrations. Alongside the correspondence of Benton and Thomas Hart, it covers the Revolutionary War campaigns in North Carolina, including the battles of Hart's Mill and Lindley's Mill in 1781, both fought in what was then Orange County. Dunaway reissued the letters in 2009.
Seventh volume of William D. Bennett's Orange County records, gathering miscellaneous papers of the Granville Proprietary land office, including an Anson County petition of about 1754 to 1759. Self-published in 1991. Like the rest of the series it abstracts colonial land records for researchers of early Orange County families and tracts.
Nancy Wallace Henderson's play, staged and filmed as a dramatic reenactment for the bicentennial of the 1788 convention at Hillsborough, where North Carolina's delegates met from July 21 to August 4 to consider the new federal Constitution and declined to ratify it without a bill of rights. The 1990 recording is a filmed performance on constitutional history and Hillsborough's part in it.
Volume V of William D. Bennett's Orange County records, abstracting the deeds and surveys of the Granville Proprietary land office from 1752, the year the county was formed, through 1760. Self-published in 1989, 164 pages with maps. Each survey describes a tract and its neighbors; volume VI carries the deeds and surveys on to 1763.
Sources and research tools for this storyline. Research guide: Follow an event across several accounts.
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