The court or committee held their sessions at stated and regular times, and took the law of Virginia as their standard for decisions.  They saw to the recording of deeds and wills, settled all questions of debt, issued marriage licenses, and carried on a most vigorous warfare against lawbreakers, especially horse-thieves.[27] For six years their government continued in full vigor; then, in February, 1778, North Carolina having organized Washington County, which included all of what is now Tennessee, the governor of that State appointed justices of the peace and militia officers for the new county, and the old system came to an end.  But Sevier, Robertson, and their fellow-committeemen were all members of the new court, and continued almost without change their former simple system of procedure and direct and expeditious methods of administering justice; as justices of the peace they merely continued to act as they acted while arbitrators of the Watauga Association, and in their summary mode of dealing with evil-doers paid a good deal more heed to the essence than to the forms of law.  One record shows that a horse-thief was arrested on Monday, tried on Wednesday, and hung on Friday of the same week.  Another deals with a claimant who, by his attorney, moved to be sworn into his office of clerk, “but the court swore in James Sevier, well knowing that said Sevier had been elected,” and being evidently unwilling to waste their time hearing a contested election case when their minds were already made up as to the equity of the matter.  They exercised the right of making suspicious individuals leave the county.[28] They also at times became censors of morals, and interfered with straightforward effectiveness to right wrongs for which a more refined and elaborate system of jurisprudence would have provided only cumbersome and inadequate remedies.  Thus one of their entries is to the effect that a certain man is ordered “to return to his family and demean himself as a good citizen, he having admitted in open court that he had left his wife and took up with another woman.”  From the character of the judges who made the decision, it is safe to presume that the delinquent either obeyed it or else promptly fled to the Indians for safety.[29] This fleeing to the Indians, by the way, was a feat often performed by the worst criminals—­for the renegade, the man who had “painted his face” and deserted those of his own color, was a being as well known as he was abhorred and despised on the border, where such a deed was held to be the one unpardonable crime.

So much for the way in which the whites kept order among themselves.  The second part of their task, the adjustment of their relations with their red neighbors, was scarcely less important.  Early in 1772 Virginia made a treaty with the Cherokee Nation, which established as the boundary between them a line running west from White Top Mountain in latitude 36 degrees 30’.[30] Immediately afterwards the agent[31] of the British