But even while this bill was before the Legislature, popular opposition to it began. A young man of twenty-three was then teaching in a little school-house at Augusta, but he was destined to become United States Senator, Minister to France, Secretary of the Treasury, and candidate for President. Enraged at what he believed the despoiling of the people by a band of robbers using robbers' methods, young William H. Crawford hurried to his home in Columbia County, got up a petition to the Governor to reject the bill again, and hurried to the Capital where he presented it to the Chief Executive of the State.[1376] But Governor Mathews, against whom no man, then or thereafter, charged corrupt motives, persisted in signing the measure.
And it must be said that the bill was not without merit. Georgia was but thinly populated, not more than fifty thousand human beings inhabiting its immense extent of savanna and forest. Most of these people were very poor[1377] and unable to pay any public charges whatever. The State Treasury was empty; the State troops, who had been employed in the endless Indian troubles, were unpaid and clamoring for the money long due them; the State currency had so depreciated that it was almost without value. No commonwealth in the Union was in worse financial case.[1378]
Moreover, the titles of the Indians, who occupied the country and who were its real owners, had not been extinguished. Under the Constitution, the National Government alone could deal with the tribes, and it had long been urging Georgia to cede her claims to the United States, as Virginia and Connecticut had done. Indeed, the State had once offered to make this cession, but on such terms that Congress had refused to accept it. The purchasers now took whatever title Georgia had, subject to these burdens, the State to be saved from all annoyance on account of them.
The tribes were powerful and brave, and they had been prompt and bold in the defense of their lands. The Creeks alone could put nearly six thousand fighting men in the field, and the Choctaws had more than four thousand trained warriors.[1379] The feeble and impoverished State had never been able to subdue them, or to enforce in the slightest degree the recognition of the State's title to the country they inhabited. Georgia's right to their lands "depended on her power to dispossess the Indians; but however good the title might be, the State would have been fortunate to make it a free gift to any authority strong enough to deal with the Creeks and Cherokees alone."[1380]
The sale of the territory was not a new or novel project. Six years earlier the State had disposed of twenty-five million five hundred thousand acres of the same territory to four land companies on much poorer terms.[1381] Jefferson, then Secretary of State, rendered a careful opinion on the right of Georgia to make the grant.[1382] These purchasers had tendered payment in South Carolina and Continental scrip that was practically worthless; the Treasurer of Georgia had properly refused to accept it; and there ended the transaction as far as the State was concerned. A suit was later brought against Georgia by the grantees[1383] to compel the performance of the contract; but the Eleventh Amendment of the Constitution thwarted that legal plan. So these speculators dropped the matter until the sale just described was made to the new companies six years later.
The most active promoters of the first purchasing companies, in 1789, were mere adventurers, although at first Patrick Henry and other men of honor and repute were interested in the speculation. Henry, however, soon withdrew.[1384] The consummation of their deal with Georgia required the payment of sound money and bona-fide settlement by actual tillers of the soil. Also, the adventurers got into trouble with the Indians, became gravely involved in Spanish intrigue, and collided with the National Government;[1385] so the enterprise lost, for a time, all attractiveness for these speculators.
The new land companies, on the other hand, were for the most part composed of men of excellent reputations.[1386] At the head of the largest, The Georgia Company, were United States Senator James Gunn and United States Attorney for the District of Georgia, Mathew McAlister; associated with them, in addition to Judges Stith and Pendleton, and Justice Wilson, were Robert Goodloe Harper, Representative in Congress from Maryland, Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution, and others of substance and position.[1387] Also, as has been stated, they paid for their lands in the money called for by the act—the best money then circulating in America. The first sales of Indian lands to which Georgia claimed title were known as the "Yazoo" speculation, and this designation stuck to the second transaction.
In the six years that had intervened between the sales to the irresponsible land-jobbers of 1789 and the solvent investors of 1795, an event of world importance had occurred which doubled and trebled the value of all cotton-bearing soil. Eli Whitney, a Connecticut school-teacher twenty-seven years of age, had gone to Georgia in 1792 to act as a private tutor. Finding the position taken, he studied law while the guest of the widow of General Nathanael Greene. This discerning woman, perceiving that the young man was gifted with inventive genius, set him to work on a device for separating cotton from the seed. The machine was built, and worked perfectly. The news of it traveled with astonishing rapidity throughout Georgia and the South. The model was stolen; and so simple was the construction of it that everywhere in cotton-growing lands it was freely reproduced by planters great and small. The vast sweep of territory stretching from Georgia to the Father of Waters, the best cotton land in the world, thus rose in value as if the wand of a financial deity had been waved over it. Settlers poured into Georgia by the thousand, and Indian atrocities were now as little feared as Indian rights were respected.[1388]
The purchase of the unoccupied Georgia lands by the bona-fide, if piratical, land companies of 1795 became, therefore, an adventure far more valuable in possibilities for the investors, and incomparably more attractive in the probability of political advantage to those who resisted it, than the innocuous and unopposed sale to the Yazoo swindlers of six years previous.
So it fell out that the mechanical genius of Eli Whitney, in 1793, called into action, exactly eighteen years afterward, the judicial genius of John Marshall. His opinion in Fletcher vs. Peck was one of the first steps toward the settling of the law of public contract in the riotous young Republic—one of the earliest and strongest judicial assertions of the supremacy of Nationalism over Localism. And never more than at that particular time did an established rule on these vital subjects so need to be announced by the highest judicial authority.