Since before the Revolution, all men had fixed their eyes, hopes, and purposes upon land. Not the humble and needy only, but the high-placed and opulent, had looked to the soil—the one as their chief source of livelihood, and the other as a means of profitable speculation. Indeed, dealing in land was the most notable economic fact in the early years of the American Nation. "Were I to characterize the United States," chronicles one of the most acute British travelers and observers of the time, "it should be by the appellation of the land of speculation."[1389]
From the Nation's beginning, the States had lax notions as to the sacredness of public contracts, and often violated the obligations of them.[1390] Private agreements stood on a somewhat firmer basis, but even these were looked upon with none too ardent favor. The most familiar forms of contract-breaking were the making legal tender of depreciated paper, and the substitution of property for money; but other devices were also resorted to. So it was that the provision, "no state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts," was placed in the Constitution.[1391] The effect of this on the public mind, as reported by conservatives like Marshall, is stated in the Commercial Gazette of Boston, January 28, 1799: "State laws protected debtors" when they "were citizens ... [and] the creditors foreigners. The federal constitution, prohibiting the states to clear off debts without payment, by exacting justice, seemed ... to establish oppression." The debtors, therefore, "pronounced ... the equal reign of law and debt-compelling justice, the beginning of an insidious attack on liberty and the erection of aristocracy."
The "contract clause" of the Constitution was now to be formally challenged by a "sovereign" State for the first time since the establishment of the National Government. Georgia was to assert her "sovereignty" by the repudiation of her laws and the denial of contractual rights acquired under them. And this she was to do with every apparent consideration of morality and public justice to support her.
The tidings of the corruption attending the second "Yazoo" sale were carried over the State on the wings of fury. A transaction which six years before had met with general acquiescence,[1392] now received deep-throated execration. The methods by which the sale was pushed through the Legislature maddened the people, and their wrath was increased by the knowledge that the invention of the Connecticut schoolmaster had tremendously enhanced the value of every acre of cotton-bearing soil.
Men who lived near Augusta assembled and marched on the Capital determined to lynch their legislative betrayers. Only the pleadings of members who had voted against the bill saved the lives of their guilty associates.[1393] Meetings were held in every hamlet. Shaggy backwoodsmen met in "old-field" log schoolhouses and denounced "the steal." The burning in effigy of Senator Gunn became a favorite manifestation of popular wrath. The public indignation was strengthened by the exercise of it. Those responsible for the enactment of the law found it perilous to be seen in any crowd. One member left the State. Another escaped hanging only by precipitate flight.[1394] Scores of resolutions were passed by town, rural, and backwoods assemblages demanding that the fraudulent statute be rescinded. Petitions, circulated from the "mansion" of the wealthy planter to the squalid cabin of the poorest white man, were signed by high and low alike. The grand juries of every county in Georgia, except two, formally presented as a grievance the passage of the land sale act of 1795.
Among other things, the land sale act required the Senators and Representatives of Georgia in Congress to urge the National Government to speed the making of a treaty with the Indian tribes extinguishing their title to the lands which the State had sold. Upon receiving a copy of the nefarious law, Senator James Jackson of Georgia laid it before the Senate, together with a resolution declaring that that body would "advise and consent" to the President's concluding any arrangement that would divest the Indians of their claims.[1395]
But although he had full knowledge of the methods by which the act was passed, the records do not show that Jackson then gave the slightest expression to that indignation which he so soon thereafter poured forth. Nor is there any evidence that he said a word on the subject when, on March 2, 1795, Georgia's title again came before the Senate.[1396] Some time afterward, however, Senator Jackson hurried home and put himself at the head of the popular movement against the "Yazoo Frauds." In every corner of the State, from seaport to remotest settlement, his fiery eloquence roused the animosity of the people to still greater frenzy. In two papers then published in Georgia, the Savannah Gazette and the Augusta Chronicle, the Senator, under the nom de guerre of "Sicillius," published a series of articles attacking with savage violence the sale law and all connected with the enactment of it.[1397]
It came out that every member of the Legislature who had voted for the measure, except one,[1398] had shares of stock in the purchasing companies.[1399] Stories of the extent of the territory thus bartered away kept pace with tales of the venality by which the fraud was effected. Bad as the plain facts were, they became simply monstrous when magnified by the imagination of the public.
Nearly every man elected[1400] to the new Legislature was pledged to vote for the undoing of the fraud in any manner that might seem the most effective. Senator Jackson had resigned from the National Senate in order to become a member of the Georgia House of Representatives; and to this office he was overwhelmingly elected. When the Legislature convened in the winter of 1795-96, it forthwith went about the task of destroying the corrupt work of its predecessor. Jackson was the undisputed leader;[1401] his associates passed, almost unanimously, and Governor Irwin promptly approved, the measure which Jackson wrote.[1402] Thus was produced that enactment by a "sovereign" State, the validity of which John Marshall was solemnly to deny from the Supreme Bench of the Nation.
Jackson's bill was a sprightly and engaging document. The preamble was nearly three times as long as the act itself, and abounded in interminable sentences. It denounced the land sale act as a violation of both State and National Constitutions, as the creation of a monopoly, as the dismemberment of Georgia, as the betrayal of the rights of man. In this fashion the "whereases" ran on for some thousands of words. On second thought the Legislature concluded that the law was worse than unconstitutional—it was, the "whereases" declared, a "usurped act." That part of the preamble dealing with the mingled questions of fraud and State sovereignty deserves quotation in full: