"Whether it was competent to any subsequent Legislature to set aside the act on the ground of fraud and corruption?
"No, said the Judges, it was not.... No matter, say the Judges, what the nature or extent of the corruption, ... be it ever so nefarious, it could not be set aside....
"The [legal] maxim that third purchasers without notice shall not be affected by the fraud of the original parties" had, declared Troup, been wielded by the Judges for the benefit of the speculators and to the ruin of the country.
"Thus, sir, by a maxim of English law are the rights and liberties of the people of this country to be corruptly bartered by their Representatives.
"It is this decision of the Judges which has been made the basis of the bill on your table—a decision shocking to every free Government, sapping the foundations of all your constitutions, and annihilating at a breath the best hope of man.
"Yes, sir," exclaimed the deeply stirred and sincerely angered Georgian, "it is proclaimed by the Judges, and is now to be sanctioned by the Legislature, that the Representatives of the people may corruptly betray the people, may corruptly barter their rights and those of their posterity, and the people are wholly without any kind of remedy whatsoever.
"It is this monstrous and abhorrent doctrine which must startle every man in the nation, that you ought promptly to discountenance and condemn."
In such fashion the enraged Troup ran on; and he expressed the sentiments of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the United States. The longer the Georgia champion of popular justice and the rights of the States talked, the more unrestrained became his sentiments and his expression of them: "If, Mr. Speaker, the arch-fiend had in ... his hatred to mankind resolved the destruction of republican government on earth, he would have issued a decree like that of the judges"—the opinion of John Marshall in Fletcher vs. Peck. "Why ... do the judges who passed this decision live and live unpunished?... The foundations of the Republic are shaken and the judges sleep in tranquillity at home.... The question ... had been so often discussed" that it was "well understood by every man in the nation." Troup prophesied, therefore, that "no party in this country, however deeply seated in power, can long survive the adoption of this measure."[1499]
But the Federalist-Jeffersonian Yazoo coalition held firm and Troup's motion to reject the Senate Yazoo bill was lost by a vote of 55 to 59.[1500] The relief bill was delayed, however, and the claimants were compelled to nurse their eighteen-year-old disappointment until another session of Congress convened.
The following year the bill to settle the Yazoo claims was again introduced in the Senate and passed by that body without opposition. On February 28, 1814, the measure reached the House.[1501] On the second reading of it, Troup despairingly moved that the bill be rejected. The intrepid and resourceful John Randolph had been beaten in the preceding Congressional election, the House no longer echoed with his fearless voice, and his dominant personality no longer inspired his followers or terrified his enemies. Troup could not bend the mighty bow that Randolph had left behind and that he alone could draw. But the dauntless Georgian did his best. Once more he went over the items of this "circle of fraud," as he branded it. Success of the "plunderers" now depended on the affirmation by Congress of Marshall's opinion, which, said Troup, "overturns Republican Government. You cannot, you dare not, sanctify this doctrine." If you do so, then "to talk of the rights of the people after this is insult and mockery."[1502]