The Yazoo Land Scandal and Pine Barrens Speculation

Another feature of Early America was land speculation and sometimes swindling on a massive scale.  There were several reasons for this.  While state boundaries on the Eastern Seaboard were mapped and fairly explicit, often the western borders of each state were not.  While the federal government understood and tried to make plain that the western border of expansion was the Appalachian Mountains, state officials and the wealthy land speculators they dealt with weren't content with that.  Most local officials believed that their western border was the Mississippi River and they began making plans that way.  What did this have to do with Natives?  Everything.  Were they consulted? No.

Georgia was a case in point.  Georgia claimed the Mississippi River as its western border, meaning that it laid claimed to something known as the Yazoo lands, which took in most of the present-day states of Alabama and Mississippi with the exception of the top portions of both future states (claimed by South Carolina) and the bottom portion (part of Spanish Florida).  The Yazoo were a Native tribe that lived along the Yazoo River in present-day Mississippi.  The land was also occupied by Choctaw, Chickasaw and Creek Natives, just to name the major tribes.  There were others.  Like most Southeastern tribes, these people made their living partly by agriculture and it was obvious to speculators how rich and fertile the land was. 

Prior to 1794, there had been attempts to sell and settle this land, but they had come to nothing.  One Georgia governor had attempted to sell land belonging to Spain.  The Continental Congress and later the federal government stepped in to avoid war with an ally as well as to protect the land claims of the various Natives.  This wasn't from any altruistic feelings on the government's part.  Some Native tribes had been allies during the Revolution and the new nation did not need a Native revolt just then.  Another attempt fell through when the land speculators involved tried to get Georgia to accept Continental money, which was depreciated.  However, many of the men involved in these dealings, though outright fraudsters, continued to sit in Georgia's legislature or do business with legislators and state officials. 

In 1794, four land speculation companies made an offer of $500,000 dollars for more than 40,000,000 acres of land in the Yazoo area.  These people included men who had been active in the earlier land swindles, as well as Georgia legislators and government officials and at least one Supreme Court Justice.  To make certain that this land deal was completed, legislators were offered shares in the land company, money and other incentives to come on board with the deal.  The Governor signed the bill in 1795, confirming the sale.  This bill was known as the Yazoo Act. 

When the terms of the sale were made public, outrage began.  Congressman Jared Irwin and U.S. Senator James Jackson (no relation to Andrew) began efforts at reform.  Irwin resigned from Congress to run for governor of Georgia and was elected.  In 1796, he signed a bill nullifying the Yazoo Act.  To publicly signify that the deal was nullified, he ordered all copies of the bill confiscated and publicly burned.  Jackson ran for Governor after Irwin's term was finished and he continued to deal with the fallout in the form of lawsuits by innocent third party buyers against the land companies and the state.  Many of thee people refused the money, and refused to vacate the land, further inflaming matters with the various Native tribes. 

The federal government stepped in, primarily to deal with the Native land claims and a touchy situation with Spain.  Spain's claims were clarified by the Treaty of San Lorenzo in 1795.  In 1802, Georgia ceded to the United States all land west of its present border, which became part of a newly created Mississippi Territory counterpart to the Ohio Territory in the North.  The land claims of individual citizens, mostly third-party buyers now turned squatters, took until 1816 to resolve.  Meanwhile, the federal government also removed from the states any treaty powers with the Natives and began negotiating a series of treaties determined to take away the Natives rights to their land piecemeal while convincing them to accept other land out west in exchange.  The controversy over these treaties wreaked havoc in several tribes, particularly the Creek as Native leaders and people differed over whether land should be ceded or not.  It would lead directly to the Creek War of 1814 and later the first Seminole War of 1816-1818. 

Nor was this the only land swindle that was going on in Georgia at the time.  From 1789-1796, three Georgia Governors, who had also been involved in the windup to the Yazoo Scandal, sold lands in Georgia proper, eventually deeding away more than three times the amount of land available for vast sums of money.  This smaller scandal is known as the Pine Barrens Speculation.  A portion of the lands involved were claimed by the Cherokee, whose rights were totally ignored as settlers and squatters poured onto their land.  As with the larger Yazoo Scandal, the resulting law suits took years to clean up in the courts.