Yazoo claims

The Yazoo claims arose from perhaps the grandest land speculation effort in the early republic. The story of the Yazoo claims is rife with corruption and intrigue. The resolution of Yazoo claims set the course for the expansion of federal judicial power in the era of the Marshall Court.

In 1795 the Georgia Mississippi Company and three other land speculation concerns purchased from the state of Georgia 35 million acres of land in the region centered on the Yazoo River in what became the Mississippi Territory for $500,000. The act authorizing the sale was the product of widespread corruption. When a preliminary sale bill passed in December 1794, for example, only one of the legislators voting for it had not been bribed. In 1796 the Georgia Mississippi Company sold an 11 million acre stake in the Yazoo lands to the New England Mississippi Land Company for $1,138,000. On the very day this deal closed, all of the Yazoo grants were repudiated by the succeeding Georgia legislature. So complete was this repudiation that all records of the grants were ordered excised from Georgia’s public records and the original act of sale was burned in the public square at Louisville, where the legislature had convened, by a Revolutionary War (1775-83) veteran holding a magnifying glass and bringing the destroying fire down “from God.”

The ensuing battle concerning the title carried over to Congress when the United States acquired Georgia’s western land claims in 1802. Opposition to the claims of the Yazoo transferees was focused on the circumstances of the passage of the original act of sale. On the floor of Congress, pro - and anti-Yazooists debated incessantly after 1802 the legitimacy of the original grants and the validity of the subsequent repeal. The Yazooists were aggressive in pressing their claims, regularly employing numerous high-ranking agents, including soon-to-be Associate Justice Joseph Story, as Capitol Hill lobbyists. Despite their efforts, they had no luck at forcing a compromise. The anti-Yazooists refused to recognize the land titles of speculators whose claims traced to widespread bribery and the corruption of public officials.

After failing in Congress, the speculators opted to look to the Supreme Court for relief. In 1803, the New England Mississippi Land Company engineered a lawsuit that ultimately reached the Supreme Court as Fletcher v. Peck. The speculators argued that the repeal act was unconstitutional because it violated the contracts clause of the Constitution, which provided that “[n]o State shall. . . pass any . . . Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts. . . .” The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, agreed, issuing an opinion in 1810 holding that the Yazoo speculators did indeed have a valid claim, as the act of the Georgia legislature repealing the sale was unconstitutional. This marked the Supreme Court’s first exercise of the judicial review power to invalidate the legislative act of a state. Anti-Yazooists in Congress were furious. Some even proposed sending federal troops into the Yazoo territory to keep the speculators out, and Congress debated whether the Supreme Court had to be obeyed. Ultimately, the federal legislature decided to abide by the Supreme Court’s decision. In 1814 Congress implemented a plan for providing compensation to the Yazoo speculators.

Further reading: C. Peter Magrath, Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New Republic (Providence, R. I.: Brown University Press, 1966).

—Lindsay Robertson