Dr. Thomas Young [ 17 ] ton Massacre (March 5, 1770) but not as a "pestilence" seeking to arouse the people. "He said the Soldiers had been making a Rumpus, but were gone to their Barracks!' a witness reported, and he urged the people to return to their homes.24 In July a group of protesting merchants marched through the streets "with Dr Young at their head with Three Flags Flying, Drums Beating & a french Horn!' Thomas Hutchinson in August included Young among the city's radical leaders who "still influence the mob [and] who threaten all who import!'28 Sometime in the autumn of 1770 Young left Boston, according to Thomas Hutchinson, the sole authority for this information. "A Doctor Young, whose name has often appeared in the newspapers, has taken passage for North Carolina" Hutchinson wrote a friend. "He may have a chance among the 'Regulators' there!' It is doubtful Young ever visited North Carolina; yet to have done so would have fit both his and Samuel Adams's conception of the job at hand—to stir up the continent.26 Young would have been the ideal choice to investigate the uprising in North Carolina to see if it could be tied to the movement in Boston. Unfortunately, he would have found that the Regulators were rebelling against a set of kjcal grievances and that no part of their uprising resulted from bitterness against England. If Young did visit North Carolina, he stayed only a short time, for he was back in Boston on March 5, 1771 in time to deliver the first anniversary oration on the Boston Massacre, an event that would become a fixture in Boston tradition down through the Revolution. Nothing of his speech has survived, nor has any explanation of why he of all the Boston radical leaders was handed the honor of giving the initial address.27 After this Dr. Young again slips from sight, this time for over a year and a half, reappearing briefly in August of 1772 to buy a small house 24L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds., Legal Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 112. 26John Rowe's Diary, July 24, 1770, and Thomas Hutchinson to Governor Francis Bernard, August 28,1770, in Edes, "Memoir of Dr. Thomas Young!' 28. 26 Ibid., 28. The standard account of the movement, John S. Bassett's "The Regulators of North Carolina (1765—1771)',' Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1894 (Washington, D.C., 1895), 141—212, makes no mention of Young. 27 Edes, "Memoir of Dr. Thomas Young" 29. (The first extant printed address commemorating the anniversary of the Boston Massacre is James Lovell's oration, delivered on April 2,1771.)