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.

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;
But by his civil robberies,
He's laced his coat with gold.

The germs of the great westward migration in the coming decade
were thus working among the people of the back country. If the
tense nervous energy of the American people is the transmitted
characteristic of the border settlers, who often slept with
loaded rifle in hand in grim expectation of being awakened by the
hideous yells, the deadly tomahawk, and the lurid firebrand of
the savage, the very buoyancy of the national character is in
equal measure "traceable to the free democracy founded on a
freehold inheritance of land." The desire for free land was the
fundamental factor in the development of the American democracy.
No colony exhibited this tendency more signally than did North
Carolina in the turbulent days of the Regulation. The North
Carolina frontiersmen resented the obligation to pay quit-rents
and firmly believed that the first occupant of the soil had an
indefeasible right to the land which he had won with his rifle
and rendered productive by the implements of toil. Preferring the
dangers of the free wilderness to the paying of tribute to
absentee landlords and officials of an intolerant colonial
government, the frontiersman found title in his trusty rifle
rather than in a piece of parchment, and was prone to pay his
obligations to the owner of the soil in