![]() By 1771 protest had become confrontation, and a large group of mostly unarmed westerners gathered to clash with North Carolina militia units at the Battle of Alamance. Like many other western settlers, however, the family became involved with the Regulators, a populist movement that grew up in reaction to the political and economic restrictions imposed on the frontier or back-country farmers by the merchants and planters of the tidewater area and by the local politicians and lawyers. In time the Few family achieved a measure of prosperity, emerging as political leaders in rural Orange County. The whole community decided to abandon its farms and try its luck among the more fertile lands on the southern frontier. ![]() When a series of droughts struck the region in the 1750s, the Fews and their neighbors-actually a sort of extended family consisting of cousins and distant relations-found themselves on the brink of ruin. This belief became the hallmark of his long public service.ĭescendant of Quaker shoe polisher Richard Few from the county of Wiltshire, England, and his son Isaac Few, a cooper who emigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1640s, the Few family lived in northern Maryland, where they eked out a modest living raising tobacco on small holdings. ![]() Men of his stripe came to realize during the years of military conflict that the rights of the individual, so jealously prized on the frontier, could be nurtured and protected only by a strong central government accountable to the people. The war profoundly affected Few's attitude toward the political future of the new nation, transforming the rugged frontier individualist into a forceful exponent of a permanent union of the states. Few's dedication to the common good and his natural military acumen quickly brought him to the attention of the leaders of the Patriot cause, who eventually invested him with important political responsibilities as well. Important in any theater of military operations, leadership and organizational ability were particularly needed in the campaigns in the south where a dangerous and protracted struggle against a determined British invader intimately touched the lives of many settlers. In the case of the self-educated Few, that image was largely accurate.įew's inherent gifts for leadership and organization, as well as his sense of public service, were brought out by his experience in the American Revolutionary War. The idea of a rude frontiersman providing the democratic leaven within an association of the rich and powerful has always excited the American imagination, nurtured on stories of Davy Crockett. ![]() Exhibiting those characteristics of self-reliance vital for survival on the American frontier, he became an intimate of the nation's political and military elite. ![]() Senators from Georgia.īorn into a poor yeoman farming family, Few achieved both social prominence and political power later in life. state of Georgia at the Constitutional Convention and signed the U.S. (J– July 16, 1828) was an American Founding Father, lawyer, politician and jurist. ![]()
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