Another important cause for Boone's removal from the neighborhood of Salisbury into the mountain fastnesses was the oppressive administration of the law by corrupt sheriffs, clerks, and tax-gatherers, and the dissatisfaction of the frontier squatters with the owners of the soil. At the close of the year 1764 reports reached the town of Wilmington, after the adjournment of the assembly in November, of serious disturbances in Orange County, due, it was alleged, to the exorbitant exactions of the clerks, registers, and some of the attorneys. [106] As a result of this disturbing news, Governor Dobbs issued a proclamation forbidding any officer to take illegal fees. Troubles had been brewing in the adjacent county of Granville ever since the outbreak of the citizens against Francis Corbin, Lord Granville's agent (January 24, 1759), and the issuance of the petition of Reuben Searcy and others (March 23d) protesting against the alleged excessive fees taken and injustices practised by Robert (Robin) Jones, the famous lawyer. These disturbances were cumulative in their effect; and the people at last (1765) found in George Sims, of Granville, a fit spokesman of their cause and a doughty champion of popular rights. In his "Serious Address to the Inhabitants of Granville County, containing an Account of our deplorable Situation we suffer … and some necessary Hints with Respect to a Reformation," recently brought to light, he presents a crushing indictment of the clerk of the county court, Samuel Benton, the grandfather of Thomas Hart Benton. After describing in detail the system of semi-peonage created by the merciless exactions of lawyers and petty court officials, and the insatiable greed of "these cursed hungry caterpillars," Sims with rude eloquence calls upon the people to pull them down from their nests for the salvation of the Commonwealth. [107]
Other abuses were also recorded. So exorbitant was the charge for a marriage-license, for instance, that an early chronicler records: "The consequence was that some of the inhabitants on the head-waters of the Yadkin took a short cut. They took each other for better or for worse; and considered themselves as married without further ceremony." The extraordinary scarcity of currency throughout the colony, especially in the back country, was another great hardship and a perpetual source of vexation. All these conditions gradually became intolerable to the uncultured but free-spirited men of the back country. Events were slowly converging toward a crisis in government and society. Independent in spirit, turbulent in action, the backwoodsmen revolted not only against excessive taxes, dishonest sheriffs, and extortionate fees, but also against the rapacious practices of the agents of Lord Granville. These agents industriously picked flaws in the titles to the lands in Granville's proprietary upon which the poorer settlers were seated; and compelled them to pay for the land if they had not already done so, or else to pay the fees twice over and take out a new patent as the only remedy of the alleged defect in their titles. In Mecklenburg County the spirit of backwoods revolt flamed out in protest against the proprietary agents. Acting under instructions to survey and close bargains for the lands or else to eject those who held them, Henry Eustace McCulloh, in February, 1765, went into the county to call a reckoning. The settlers, many of whom had located without deeds, indignantly retorted by offering to buy only at their own prices, and forbade the surveyors to lay out the holdings when this smaller price was declined. They not only terrorized into acquiescence those among them who were willing to pay the amount charged for the lands, but also openly declared that they would resist by force any sheriff in ejectment proceedings. On May 7th an outbreak occurred; and a mob, led by Thomas Polk, set upon John Frohock, Abraham Alexander, and others, as they were about to survey a parcel of land, and gave them a severe thrashing, even threatening the young McCulloh with death. [108]
The choleric backwoodsmen, instinctively in agreement with Francis Bacon, considered revenge as a sort of wild justice. Especial objects of their animosity were the brothers Frohock, John and Thomas, the latter clerk of the court at Salisbury, and Edmund Fanning, a cultured gentleman-adventurer, associate justice of the superior court. So rapacious and extortionate were these vultures of the courts who preyed upon the vitals of the common people, that they were savagely lampooned by Rednap Howell, the backwoods poet-laureate of the Regulation. The temper of the back country is well caught in Howell's lines anent this early American "grafter," the favorite of the royal governor:
When Fanning first to Orange came,
He looked both pale and wan;
An old patched coat was on his back,
An old mare he rode on.
Both man and mare wan't worth five pounds,
As I've been often told;