GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter One

 

I have always been confused by Patrick Henry. He is famous for saying, “Give me liberty or give me death”, a bold statement that should have gotten a lot of press. Yet nobody at the time recorded him saying it.  

He also supposedly said “If this be treason, let us make the most of it”, another bold statement which, again, nobody wrote down at the time. What is fact is that he was always suspicious of the power of government. We largely have him to thank for the Bill of Rights, today a beacon of freedom for billions of people world wide. But he was also the CEO of the Virginia Yazoo Company, which sold swamp land to war veterans, trusting customers and unsuspecting tax payers. The Yazoo Company and its fellow scams shows that from the moment it was born the United States was a nation dedicated to the success of rich liars cheats and thieves.

My guess is the Yazoo Indians were only joking with French explorer Robert de La Salle.   In 1682, la Salle asked about the water at the edge of their town and the Yazoos told him it was a river, A 180 mile long by 100 mile wide “river” which did not so much flow into the Mississippi River, as seep. It was a swamp.  But the last laugh was on the Yazoo Indians because La Salle named the “river” after them. And after the Revolution, that patriot Patrick Henry used his freedom of speech to fleece a lot of unsuspecting would be capitalist by selling them Yazoo swamp land.

Now, even in 1789 nobody was interested in buying a swamp, So the American crooks decided to call their inventory the Yazoo Lands, instead.  Besides patriot and ex-governor Patrick Henry's Virginia Yazoo Company, there was the Tennessee Yazoo Company and the Carolina Yazoo Company. And together they formed the first American lobbying firm, what they called "The Combined Society".  It's stated purpose was  “By means of certain influences...to obtain from the State (of Georgia) large grants of land...for the end of making a large sum of money...” They were certain they could obtain a deed from Georgia, because although Georgia did not claim the swamp, Georgia was also flat broke.

Georgia had paid for its share of the American revolution by claiming lands westward to the Mississippi river and beyond, and used them as collateral to borrow gold and silver from European speculators. The problem was that land was mostly swamp during part of the year, and during the rest of the year was completely swamp. And that sliver of semi-dry land was was already claimed by the King of France.

The solution was first suggested by an ex-militia Colonel named Thomas Marston Green, sr. (above).  He'd been farming out in the Pine forests when a bunch of Spanish soldiers and surveyors showed up looking to inventory the lands they had just bought from the French. Colonel Green realized that after such an inventory would come the taxes. And Thomas hated paying taxes.  Luckily Green had no objection to collecting taxes. 

So in the fall of 1784 Green showed up in the then state capital of Louisville, Georgia, suggesting the state take over his plantation as "Bourbon County", now encompassing all land between the present Georgia border and the Mississippi river south of the Yazoo river. Thus it would be the largest county in the United States, and Marston Green would, of course, run it, selling any land he did not want and splitting the take with the state. And on 7 February, 1785, the rich white men running Georgia passed the Bourbon County Act, and waited for everybody not as smart as them, to buy into this hairbrained scheme. 

The greedy Thomas Marston Green decided to speed things along. He gathered a little army of 32 gullible fools  and led them on a march into the Spanish outpost of Natchez (above) on the Mississippi river. 

Once there he informed the Spanish Governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos (above) that the American state of Georgia now owned everything south of the Yazoo river, and the Spanish should just get out.  

Governor de Lemos wasted no time in having all the idiots arrested, and shipped down river to New Orleans (above) where they could safely rot in a prison (below)

The state of Georgia lifted not a finger to rescue their new governor of Bourbon County, let alone his little army.  The only person who showed up in New Orleans (above) to plead for the release of any of these idiots was Martha Green, Thomas' long suffering wife. The journey to New Orleans left her in such a pitiable state, that shortly after her arrival she died. Governor de Lemos felt so sorry for the late lady and her now motherless children, that he sent Thomas home with a warning - don't do it again.  

But de Lemos also decided the upstart Americans could no longer use the port of New Orleans to ship their produce to market. That made the settlers in western Georgia, very unhappy.  In 1788 the state of Georgia backed down and repealed the Bourbon County Act. The port of New Orleans was re-opened to Americans.  But that still left Georgia flat broke.

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