Complaints in the West

Eleven years before the American Revolution broke out, European-Americans in what then was the western half of North Carolina were upset with:

• tax policies and assembly representation that favored the eastern half;
• unfair court fees, which were not standardized and usually not even published by the sheriffs;
• stealing of much of the tax money those sheriffs collected, a problem the royal governors acknowledged;
• land practices that gave advantages to the rich;
• aggressive debt collection by outsider merchants, who gained control of the courts with the help of large landowners and thus unfair influence over lawsuits;
• corrupt cou