Mississippi History 101 Part 1: The Yazoo Land Scandal

As a part of explaining why Mississippi is the way it is, we must first recognize and understand its history from as objective of a standpoint as possible. This is why I am launching a new series on Mississippi History as a part of the Left of the Pearl blog. I hope to use this series to examine the different events, people, and ideologies that have shaped this state over time. Part 1 will focus on the founding of the Mississippi Territory as a distinct entity from the State of Georgia.

At the end of the French and Indian war, the British agreed to limit their North American colonists to the eastern side of the Appalachian mountains. To this end, King George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1963, after which the continent looked like the map below. (Source)

Most of the land that is today Mississippi and Alabama (excluding the coastal areas which were at the time Spanish West Florida, (given to the British at the end of the 7 Years War, but returned to Spain upon the end of the American Revolution)) was claimed after the American Revolution by the state of Georgia. After the Treaty of Paris 1783, the American states under the Articles of Confederation were free to offically settle west of the Proclamation Line of 1763. This meant that most states simply extended their north and south borders all the way to the Mississippi River. The map below illustrates what those claims looked like. (Source)

When the war ended in 1781, the slow trickle of settlers to the western lands that had been reserved for Native Americans by the Proclamation Line sped up. In 1795, once all of the Yazoo lands had been ceded by Spain, the Georgian legislature passed the Yazoo Land Act. This split the territory into districts and sold it at below market costs (about 1.4 cents an acre). Most of the people who bought the land at that price, then went on to resell it at a significant markup, making lots of private money at the expense of their state government.

The details of the scheme got out and the Georgian voters were outraged. They replaced nearly all of their incumbents (most whom profited off of the scheme personally) and about a year later, the bills of sale were repealed by the Georgia state government. Due to disputes with the settlers, some of whom decided that they had paid for the land and it was thus theirs, Georgia sold the land back to the US Government in exchange for their assuming the legal responsibility for the land. This land became the Mississippi Territory.

The case made its way to the Supreme Court in the 1810 case of Fletcher v. Peck, when Chief Justice Marshall ruled that the sale was binding, and that Georgia had no right to repeal the bills of sale, no matter if they were corrupt or not.

So there you have the birth of the territory; concieved in corruption and dedicated to the proposition that all men ought to make a buck off of the public's trust if they are able to do so. And while the corruption was found out and repudiated by the voters, it nonetheless stuck and the land speculators were able to pocket their money from the public largesse.

Source

All of this ignores the fact that the lands west of the Proclamation Line were very much not empty, and that various native tribes (in Mississippi's case the Choctaw and Chickasaw at that time) were already settled on the land. The next Mississippi History post will deal with how the early settlers and the native tribes got along, as well as the development of the slave economy in the new territory.