GEORGIA PEACHES - Chapter Eight

I think Patrick Henry's (above) death may have been a release. At the urging of George Washington, in the spring of 1799, Patrick stood for one last election - for the Virginia House of Delegates. He ran as a Federalist. Patrick won his last election, but never occupied his seat. He died of stomach cancer on 6 June, 1799. His second wife, Dorothea, quickly married Patrick's friend, Judge Edmund Wilson, thus protecting the family investments from predators who might have cheated a naive widow, probably a predator like  Judge Edmund Wilson.

Once the details of the Yazoo Land sale became public, Senator James Gunn (above) was universally despised. Six years later, toward the end of his term he announced he was “disgusted with everything connected with public life.”  It was certainly disgusted with him.  In March of 1801 he returned to the old state capital of Louisville, Georgia and at the end of July, in a room full of people, James Gunn died so quietly no one noticed he was dead for several minutes. That would have galled him. One obituary called him “General Yazoo”, a reminder of those runaway slaves he had murdered so many years before, and the millions of dollars he had tried to steal from the  tax payers.  A kinder obituary hoped he was “beyond the reach of friendship, or of hatred.”  Not me.

James Jackson was twice elected Governor of Georgia. In his first two year term he personally wrote sections 23 and 24 of the new Georgia constitution, which insured that " “no...order shall pass the General Assembly, granting a donation or gratuity in favor of any person whatever...” except by a two-thirds vote.  During his second term, in 1802  he finally disposed of the temptation of the Yazoo Lands by selling them to the Federal Government for $1,250,000. Georgia was no longer broke. For awhile.

And when the “Prince of Duels” died on 19 March, 1806, no one was more surprised and disappointed than James Jackson, that he met his demise quietly in his own bed.

Most of the speculators who tried to profit from the selling the Yazoo swamp  -  Patrick Henry, David Ross, Robert Morris, John Nicholson, James Wilson and James Gunn - lost everything. Taking a profit would be up to the next generation of “land jobbers”, starting with John Peck, and his partner in “ legal crime”, Robert Fletcher.

The story goes - and it was a fictional story - that on 14 May, 1803, 75 year old John Peck sold to 43 year old Robert Fletcher (above) 15,000 acres of Yazoo swamp around the Tombigby River, in exchange for $3,000, or about 4 and 1/3 cents an acre.  Fletcher was supposedly concerned about receiving a clear title because of the "The Rescinding Act”,  so Peck had included the following addendum, insisting that,  “The title to the premises as conveyed by the state of Georgia (in 1795)...has been in no way constitutionally or legally impaired by virtue of any subsequent act of any subsequent legislature of the...state of Georgia.”

The addendum was important because of that 1603 English case of Chandler v Lopus, which you remember (I'm sure)  established the legal doctrine of Caveat Emptor - buyer beware.  Peck had now provided the guarantee in writing that the 1796 Rescinding Act did not apply, even though Georgia had just sold the Yazoo Swamp-Land to the Federal Government. And in doing so, he had provided legal grounds for Fletcher to sue Peck to get his money back. But then that was not really the point of the entire transaction.

Because Fletcher was a resident of New Hampshire and Peck resided in Massachusetts, the case moved directly into the federal court system – what a lucky break that was. There  it was heard at the circuit court level by the cranky, craggy 74 year old Federalist New Englander, William Cushing (above) , who was also a Supreme – another lucky break. Cushing  decided the case for Peck, which allowed Fletcher to appeal to the Supreme Court.

And it is now that the final character in our farce, John Marshal (above), steps upon the stage. He was a cousin to Thomas Jefferson, and a close friend to George Washington. When the case of Fletcher v Peck reached the high court in March of 1806, Chief Justice Marshall decided that the arguments made by Peck's team of lawyers had been “incorrect”, and so the case was “continued by consent”,  meaning held over for the next term, to be re-argued (or better argued) in October of 1807.  

And even then, Marshall did not issue the final ruling until 16 March, 1810, 3 years later, probably because it took him that long to cajole an unanimous decision. The decision had to be unanimous because for the first time ever, the Supreme Court was declaring that a state law - the Rescinding Act -  violated an article of the Federal Constitution – in this case, section 10 of Article One.

As usual, Marshall wrote the court's opinion. He acknowledged that the members of the 1795 Georgia legislature were guilty of reprehensible actions. However, he reasoned, “The grant, when issued, conveyed an estate...(and) This estate was transferable; and those who purchased parts of it were not stained by that guilt which infected the original transaction.” Thus was born the legal fiction of the “innocent third party” in the Yazoo land fraud, meaning the speculators who had bought the land from the men who had bribed the legislature were not the same man who had committed the sin, working under the mask of a corporation.

Marshall argued that if a concealed defect in a contract could be held against the victim of that concealment, then “All titles would be insecure”. That might be true in the abstract, but referring to the members of the New England Mississippi Company as “innocent” was almost as much a legal fiction as insisting that written guarantees protected buyers in an age when only 3% of the population could read.

Oddly, the only member of the court to disagree with Marshall in writing was Jefferson's only appointee on the court,  William Johnson (above), from South Carolina. And his only objection was that he thought the Indians had a better claim to the land than did the state of Georgia. Still, Johnson managed, at the end of his argument, to state the obvious. “I have been very unwilling to proceed to the decision of this cause at all,” he wrote, because, “It appears to me to bear strong evidence... of being a mere feigned case.” 

But having stated the obvious, Johnson then folded his tent and concurred with Marshall's decision. And so the court had decided in favor of the New England Mississippi Company and all the other speculators in the Yazoo land sales.

The cost of that decision became clear in 1814, when the Federal government reached a settlement with all the “innocent third parties” in the Yazoo land fraud. Having already paid Georgia $4 million in 1802  for the swamp land -  the modern equivalent of $63 million -  they now paid the speculators in the various Yazoo companies another $5 million for the same swamp - the modern equivalent of $50 million - over 113 million dollars for a swamp which grew little more than mosquitos, turtles and alligators.

It made Patrick Henry's scheme to cheat the tax payers of Georgia seem small potatoes. And this would be far from the last time the lawyers wrote and interpreted laws to assist thieves in robbing the public. Such behavior is a stab to the heart of the public's faith in their government. And it all began at the very birth of that Republic.

It was the next generation of Americans who would risk their fortunes to build levees, to drain the Yazoo swamp and keep the Yazoo river to a path, and who would finally lay bare some of the richest agricultural soil in the world, upon which they would plant and grow cotton. There were profits aplenty for all...except, of course, for the natives who had originally owned the land and the slaves who picked the cotton. It is a sad truth about speculators that like villains in a horror story they generate life for no one but themselves, and misery and debt for everyone and everything else they touch.  And capitalism empowers them.

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GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter Seven

I suppose you've heard how a group of civic minded men gathered in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to create a “more perfect union” (above). Well, they did. Except it would be well to remember they were human beings, not machines and that civics is not a science, but an art form, in which each human expresses a different vision of perfection and hell. 

And in the case of James Wilson (above), opponent to the Bill of Rights and Justice of the Supreme Court under the new constitution and briber in-chief for the Yazoo land fraud, perfection included the right to lie to and steal from his fellow humans.

Remember Robert Morris who created the Bank of North America, which financed the Revolutionary War?  Well, the bank had originally been chartered in Pennsylvania, and after the Revolution patriots who who did not trust the power the bank gave Morris revoked it's charter. But in 1786 the state was sued by a share holder in that bank, who claimed the repeal had violated the rights of an innocent party – i.e. him, James Wilson. And a year later, he was able to replace the Articles of Confederation which he hated, Justice Wilson was one of those civic minded men who gathered in Philadelphia to draw up the new Constitution for the United States.

The state of Pennsylvania had backed down from Wilson's lawsuit, re-charted the bank and put Wilson on the board.  But Wilson was determined his new Federal government would show respect for business. So, in drawing the new constitution for America, James Wilson added what became Section 10 of the first Article of The Constitution, which read in part, “No State shall enter into any Treaty...coin Money...pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility...”. This was to be a capitalist nation, and respect for business was thus written into its constitution. 

All of which brings us back to 1795 when the Georgia Yazoo Company bought 11 million acres of swamp land for 1/4 cent an acre.  In August of 1795,  now bankrupt Georgia Company was bought by morally bankrupt James Greenleaf.  He paid 1 cent an acre. Then in November of 1795  Greenleaf sold the company to yet another group of speculators, for 8 cents an acre, giving Greenleaf a 650% profit in just 3 months. The new owners renamed it the New England-Mississippi Company  But why were these speculators paying so much for a dead company? Hadn't the new owners never heard of Caveat Emptor?

Listed first among the directors of the New England-Mississippi Company was Boston lawyer, Benjamin Hichborn (above), a  cousin to Paul Revere on his mother's side.  And Benjamin's real talent was as a gossip, knowing which ear would be most receptive to which dirt.  In the late 1790's he aligned himself with the  Democrat-Republicans, becoming a trusted and rare confidant for Thomas Jefferson himself in Federalist New England. 

The other company directors were equally well connected. Samuel Brown was a member of the  Providence, Rhode Island Browns,  who had made a fortune insuring slave ships which brought rum to Africa, traded it for black skinned human who were then traded in Barbados for cotton and coffee.

Benjamin Joy was a Massachusetts land speculator. Thomas Winthrop (above) was then a thirty-something son of the iconic Boston family.  George Blake was yet another lawyer-speculator . And finally there was John Peck. 

He was 75 years old in 1800. Most people knew him for what he considered his hobby – he was “The most scientific and most successful naval architect” in the new nation, having designed small and fast privateers (above) for smuggler John Hancock and later the colonial navy. But someone else had to build the ships, because John did not work or play well with others.

As a human being John Peck was secretive, “...Often argumentative and egotistical, tending to alienate those with whom he interacted”. In other words, the people who knew him best, disliked him the most. 

John Peck saw himself as a merchant, starting with a trading post on Crabtree Neck (above), where the Skillings River flows into Frenchman's Bay, not far from Bar Harbor, Maine. It is still labeled Peck's Point on the maps. John invested his profits in land, and there are few communities in today's Maine, which do not list him on their early property rolls. So it was a natural that the wealthy landowner would by shares in the New England-Mississippi Company. 

And it was John Peck who on 14 May, 1803, sold to Robert Fletcher of New Hampshire, 15,000 acres of the New England- Mississippi company holdings, at the inflated price of $5 an acre. If the lawyers are to be believed Robert Fletcher felt cheated by Peck, and later in 1803, just like Mr. Chandler in 1603 - remember him? - sued to get his money back

Robert Fletcher was a lawyer from Amherst, New Hampshire (above).  He was only 42 years old in 1803, and owned extensive properties in the state. He was also a very successful husband, fathering 13 children, but ultimately, an unsuccessful businessman.  His final investment was in timber lands in Montreal, Canada. And when this venture failed in November 1809, Robert Fletcher shot himself. But even after his suicide, the court case he had launched continued all the way to the Supreme Court – just as it was intended to. Which was amazing because it was a set up, a fake case. And everybody knew it.

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GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter Five

I think the villain of our story is clearly Senator James Gunn (above). He was a big man, and a vulgar bully with a quick temper, who cheated the citizens of George out millions of dollars, when a million was the equivalent of today's 12 billions. And when Gunn complained about “dishonorable interference of some of my associates”, the associate he was referring to was his fellow Senator from Georgia, James Jackson (below). That makes Jackson the hero of this story. 

But if the truth be told – and that is my goal, here – the personalities of Senator Jackson (above) and Senator Gunn were not all that different. They were both rich and arrogant white supremacist. And they were both hotheads, known to fight duels over issues of “honor”. In fact the only real difference between Jackson and Gunn, was that Jackson was nominally fighting for the white people of Georgia, and Gunn was fighting for himself. 

Gunn started off by offering Senator Jackson a bribe. The ever dutiful Supreme Court justice James Wilson (above) approached Senator Jackson with the promise of half a million acres of prime Yazoo lands, in exchange for his support, or at least his silence on the Yazoo swamp-land sale. Senator Jackson replied that he had fought the Revolution for the people of Georgia, and “the land was theirs, and the property of future generations” At least that was what Senator Jackson said he said. But Jackson knew what he was facing. 

In February of 1795 President George Washington sent a copy of the Yazoo land sale to Congress, and suggested it violated a treaty his administration had signed with several Indian tribes. 

Not that Washington was looking to protect native Americans. Washington just wanted the Federal government to be responsible for stealing their land, not private citizens.  Senator Jackson helpfully authored a bill authorizing the Federal Government to negotiate a treaty to do just that.  Like I said, the good guys and the bad guys in most situations, are not all that different, personality wise.

But...as word of the bribery and the chicanery of the Yazoo swamp lands leaked out, the public outrage exploded.  On 28 March, 1795,  the Augusta Chronicle newspaper called the sale “a hellish fraud”. Inspired, an organized mob marched the 30 miles from Augusta  to the capital of Louisville, intent upon lynching the Yazoo Gang - those members of the legislature who had voted for and profited from the sale.  All of the gang still in Louisville ran for the hills, and the 'Augustinians' were reduced to hanging them in effigy.  

In fact every member of the Yazoo Gang state wide was forced into hiding. Some had their homes burned. A few who were caught were beaten, a few tared and feathered and run out of town on fence rails. Some were shot at.  One legislator, so the story goes, was even tracked down hiding in Virginia, where he was lynched - and not in effigy.

Jackson thought about resigning his seat in the U.S. Senate to fight the sale, but Gunn's rehearsed process preceded so quickly that it was over before Jackson could move. The depressed Jackson wrote to a friend, “I have really a good mind to...turn speculator...There is a damn sight more to be got by it”  But after being encouraged by the uproar in Georgia, he took heart again, resigned from the Federal Senate, returned home and began writing anonymous letters to the newspapers attacking the sale.

“The enormous gain of the speculator,” wrote Senator Jackson, “and the magical conversion of funds of the state into the funds of the individual” were destroying peoples' faith in democratic government. He told the citizens of Georgia that “It remains to you to decide whether you will nip this aristocratic influence in the bud, or leave it to be torn up by your children...thus rendering them subservient to the base and servile passions of a few Nabobs…Patience and moderation are no longer virtues, but the most infamous offices, and will be detested, with their owners, as the sycophants of a venal day.”

Grand juries were convened throughout Georgia to investigate the bribery and attempted bribery of their local representatives. Most towns held public meetings to denounce the sale. The general population was up in arms because since 1780 Georgia had followed the “head rights rule”, under which each head of a family had the right to 200 acres of unclaimed state land, plus fifty acres per family member. 

With land ownership came the right to vote, and a rise in social status. Now a huge chunk of western lands were no longer "unclaimed". 

The citizens of Georgia had already decided they needed a new Constitution, to match the new Federal one, but the delegates to their constitutional convention -  which began on 3 May, 1795 - were apoplectic. The delegates could do little more than move the state capital to Louisville before demanding an investigation into the Yazoo sale, and then exhausted, adjourned. 

Senator Jackson won election to the Georgia Assembly in the fall of 1795.  In fact, in that election, all but two of the Yazoo Gang were voted out of office. The voters had spoken. In fact, the Yazoo Gang greatly strengthened the argument for universal suffrage. It turned out the wealthy property owners were even more venal and greedy and stupid as people who did not own property.

It was a spirit loose in the air, even in the heart of an English minister and poet like Christopher Anstey. Ten years earlier this gentle man had been moved to write a long poem he called “Speculation”. “Whatever wild fantastic Dreams, Give Birth to Man's outrageous Schemes, Pursu'd without the least Pretence, To Virtue, Honesty, or Sense, Whate'er the wretched basely dare, From Pride, Ambition, or Despair, Fraud, Luxury, or Dissipation, Assumes the Name of—Speculation.” There was very little in Dr. Anstey's poem, written a decade before the French revolution, which does not apply to today's Top 1% ers and their flunkies. 

Once in office, the new “Reform” Georgia Assembly would waste little time in dealing with the Yazoo gang. But that would open a whole new box of trouble, greed and lawyers.

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GEORGIA PEACHES Chapter Four

I hope that on Tuesday, 10 November, 1794, the members of the Georgia legislature did not realize the evil they were unleashing when they voted to elect James Gunn (above) to a second six year term in the U.S. Senate. The distinguished members of the Georgia legislature were supposed to be the best the state had to offer, the brightest of the brightest, far more qualified to pick a Senator than the "hoi polli" – a word from ancient Greece defining the general populace. 

Well. the majority of the Georgia legislature meeting in Louisville (above), must have been idiots, otherwise their willingness to return the amoral selfish bully that was Gunn to power was a conscious decision to sell their reputations to him. And I would hate to think they were that greedy and stupid. But they were..

In the flunkies defense, it must be pointed out that Senator Gunn and his co-conspirators had been preparing for this immoral yard sale for at least three years. Having bought up the bankrupt Virginia Yazoo Company in late 1791, Gunn and his “Yankee” partners - Pennsylvanians Robert Morris, John Nicholson and James Greenleaf - had renamed it the "Upper Mississippi Company", to avoid the impression they were “foreign invaders”. 

Revolutionary War hero, Major Wade Hampton (above) became the center piece of the  South Carolina Yazoo Company, and he now renamed his land grab "The Georgia-Mississippi Company".  The Tennessee Company felt no such compunction to verbally pander for approval. But members of all three companies agreed to act as one, and cross traded in each others stocks., to artificially increase their values.

And as a joint committee of the Georgia legislature began to consider their new bids, it was seen as politically expedient to form a fourth company, to be called "The Georgia Yazoo Company", from which land bribes might be more palatable to the locals. But the bylaws for this new bidder were written by Federal Judge from Georgia, Nathaniel Pendleton (above), who was a shareholder in the new "Upper Mississippi Company" with Senator Gunn, and a good friend of Alexander Hamilton.

The partners even put it down on paper, agreeing in writing that it was “expedient to dispose of a considerable quantity” of the land they were offering to "...to diverse persons...to effect the purchase”. In other words, the men behind all four Yazoo companies were willing bribe the Georgia legislature, and said so in writing.  And at the very center of this web of graft loomed the dark presence of Senator James Gunn.

After he was safely re-elected, Gunn warned Supreme Court Justice James Wilson, who owned 25,000 shares of the Upper Mississippi Company, “We have taken measures which will ensure Success. But...they are to be executed by men whose want of talents may ruin every thing.” And by talents he meant a willingness to be bought, and by a want of talent he meant a shred of integrity. 

Senator Gunn had already been handing out options worth 1,000 British pounds - called 'money shares' -  to merchants in Savannah, including the stout Mayor Thomas Gibbons (above), who was already supposed to be the richest man in Georgia.  The printer of the Augusta Southern Centennial newspaper, Alexander McMillan, was given 28,000 acres of land in the Georgia Company grant, to ensure at least one newspaper favorable to the land grab. 

The Treasurer for the state of Georgia, Philip Clayton, was given 112,000 acres, and two of Governor George Mathews' (above) personal secretaries got options on even more land. Even Governor Mathew's son-in-law received a land donation, although he kept suffering integrity relapses. In fact, Gunn warned every politician in Georgia they would not share in the bounty if they “did not vote for the bill.”

Gunn offered the Columbia County representative, James Simm, 50,000 acres for every fellow legislator he could convince to vote for the sale. He offered state Representative Robert Flournoy and state Senator Henry Mitchell 75,000 acres each in the Georgia Company's grant. 

Once the joint committee recommended accepting the primary bids on Friday 28 November, 1794, and the matter went before the entire state Assembly and Senate, legislators were treated to the image of United States Supreme Court Justice James Wilson (above), standing in the lobby of the Georgia State Capital with “$25,000 in his hands as a ready cash payment.”  Also known as bribes.

Richmond County Representative Robert Watkins received no shares for his support. But his younger brother Thomas got shares in the Upper Mississippi Yazoo Company, and his other brother Anderson got shares in the Tennessee Yazoo Company.  Representative Peter Van Allen opposed the sale, and Treasurer Clayton offered him 75 British pounds to just go home until the vote was over. That offer, Clayton told Van Allen, came from “General Gunn”.  

A similar offer was made to Georgia state Senators John Sheppered and Henry Mitchell.  Another state Senator was offered $2,000 cash for his vote. And when he had the temerity to ask where the cash was coming from, Treasurer Clayton told him, “It is nothing to you.” Yet another state Senator was offered ten slaves for his vote. Representative Thomas Raburn was offered a measly $600 for his - and he took it – and state Senator Robert Thomas received shares in the Georgia Company, which he later sold for $5,000 cash.

After a lot of behind the scenes pushing and shoving, the bill, nobly titled "An Act for appropriating a part of the un-allocated territory of this state for the payment of the late state troops, and...for the protection and support of the frontiers of this State, and for other purposes, " passed the Georgia Assembly by 19 to 9 on 2 January, 1795, and the Senate on 3 January by a vote of 18 to 10. Governor Mathews signed it into law on 7 January, 1795. 

Senator James Gunn and his conspirators had just bought 35 million acres of mostly swamp land, an area far larger then the original Yazoo Land grants. And where the old grants had offered Georgia 24 cents an acre, these new grants promised to pay just 1 ½ cents an acre. It was a steal.  In every way you looked at it.

And there was more. Among other "goodies" hidden in the bill was the clause that “the lands....shall be free from taxation, until the inhabitants thereof are represented in the legislature...”  Translation; the speculators were not responsible for property taxes,  and thus they produced no income to the state until they were sold to the suckers,...er, farmers. That made the grants easier to resell, which had been the goal from day one. 

And who was going to farm a swamp? Three months after the bill was signed,  Wade Hampton sold the Upper Mississippi Company to three Boston speculators for $120,000 ($1.5 million today). However Senator Gunn was not so fortunate. The day after the sale became law, Senator Gunn was on his way back to Washington, D.C., Within two weeks Senator Gunn  resold his lands for a measly $25,000 profit ($300,000 today) .  The buyer was his own partner, James Greenleaf.

What drove Senator Gunn to hurry back to Washington was that in several parts of Georgia,  he was already being hanged and burned in effigy.  It was the already humbled David Ross who had warned him of this. The open bribery used in the Georgia legislature, Ross counseled, “will not a little embarrass the members, and, I fear, increase your difficulties.”

Ah, how true that would prove to be. If this had been a monster movie, the villagers were about to show up with their pitchforks and flaming torches.

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