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 county officials allowed to hold multiple offices; and
• the cost of the mansion Royal Gov. William Tryon built at public expense in New Bern—as one Regulator declared, “We want no such House, nor will we pay for it.”[1].

Farmland was taxed at the same rate across the colony even though crop yields were higher per acre in the east. There was also a tax per person. Westerners tended to have larger families, in part to provide farm labor instead of slaves (for economic and/or moral reasons), so again this hit them harder.[2] Sheriff Francis Locke of Rowan County began having troubles collecting taxes as early as 1763. Three years later he took a horse from a man in lieu of unpaid taxes for 1764–6, only to have 15 men reclaim it from him by force. That year, less than a third of his county’s households paid their taxes.[a]

As for representation, in the 1766 Provincial Assembly, four counties around Albemarle Sound had 21 delegates for “3,300 white male taxables,” but four counties in the west had only nine for 5,776 such men.[3]

Though people in eastern counties raised concerns as well, prejudice between the eastern and western regions played a role. A New Bern ship captain observed, “‘Those from the westward look upon the people in any of the commercial towns, as little better than swindlers; while those of the east consider the western (assembly) members as a pack of savages.’”[b]

The protestors adopted “the Regulation” for their association’s name, from a group formed in South Carolina for protection against an outlaw band (though the name had already been used in England).[c] That group had forced the creation of a court system on the S.C. frontier. In April 1768, one set of N.C. “Regulators” took over the Anson County Courthouse (near today’s Wadesboro) and wrote what became known as the “Anson Regulators Protest Paper.” In it they complained about how taxes were levied and said that “no people have a right to be taxed without by consent of themselves or their delegates.” This somewhat garbled statement was the first formal complaint in the colonies against “taxation without representation” sent to British authorities, and relates to the fact county officials were appointed instead of elected.

A Fatal Shift Toward Violence