year four, the Georgia, the
Georgia-Mississippi, the Tennessee, and the Upper Mississippi, companies
obtained grants from the Georgia Legislature to a territory of over
thirty millions of acres, for which they paid but five hundred thousand
dollars, or less than two cents an acre. Among the grantees were many
men of note, congressmen, senators, even judges. The grants were secured
by the grossest corruption, every member of the Legislature who voted
for them, with one exception, being a stockholder in some one of the
companies, while the procuring of the cessions was undertaken by James
Gunn, one of the two Georgia Senators. The outcry against the
transaction was so universal throughout the State that at the next
session of the Legislature, in 1796, the acts were repealed and the
grants rescinded. This caused great confusion, as most of the original
grantees had hastily sold out to third parties; the purchases being
largely made in South Carolina and Massachusetts. Efforts were made by
the original South Carolina Yazoo Company to sue Georgia in the Federal
Courts, which led to the adoption of the Constitutional provision
forbidding such action.

Their Failure.

When in 1802, Georgia ceded the territory in question, including all of
what is now middle and northern Alabama and Mississippi, to the United
States for the sum of twelve hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the
National Government became heir to these Yazoo difficulties. It was not
until 1814 that the matter was settled by a compromise, after
interminable litigation and legislation. [Footnote: American State
Papers, Public Lands, I., pp. 99, 101, 111, 165, 172, 178; Haskin's
"Yazoo Land Companies." In Congress, Randolph, on behalf of the ultra
states'-rights people led the opposition to the claimants, whose special
champions were Madison and the northern democrats. Chief Justice
Marshall in the case of Fletcher _vs._ Peck, decided that the rescinding
act impaired the obligation of contracts, and was therefore in violation
of the Constitution of the United States; a decision further amplified
in the Dartmouth case, which has determined the national policy in
regard to public contracts. This decision was followed by the passage of
the Compromise Act by Congress in 1814, which distributed a large sum of
money obtained from the land sales in the territory, in specified
proportions among the various claimants.] The land companies were more
important to the spe