Chapter 3 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.