Volume III Part 70 (1/2)

[1398] Robert Watkins.

[1399] See Report of the Commissioners, _Am. State Papers, Public Lands_, I, 132-35.

[1400] The ”Yazoo men” carried two counties.

[1401] Chappell, 126.

[1402] The outgoing Governor, George Mathews, in his last message to the Legislature, stoutly defended his approval of the sale act. He attributed the attacks upon him to ”base and malicious reports,”

inspired by ”the blackest and the most persevering malice aided by disappointed avarice.” The storm against the law was, he said, due to ”popular clamour.” (Message of Governor Mathews, Jan. 28, 1796, Harper: _Case of the Georgia Sales on the Mississippi Considered_, 92-93.)

[1403] _Am. State Papers, Public Lands_, I, 157.

[1404] _Ib._ 158.

[1405] _Am. State Papers, Public Lands_, I, 158.

[1406] The punctilious Legislature failed to explain that one hundred thousand dollars of the purchase money had already been appropriated and expended by the State. This sum they did not propose to restore.

[1407] ”Or his deputy.”

[1408] Report of the joint committee, as quoted in Stevens: _History of Georgia from its First Discovery by Europeans to the Adoption of the Present Const.i.tution in 1798_, II, 491-92.

[1409] Stevens, 492-93. Stevens says that there is no positive proof of this incident; but all other writers declare that it occurred. See Knight: _Georgia's Landmarks, Memorials and Legends_, I, 152-53; also Harris, 135.

[1410] Adams: _Randolph_, 23; also Garland: _Life of John Randolph of Roanoke_, I, 64-68.

[1411] See _infra_, 577-81; and _supra_, chap. IV.

[1412] For instance, Wade Hampton immediately sold the entire holdings of The Upper Mississippi Company, millions of acres, to three South Carolina speculators, and it is quite impossible that they did not know of the corruption of the Georgia Legislature. Hampton acquired from his partners, John B. Scott and John C. Nightingale, all of their interests in the company's purchase. This was done on January 16 and 17, immediately after Governor Mathews had signed the deed from the State.

Seven weeks later, March 6, 1795, Hampton conveyed all of this land to Adam Tunno, James Miller, and James Warrington. (_Am. State Papers, Public Lands_, I, 233.) Hampton was a member of Congress from South Carolina.

[1413] _State of Facts, shewing the Right of Certain Companies to the Lands lately purchased by them from the State of Georgia._

[1414] The Georgia Mississippi Company, The Tennessee Company, and The Georgia Company. (See Haskins, 29.)

[1415] Eleven million acres were purchased at eleven cents an acre by a few of the leading citizens of Boston. This one sale netted the Yazoo speculators almost a million dollars, while the fact that such eminent men invested in the Yazoo lands was a strong inducement to ordinary people to invest also. (See Chappell, 109.)

[1416] See Chappell, 110-11.

[1417] Ames to Gore, Feb. 24, 1795, Ames, I, 168. Ames's alarm, however, was that the Georgia land sale ”threatens Indian, Spanish, and civil, wars.” The immorality of the transaction appears to have been unknown to him.

[1418] Haskins, 30.

[1419] Harper, 109. Hamilton's opinion is dated March 25, 1796. In Harper's pamphlet it is incorrectly printed 1795.

[1420] _Annals_, 3d Cong. 1st and 2d Sess. 1231.

[1421] _Annals_, 3d Cong. 1st and 2d Sess. 1251-54. The Georgia act was transmitted to Was.h.i.+ngton privately.

[1422] _Ib._ 1255, 1262-63.