[1408] Report of the joint committee, as quoted in Stevens: History of Georgia from its First Discovery by Europeans to the Adoption of the Present Constitution in 1798, ii, 491-92.
[1409] Stevens, 492-93. Stevens says that there is no positive proof of this incident; but all other writers declare that it occurred. See Knight: Georgia's Landmarks, Memorials and Legends, i, 152-53; also Harris, 135.
[1410] Adams: Randolph, 23; also Garland: Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, i, 64-68.
[1411] See infra, 577-81; and supra, chap. iv.
[1412] For instance, Wade Hampton immediately sold the entire holdings of The Upper Mississippi Company, millions of acres, to three South Carolina speculators, and it is quite impossible that they did not know of the corruption of the Georgia Legislature. Hampton acquired from his partners, John B. Scott and John C. Nightingale, all of their interests in the company's purchase. This was done on January 16 and 17, immediately after Governor Mathews had signed the deed from the State. Seven weeks later, March 6, 1795, Hampton conveyed all of this land to Adam Tunno, James Miller, and James Warrington. (Am. State Papers, Public Lands, i, 233.) Hampton was a member of Congress from South Carolina.
[1413] State of Facts, shewing the Right of Certain Companies to the Lands lately purchased by them from the State of Georgia.
[1414] The Georgia Mississippi Company, The Tennessee Company, and The Georgia Company. (See Haskins, 29.)
[1415] Eleven million acres were purchased at eleven cents an acre by a few of the leading citizens of Boston. This one sale netted the Yazoo speculators almost a million dollars, while the fact that such eminent men invested in the Yazoo lands was a strong inducement to ordinary people to invest also. (See Chappell, 109.)
[1416] See Chappell, 110-11.
[1417] Ames to Gore, Feb. 24, 1795, Ames, i, 168. Ames's alarm, however, was that the Georgia land sale "threatens Indian, Spanish, and civil, wars." The immorality of the transaction appears to have been unknown to him.