THE GEORGIA COMPANY.
YAZOO PURCHASE--GOVERNOR MATHEWS--JAMES JACKSON--BURNING OF THE YAZOO
ACT--DEVELOPMENT OF FREE GOVERNMENT--CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION--SLAVERY:
ITS INTRODUCTION AND EFFECTS.
The grant by the British Government of the territory of Georgia to
General Oglethorpe and company, comprised what now constitutes the
entire States of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, except that
portion of Alabama and Mississippi lying below the thirty-first degree
of north latitude, which portions of those States were originally part
of West Florida.
The French settlements extended up the Mississippi, embracing both
sides of that river above the mouth of Red River, which discharges
into the former in the thirty-first degree of north latitude. The
river from the mouth of the Bayou Manshac, which left the river
fourteen miles below Baton Rouge, on the east side, up to the
thirty-first degree of north latitude, was the boundary line between
West Florida and Louisiana. Above this point the French claimed
jurisdiction on both sides; but Georgia disputed this jurisdiction
over the east bank, and claimed to own from the thirty-first to the
thirty-sixth degree of latitude. There were many settlements made by
Americans upon this territory at a very early day,--one at Natchez,
one at Fort Adams, and several on the Tombigbee, the St. Stephens, at
McIntosh's Bluff, and on Bassett's Creek. These settlements formed the
nucleus of an American population in the States of Mississippi and
Alabama. The lands bordering upon these rivers and their tributaries
were known to be exceedingly fertile, and proffered inducements to
settlers unequalled in all the South. Speculation was very soon
directed to these regions. A company was formed of citizens of Georgia
and Virginia for the purchase of an immense tract of territory,
including most of what is now Mississippi and Alabama. This company
was known as the Georgia Company, and the territory as the Yazoo
Purchase. It was a joint-stock company, and managed by trustees or
directors. The object was speculation. It was intended to purchase
from Georgia this domain, then to survey it and subdivide it into
tracts to suit purchasers. Parties were delegated to make this
purchase: this could only be done by the Legislature and by special
act passed for that purpose. The proposition was made, and met with
formidable opposition. The scheme was a gigantic one and promised
great results, and the parties concerned were bold and unscrupulous.
They very soon ascertained that means other than honorable to either
party must be resorted to to secure success. The members to be
operated upon were selected, and the company's agents began the work.
Enough was made, by donations of stock and the direct payment of money
by those interested in the scheme, to effect the passage of the Act
and secure the contract of purchase and sale. The opposition denied
the power of the Legislature to sell; asserting that the territory was
sacred to the people of the State, and that those, in selecting their
representatives, had never contemplated delegating any such powers as
would enable them to dispose by sale of any part of the public domain;
that it was the province of the Legislature, under the Constitution,
to pass laws for the general good alone, and not to barter or sell any
portion of the territory of the State to be separated from the domain
and authority of the State. They insisted that the matter should be
referred to the people, who at the next election of members to the
Legislature should declare their will and intention as to this sale.
On the other side they were met with the argument, that the
Legislature was sovereign and the supreme power of the State, and
might rightfully do anything, not forbidden in the Constitution,
pertaining to sovereignty, which they in their wisdom might deem
essential to the general welfare; that the territory included in the
grant to Oglethorpe and company was entirely too extended, and that by
a sale a new State or States would be formed, which would increase the
political power of the South--especially in the United States Senate,
where she greatly needed representation to counterbalance the
influence of the small States of the North in that body. These
arguments were specious, but it was well understood they were only
meant to justify a vote for the measure which corruption had secured.
The Act was passed by a bare majority of both branches of the
Legislature, and the sale consummated. Before the passage of this
measure, the will of the people had been sufficiently expressed in the
indignant outburst of public feeling, as to leave no doubt upon the
minds of the corrupt representatives that they had not only forfeited
the public confidence, but had actually imperilled their personal
safety. Upon the return to their homes, after the adjournment, they
were not only met with universal scorn, but with inappeasable rage.
Some of the most guilty were slain; some had their houses burned over
their heads, and others fled the State; one was pursued and killed in
Virginia, and all not only entailed upon themselves infamy, but also
upon their innocent posterity; and to-day, to be known as the
descendant of a Yazoo man is a badge of disgrace. The deed, however,
was done: how to undo it became an agitating question. The Legislature
next ensuing was elected pledged to repeal the odious Act; and upon
its convening, all made haste to manifest an ardent zeal in this work.
At the time of the passage of this Act, the Legislature sat in
Augusta, and the Governor who by the Act was empowered to make the
sale was George Mathews. Mathews was an Irishman by birth, and was
very illiterate, but a man of strong passions and indomitable will.
During the war of the Revolution he had, as a partisan officer, gained
some distinction, and in the upper counties exercised considerable
influence. Many anecdotes are related of his intrepidity and daring,
and quite as many of his extraordinary orthography. At the battle of
Eutaw Springs, in South Carolina, he was severely wounded, at the
moment when the Continental forces were retiring to a better position.
A British soldier, noticing some vestiges of a uniform upon him,
lifted his musket to stab him with the bayonet; his commander caught
the weapon, and angrily demanded, "Would you murder a wounded officer?
Forward, sir!" Mathews, turning upon his back, asked, "To whom do I
owe my life?" "If you consider it an obligation, sir, to me," answered
the lieutenant. Mathews saw the uniform was British, and furiously
replied, "Well, sir, I want you to know that I scorn a life saved by a
d----d Briton." The writer had the anecdote from a distinguished
citizen of Georgia, who was himself lying near by, severely wounded,
and who in one of his sons has given to Georgia a Governor.
General Wade Hampton, George Walker, William Longstreet, Zachariah
Cox, and Matthew McAllister were the parties most active in procuring
the passage of the Yazoo Act. That bribery was extensively practised,
there is no doubt, and the suspicion that it even extended to the
Executive gained credence as a fact, and was the cause of preventing
his name ever being given to a county in the State: and it is a
significant fact of this suspicion, and also of the great unpopularity
of the Act, that to this day every effort to that end has failed. No
act of Governor Mathews ever justified any such suspicion. As Governor
of the State, and believing the sovereign power of the State was in
the Legislature, and consequently the power to dispose of the public
domain, he only approved the Act as the State's Executive, and
fulfilled the duties assigned to him by the law. But suspicion
fastened upon him, and its effects remain to this day.
The pertinacious discussions between the parties purchasing and those
opposed to the State's selling and her authority to sell, created
immense excitement, and pervaded the entire State. The decision of the
Supreme Court of the United States was invoked in the case of Fletcher
_versus_ Peck, which settled the question of the power of the
State to sell the public domain, and the validity of the sale made by
the State to the Georgia Company. In the meantime the Legislature of
Georgia had repealed the law authorizing the Governor to sell. This
decision of the Supreme Court brought about an amicable adjustment of
the difficulties between the Company and the State, with the
Government of the United States as a third party.
The excitement was not so much on account of the sale, though this was
bitter, as of the corruption which procured it. The test of public
confidence and social respect was opposition to the Yazoo fraud. Every
candidate at the ensuing election for members of the Legislature was
compelled to declare his position on the subject of repealing this
Act, and, almost to a man, every one who believed in the power of the
State to sell, and that rights had vested in the purchasers and their
assigns, was defeated.
James Jackson, a young, ardent, and talented man, who had in very
early life, by his abilities and high character, so won the public
confidence that he had been elected Governor of the State, when he was
ineligible because of his youth, was at this time a member of
Congress. He made a tour through the State, preaching a crusade
against the corrupt Legislature, and denouncing those who had produced
and profited by this corruption, inflaming the public mind almost to
frenzy. He resided in Savannah, and was at the head of the Republican
or Jeffersonian party, which was just then being organized in
opposition to the administration of John Adams, the successor of
Washington. His parents had emigrated from England, and fixed their
home in Savannah, where young Jackson was born, and where, from the
noble qualities of his nature, he had become immensely popular.
Talent and virtuous merit at that period was the passport to public
confidence. Had it continued to be, we should never have known the
present deplorable condition of the country, with the Government
sinking into ruin ere it has reached the ten o'clock of national life.
His Shibboleth was, that the disgrace of the State must be wiped out
by the repeal of the Yazoo Act; and _repeal_ rang from every
mouth, from Savannah to the mountains. Jackson resigned his seat in
Congress, and was elected a member of the Legislature. Immediately
upon the assembling of this body, a bill was introduced repealing the
odious Act, and ordering the records containing it to be burned. This
was carried out to the letter. Jackson, heading the Legislature and
the indignant public, proceeded in procession to the public square in
Louisville, Jefferson County, where the law and the fagots were piled;
when, addressing the assembled multitude, he denounced the men who had
voted for the law as bribed villains--those who had bribed them, and
the Governor who had signed it; and declared that fire from heaven
only could sanctify the indignation of God and man in consuming the
condemned record of accursed crime. Then, with a Promethean or convex
glass condensing the sun's rays, he kindled the flame which consumed
the records containing the hated Yazoo Act.
Jackson was a man of ordinary height, slender, very erect in his
carriage, with red hair and intensely blue eyes. His manners were
courteous, affable, and remarkable for a natural dignity which added
greatly to his influence with the people. He was the model from which
was grown that chivalry and nobility of soul and high bearing so
characteristic of the people of Southern Georgia. In truth, the
essence of his character seemed subtilly to pervade the entire circle
in which he moved, inspiring a purity of character, a loftiness of
honor, which rebuked with its presence alone everything that was low,
little, or dishonest. Subsequently he was elected Governor of the
State, bringing all the qualities of his nature into the
administration of the office; he gave it a dignity and respectability
never subsequently degraded, until an unworthy son of South Carolina,
the pus and corruption of unscrupulous party, was foisted into the
position. Strength of will, a ripe judgment, and purity of intention,
were the great characteristics distinguishing him in public life, and
these have endeared his name to the people of Georgia, where now
remain many of his descendants, some of whom have filled high
positions in the State and United States, and not one has ever soiled
the honor or tarnished the name with an act unworthy a gentleman.
The Revolutionary struggle called out all the nobler qualities nature
has bestowed on man, in those who conceived the desire and executed
the determination to be free. The heroic was most prominent: woman
seemed to forget her feebleness and timidity, and boldly to dare, and
with increased fortitude to bear every danger, every misfortune, with
a heroism scarcely compatible with the delicacy of her nature. To
this, or some other inexplicable cause, nature seemed to resort in
preparation for coming events. In every State there came up men, born
during the war or immediately thereafter, of giant minds--men
seemingly destined to form and give direction to a new Government
suited to the genius of the people and to the physical peculiarities
of the country where it was to control the destinies of hundreds of
millions of human beings yet unborn, and where the soil was virgin and
unturned, which nature had prepared for their coming. This required a
new order of men. These millions were to be free in the fullest sense
of the word; they were only to be controlled by laws; and the making
of these laws was to be their own work, and nature was responding to
the exigencies of man.
The early probation of independent government taught the necessity of
national concentration as to the great features of government, at the
same time demonstrating the importance of keeping the minor powers of
government confined to the authority of the States. In the assembling
of a convention for this purpose, which grew out of the free action of
the people of each State, uninfluenced by law or precedent, we see
congregated a body of men combining more talent, more wisdom, and more
individuality of character than perhaps was ever aggregated in any
other public body ever assembled. From this convention of sages
emanated the Constitution of the United States; and most of those
constituting this body reassembled in the first Congress, which sat as
the supreme power in the United States. It was these men and their
coadjutors who inaugurated and gave direction to the new Government.
Under its operations, the human mind and human soul seemed to expand
and to compass a grasp it had scarcely known before. There were
universal content and universal harmony. The laws were everywhere
respected, and everywhere enforced. The freedom of thought, and the
liberty of action unrestrained, stimulated an ambition in every man to
discharge his duties faithfully to the Government, and honestly in all
social relations. There was universal security to person and property,
because every law-breaker was deemed a public enemy, and not only
received the law's condemnation, but the public scorn. Under such a
Government the rapid accumulation of wealth and population was a
natural consequence. The history of the world furnishes no example
comparable with the progress of the United States to national
greatness. The civilized world appeared to feel the influence of her
example and to start anew in the rivalry of greatness. Her soil's
surplus products created the means of a widely extended commerce, and
Americans can proudly refer to the eighty years of her existence as a
period showing greater progress in wealth, refinement, the arts and
sciences, and human liberty, than was ever experienced in any two
centuries of time within the historical period of man's existence. My
theme expands, and I am departing from the purposes of this work; yet
I cannot forbear the expression of opinion as to the causes of this
result. I know I shall incur the deepest censure from the professors
of a mawkish philanthropy, and a hypocritical religion which is
cursing with its cant the very sources of this unparalleled progress,
this unexampled prosperity.
Slavery was introduced into the Colonies by English merchants about
two centuries since: this was to supply a necessity--labor--for the
purpose of developing the resources of this immense and fertile
country. The African was designed by the Creator to subserve this
purpose. His centre of creation was within the tropics, and his
physical organization fitted him, and him alone, for field labor in
the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the earth. He endures the
sun's heat without pain or exhaustion in this labor, and yet he has
not nor can he acquire the capacity to direct profitably this labor.
It was then the design of the Creator that this labor should be
controlled and directed by a superior intelligence. In the absence of
mental capacity, we find him possessed of equal physical powers with
any other race, with an amiability of temper which submits without
resistance to this control. We find him, too, without moral, social,
or political aspirations, contented and happy in the condition of
servility to this superior intelligence, and rising in the scale of
humanity to a condition which under any other circumstances his race
had never attained. I may be answered that this labor can be had from
the black as a freeman as well as in the condition of a slave. To this
I will simply say, experience has proved this to be an error. Such is
the indolence and unambitious character of the negro that he will not
labor, unless compelled by the apprehension of immediate punishment,
to anything approaching his capacity for labor. His wants are few,
they are easily supplied, and when they are, there is no temptation
which will induce him to work. He cares nothing for social position,
and will steal to supply his necessities, and feel no abasement in the
legal punishment which follows his conviction; nor is his social
status among his race damaged thereby. As a slave to the white man, he
becomes and has proved an eminently useful being to his kind--in every
other condition, equally conspicuous as a useless one. The fertility
of the soil and the productions of the tropical regions of the earth
demonstrate to the thinking mind that these were to be cultivated and
made to produce for the uses and prosperity of the human family. The
great staples of human necessity and human luxury are produced here in
the greatest abundance, and the great majority of these nowhere else.
The white man, from his physical organization, cannot perform in these
regions the labor necessary to their production. His centre of
creation is in the temperate zones, and only there can he profitably
labor in the earth's cultivation. But his mental endowments enable him
to appropriate all which nature has supplied for the necessities of
life and the progress of his race. He sees and comprehends in nature
the designs of her Creator: these designs he develops, and the
consequence is a constant and enlightened progress of his race, and
the subjection of the physical world to this end.
He finds the soil, the climate, the production, and the labor united,
and he applies his intelligence to develop the design of this
combination; and the consequence has been the wonderful progress of
the last two centuries. I hold it as a great truth that nature points
to her uses and ends; that to observe these and follow them is to
promote the greatest happiness to the human family; and that wherever
these aims are diverted or misdirected, retrogression and human misery
are the consequence. In all matters, experience is a better test than
speculation; and to surrender a great practical utility to a mere
theory is great folly. But it has been done, and we abide the
consequences.
In all nations, a spurious, pretentious religion has been the
_avant-coureur_ of their destruction. In their inception and early
progress this curse exercises but slight influence, and their growth
is consequently healthy and vigorous. All nations have concealed this
cancerous ulcer, sooner or later to develop for their destruction.
These wear out with those they destroy, and a new or reformed religion
is almost always accompanied with new and vigorous developments in
a new and progressive Government. The shackles which have paralyzed
the mind, forbidding its development, are broken; the unnatural
superstition ceases to circumscribe and influence its operations; and
thus emancipated, it recovers its elasticity and springs forward
toward the perfection of the Creator. Rescued from these baleful
influences, the new organization is vigorous and rapid in its growth,
yielding the beneficent blessings natural to the healthful and
unabused energies of the mind. But with maturity and age the webs of
superstition begin to fasten on the mind; priests become prominent,
and as is their wont, the moment they shackle the mind, they reach out
for power, and the chained disciple of their superstition willingly
yields, under the vain delusion that he shares and participates in
this power as a holy office for the propagation of his creed--and
retrogression commences.
The effects of African slavery in the United States, upon the
condition of both races, was eminently beneficial to both. In no
condition, and under no other circumstances, had the African made such
advances toward civilization: indeed, I doubt if he has not attained
in this particular to the highest point susceptible to his nature. He
has increased more rapidly, and his aspirations have become more
elevated, and his happiness more augmented. With his labor directed by
the intelligence of the white race, the prosperity of the world has
increased in a ratio superior to any antecedent period. The production
of those staples which form the principal bases of commerce has
increased in a quadruple ratio. Cotton alone increased so rapidly as
to render its price so far below every other article which can be
fashioned into cloth, that the clothing and sheeting of the civilized
world was principally fabricated from it. The rapidity of its
increased production was only equalled by the increase of wealth and
comfort throughout the world. It regulates the exchanges almost
universally. It gave, in its growth, transportation, and manufacture,
employment to millions, feeding and clothing half of Europe--increasing
beyond example commercial tonnage, and stimulating the invention of
labor-saving machinery--giving a healthy impulse to labor and enterprise
in every avocation, and intertwining itself with every interest,
throughout the broad expanse of civilization over the earth. To cotton,
more than to any other one thing, is due the railroad, steamboat, and
steamship, the increase of commerce, the rapid accumulation of
fortunes, and consequently the diffusion of intelligence, learning, and
civilization.
Sugar, too, from the same cause, ceased to be a luxury, and became a
necessity in the economy of living: coffee, too, became a stimulating
beverage at every meal, instead of a luxury only to be indulged on
rare occasions. How much the increased production of these three
articles added to the commerce and wealth of the world during the last
two centuries, and especially the last, is beyond computation. How
much of human comfort and human happiness is now dependent upon their
continued production, and in such abundance as to make them accessible
to the means of all, may well employ the earnest attention of those
who feel for the interest and happiness of their kind most. If these
results have followed the institution of African slavery, can it be
inhuman and sinful? Is it not rather an evidence that the Creator so
designed?
But this is not all this institution has effected. Besides its
pecuniary results, it has inspired in the superior race a nobility of
feeling, resulting from a habit of command and a sense of
independence, which is peculiar to privileged orders of men in
civilized society. This feeling is manifested in high bearing and
sensitive honor, a refinement of sentiment and chivalrous emprise
unknown to communities without caste. This is to be seen in the
absence of everything little or mean. A noble hospitality, a scorn of
bargaining, and a lofty yet eminently deferential deportment toward
females: in this mould it has cast Southern society, and these traits
made the Southern gentleman remarkable, wherever his presence was
found.
These were the men who led in the formation of the Government of the
United States, and who gave tone and character to her legislative
assembly, so long as they held control of the Government. A peer among
these was James Jackson, and many of his confederates, of whom I shall
have occasion to speak in the progress of this work.