GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter Two

The next scheme the leaders of Georgia tried,  in the fall of 1788,  was the infamous Pine Barren Land Speculation, in which a dozen rich white men surveyed (badly) about thirty million acres of Georgia and sold it off (quickly), mostly to smaller speculators,  Everybody thought they were going to get rich. 

The problem this time was that the 85,500 white Georgians occupied about nine million acres, with most of them living in the 11 counties closest to Savanna . And for the new vast spaces claimed by whites but occupied by native Americans, there were a lot of duplicate titles, with five or six owners claiming every section of land. Over night land prices went from sky high to bargain basement,  inspiring a fake advertisement, offering, “ Ten millions of acres of valuable pine barren land in the province of Utopia, on which there are several very sumptuous air castles, ready furnished”.

This business model would later be called a Ponzi scheme, and the only people who got rich were the ones at the top, and precious little of that money trickled down to the taxpayers of the state of Georgia. So in 1789, this time under the Governorship of an arrogant fire plug named George Mathews, they tried it for a third time,  only bigger. And this was when Patrick Henry got into the game.

It is enough to make you wonder why the American people continue to have such childlike faith in capitalism, considering how often they keep getting screwed by it. It's a morality play, and the moral is "Greed makes you stupid".

Patrick Henry (above) had never been much of a business man. When he was 18, the “indolent, dreamy (and) procrastinating...ill-dressed young man” impulsively married the equally impulsive, plump and buxom Sarah "Sallie" Shelton.  He went to work for Sarah's father in his Hanover Tavern, but after a few months as a barkeep Patrick decided on a career which would not require so much physical labor. With only six weeks of study he passed the Virginia bar. The parents of the bride were so thrilled, they set the fecund couple up with some land and slaves – an instant entrance into  First Families of Virginia.  It was the perfect foundation for a politician. But, alas, Patrick would be short of money his whole life. Which is why he formed the Virginia Yazoo company.

The 53 year old Patrick Henry assembled a slightly odd group of investors. At 53, droll and humorless, Paul Carrington, (above) was a long time member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and a judge of the Court of Appeals. At barely 30 years old, Abraham Venerable was an up-and-comer in Virginia society, while 50 year old Francis Watkins was the clerk for the local courts.

But the key investor, the actual money behind the original Virginia Yazoo Company was Pennsylvanian David Ross, who had already assembled 100,000 acres in Virginia, buying up plantations and slaves, abandoned by loyalists during and after the revolution.  Ross also owned 200,000 acres of Kentucky, and several thousand more in what would become Tennessee (claimed at the time by North Carolina). He was a very land rich young man. And, oddly, he was Scottish.

See, after the 1746 battle of Culloden, Scotland was under the royal lash (above), and David Ross stood to inherit nothing from his father's now looted Scottish estates. So in the middle of the 1750's he joined the horde of Scots emigrating to the American colonies. But where most Scotsmen chose the less settled Carolinas, and arrived with little but the clothes on their back, David Ross chose Virginia and arrived with contacts in the colonial government, and with cash,  

Almost immediately he invested in the Oxford Iron Works along the Potomac River and the Antietam Iron Works in Maryland. He then began buying land and planting tobacco. It is hard to escape the suspicion that David Ross's family had sold out their fellow Stuart supporters, perhaps his own cousins. It is what the losing side of a rebellion often has to do to save the family fortunes.  And it also speaks to the way New York banks supported slavery by offering generous terms on humans beings held in bondage as collateral. 

Most years the iron works struggled to get by, and the tobacco barely covered operating expenses.  To really build a fortune, Colonial Virginia planters - such as the gout ridden George Mason - used their large plantations and slaves as collateral to buy cheap Indian land north of the Ohio River. The new owners then surveyed it quickly, subdivided it in haste and sold it off in 100 to 600 acre sections to land speculators at inflated prices.  To quote from Wood Holton's 1994 paper in 'The Journal of Southern History:  “Land speculation was a principal source of income for the Virginia gentry, the 2-to-5 % of families who stood atop the colony's pyramid of wealth and power...During the frontier years, absentee landholders owned three-quarters of the region's total acreage...little acreage was left for residents. ”

The only draw back was that the invasion of American farmers set off the French and Indian War, which brought the sale of western lands to a halt for nine long years.  Then  in 1763 (above), after the peace was signed, King George III issued a Royal Proclamation that henceforth no colony could lay claim to any land west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. Individual farmers were still free to buy acreage on Indian lands, but their property rights would not be recognized by the English crown, meaning the land could be handed down father to son but could not be resold, ending speculating. 

Wood Holton argues it was this loss of income which spurred Virginians, like the “great land-monger” George Washington, and speculators Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and Patrick Henry, to support the American Revolution

Even before the American victory at Yorktown, in June of 1779, Virginia and her governor Patrick Henry (above), joined the other southern colonies in reviving virtually all of the land claims rejected by George III's government.  

George Mason rehired his old employee Daniel Boone (above) to began “exploring” new lands to the west of Boonesborough, paying him in land -  from which Boone earned $20,000, a hefty fortune during the revolution. 

And on 20 November, 1789, the Virginia Yazoo Company, headed by Patrick Henry and David Ross,  along with the Tennessee Company and the Carolina Company, formally applied for land grants from the state of Georgia for tracts along the Yazoo River/swamp.  

To the wealthy speculators who were also the founding fathers, this is what they meant by the word “freedom”. And that is the morality play we shall now follow.

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