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.
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.