with Great Britain was definitely declared, the
utter demoralization of the government bringing the work to a
standstill. The rage for land speculation, however, which had continued,
even in the stormiest days of the Revolution, grew tenfold in strength
after Yorktown, when peace at no distant day was assured. The wealthy
land speculators of the seaboard counties made agreements of various
sorts with the more prominent frontier leaders in the effort to secure
large tracts of good country. The system of surveying was much better
than in Kentucky, but it was still by no means perfect, as each man
placed his plot wherever he chose, first describing the boundary marks
rather vaguely, and leaving an illiterate old hunter to run the lines.
Moreover, the intending settler frequently absented himself for several
months, or was temporarily chased away by the Indians, while the
official record books were most imperfect. In consequence, many
conflicts ensued. The frontiersmen settled on any spot of good land they
saw fit, and clung to it with defiant tenacity, whether or not it
afterwards proved to be on a tract previously granted to some land
company or rich private individual who had never been a hundred miles
from the sea-coast. Public officials went into these speculations. Thus
Major Joseph Martin, while an Indian agent, tried to speculate in
Cherokee lands. [Footnote: See Va. State Papers, III., 560.] Of course
the officer's public influence was speedily destroyed when he once
undertook such operations; he could no longer do justice to outsiders.
Occasionally the falseness of his position made him unjust to the
Indians; more often it forced him into league with the latter, and made
him hostile to the borderers. [Footnote: This is a chief reason why the
reports of the Indian agents are so often bitterly hostile towards those
of their own color.]

Before the end of the Revolution the trouble between the actual settlers
and the land speculators became so great that a small subsidiary civil
war was threatened. The rough riflemen resolutely declined to leave
their clearings, while the titular owners appealed to the authority of
the loose land laws, and wished them to be backed up by the armed force
of the State. [Footnote: See in Durrett MSS. papers relating to Isaac
Shelby; letter of John Taylor to Isaac Shelby, June 8, 1782.]

The government of North Carolina was far too weak to turn out the
frontiersmen in favor of the specu