This essay is Part 1 of a 2, or maybe 3 part series, dealing with similar concerns as those I addressed in this previous piece. All together, they will constitute an economic history stretching from around 1783 to the Panic of 1819 and its aftermath. It’s probably really boring, so the takeaway is that the early history of the US can be defined in no small part as a protracted struggle between Federalists, representing (mostly northern) finance capital, against Republicans, who puppeted the noble small farmer in order to provide political cover for their large holdings and estates. The result of decades of enmity was the creation of not a land market, as most commentators will tell you, but the creation of a market in land, which was from the beginning just one arm of the financial market in the US. Anyway go crazy.
1. Land and confederation
The 1783 Treaty of Paris both ended the American Revolutionary War as well as defined the former colonies’ western boundary as stretching beyond the Appalachians to the Mississippi River. This was not necessarily a cession, given the British and French presence there had always been scattered, less military and more commercial, and confined mainly to smaller towns clustered around forts – to say nothing of the fact that the territory was all firmly held by indigenous nations. But sovereignty, even without possession, was enough for speculation regardless. Before the war, and even continuing relatively unabated during, colonies had turned to these lands as a pool of assets representing a source of slow, but consistent, revenues. The colonies superintended their own lands as vast pools of assets, releasing them for sale (but not necessarily into market) as necessary in order to punch up their respective treasuries. In particular, the “ancient charters” of Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, the Carolinas, and Georgia provided western claims which were “considered good against England”, while New York enjoyed a similar claim tied to its “shadowy” “suzerainty” over the Iroquois, west of the Delaware.1
Prior to confederation, colonies sold their lands under a variety of systems. Virginia and North Carolina, especially active, developed and maintained “an extensive system of land offices, attractive terms, and fertile tracts” both before and during the war, as well as promising bounty claims for soldiers in the Continental Army.2 The six other colonies which were unfortunate enough to be laden with charters that included terms which bound them to certain geographic guidelines, naturally chafed at the idea that other states in the nascent Confederation would enter in with their existing claims to the rich land east of the Alleghenies (to say nothing of the then-unknown Pays des Illinois beyond).3 The combined efforts of non-claimant states, spearheaded by Rhode Island, New Jersey, and especially Maryland toward the end of the war, arguing that the common spillage of revolutionary blood to free these territories from British dominion necessitated they be given over in common. After a laborious battle, New York and Virginia ceded their western claims.4 Maryland and its landed delegates refused to ratify the Articles of Confederation at all until assured the Continental Congress would be given control of the western lands, plainly objecting to the claims of all other states and making clear that “it still hoped to share in the profits to be derived from the West”.5 Virginia’s cession included a caveat that all existing “purchases” from Natives in its former territory be declared null, with the specific intent of upsetting slavering land speculators from Maryland and Pennsylvania – principally the Illinois-Wabash Company, in which Robert Morris, James Wilson, Samuel Chase, Thomas Johnson, and Charles Carroll were all investors, and the Indiana Company, which included Benjamin Franklin, Samuel and Thomas Wharton, and George Morgan, with one Virginia delegate calling the above “land-jobbers”. As a result, the land-jobbers moved to strip Virginia utterly of its power to make its cession conditional, arguing instead that Congress take stewardship directly while respecting their claims. This struggle – between, on the one hand, Virginia and allied landless states, and on the other, ascendent speculators who were themselves delegates – dominated the Congress until as late at 1784.6 Virginia capitulated, the purchases remained intact, and the remainder of the lands joined the cessions of other states to create a public domain, finally under Congressional control.
Rohrbough writes of a “northern system” of expansion, defined as a cautious process of “survey before settlement”, contrasted with the southern approach of indiscriminate squatting and platting by natural boundaries, with a bare-bones administrative network of land offices which existed as quiet little bookkeepers to track and ratify claims.7 These systems were fused into a bureaucratic apparatus that twinned the cadastral fetish of the north with the folksy Jeffersonian accountancy of the south in the Ordinance of 1785.8 This ordinance, among many other things, established the office of Surveyor General, lot sizes (640 acres), a national payment and surveying system, the legal definition of deeds, state control of sales, the federal government’s title to the output of mines and deposits, the requirement to reserve four “federal lots” in every new township, and another lot for a public school – all in all, a very basic system. It also, and perhaps most crucially, required all land sales to be sold at auction.9
The public land system was placed the purview of the Department of the Treasury, along with the fact that the Ordinance required land to be sold at competitive auction to increase prices, made administratively obvious the fact that these lands, organized into seven “ranges”, had value mainly as an asset pool for the flagging national coffers. By 1787, Congress, dissatisfied with the slow progress on the surveying of the ranges (only four of which had been completed at that point), jumped the gun and sold the first four ranges immediately, against the 1785 Ordinance’s requirement that surveying of all lands came first. In autumn of the same year, 72,934 acres of land were auctioned off for the grand sum of $117,108.22 – much smaller receipts than hoped.10
Alexander Hamilton, wary of the financial situation, moved to create the possibility of a sustained market in land by, first, appealing directly to “moneyed individuals and companies, who will buy to sell again; associations of persons, who intend to make settlements themselves; single persons, or families now resident in the Western country, or who may emigrate thither hereafter” – especially the first, made up of Northeastern merchants, whom he considered to be essential to the survival of the United States in general. Facilitating this market in land was his proposed General Land Office system, intended to function as a clearinghouse for large capitalists to speculate and purchase lands directly, without needing to attend the auctions that individual settlers and preemptive residents were beholden to.11 Hamilton’s reports on the matter suggested a fixed price of 30 cents an acre, with tracts offered in three sizes to appeal to the three classes of prospective land purchasers and a minimum of surveying necessary. Would-be settlers or preemptive squatters, he suggested, should be forced to buy outright, but “moneyed individuals and companies”, or speculators, would be extended credit after initial payments in stock or specie at 6% interest.12 This tied in nicely with Hamilton and other Federalists’ efforts to develop the domestic financial system, such as chartering the (first) Bank of the United States (capitalized at $10 million, with 4/5ths of the $400 shares held by private investors) and the restructuring of public debt prior to the issuance of three new Treasury securities to attract French and Dutch investment.13
Writers of the main histories on the public domain both view the slow struggle to tame the public domain and incorporate into a suitable federal apparatus as evidence of a great republican compromise between august statesmen plagued by temporary episodes of frontier graft but their patriotism confounds the reality.14 Hamilton and the Federalists provided the basic financial apparatus, giving shape to the already-extant drive to accumulate. Mentions of certain figures as known dabblers in the land business – George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, Albert Gallatin, Rufus Putnam, to name a few – serves not to draw the obvious conclusion that the land speculator and the political agent were two masks worn by the same powerful figure, but to isolate these few as having somehow “played both sides” as they strove to administer and superintend a fledgling nation attempting to do right by its yeomen farmers.15 I propose that we think about this a different way: that these men, and many more besides, were interested solely in using the American government, by any means necessary, to create a speculator’s environment whereby their land holdings could appreciate and be sold freely. What they had in mind was not the mundane workings of land offices, but a method by which their claims could be transmuted into titles, and these could exist on a global market. The means was conquest, the ultimate lodestar a systemically structureless, “free” market.16 Talk of solving the pernicious problems of the domestic debt or dewy-eyed Rousseauian meditations on the plight of the Farmer in Nature17 were both prolegomena for the creation of this market. In order for this to occur, claims had to undergo a transformation – they had to be wrested from the notion of tenancy (on the part of the white settler and, especially, the Native nations); the individuality of the tracts themselves had to be cleared to the greatest extent possible, so land could trade as a differential commodity on the basis of its fertility alone; and finally, they had to be assigned a value in specie, meaning they had to become analogous to capital itself.18
2. 1795
1795 was something of a banner year for the public domain. First, Hamilton’s plan was more or less ratified by Congress and became the law of 1796, which required survey to always precede settlement and established a $2/acre price for 640 acre sections with a bare-bones credit system requiring one-twentieth of the purchase price down at sale, and established frontier auction sites in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh as well as the main auction location in Washington.19 The federal land business offered an improved outlet for speculators given the larger claims and volume of tracts on offer, along with the assurance of a prior survey, and, most importantly of all, a sure title. It also developed further and universalized the acceptance of a year’s credit for land purchases. The combination of a codifying the commodity for sale as well as providing services for their purchase in bulk should be read as a clear attempt to shore up the market, given doing so actually overwhelmed other pressures to shore up the frontier, to engage in wanton conquest, or even to extract money from sale of public domain assets.20 In effect, Congress had put its bloodlust for easy money and territorial expansion, however briefly, on hold in order to ensure the furthering of their nascent market-creation project.
This short-lived but remarkable prudence was also, in a way, a forced response to the military situation. The long war in the Ohio Valley/Northwest Territory against the Shawnee, Lenape, and Miami (constituting a powerful entity calling itself the United Indian Nations) had finally taken a turn in the United States’ favor after General “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers the year before.21 The previous phase of the war, in which the nations defended themselves against the consistent and ever-further-ranging trickle of advantageous settlers,22 had seen major victories for the Nations with the devastating defeats of General John Harmar at the Battle of Kekionga and, especially, to a 1000-man force General Arthur St. Clair, in which nearly all under him were killed or wounded in a surprise attack at dawn.23 Commanders Little Turtle of the Miami and Blue Jacket of the Shawnee led a militarily potent confederacy the likes of which would not be seen again until Tecumseh.24 Given the United Indian Nations’ power in the region, previous Treaties assuring settlers of their protection at Forts McIntosh and Harmar (in 1785 and 1789, respectively) were, essentially, voided. Wayne’s victory broke the back of the UIN, leading to the Treaty of Greeneville in August 1795, which placed 25,000 miles of Ohio Territory firmly in the grasp of the United States, as well as assured settlers and speculators that the US Army would go to war to protect white conquest and, crucially, the continued viability of the market in land.25 Survey proceeded at once, with tracts coming up for auction nearly as soon as the process was complete, on a tract-by-tract basis. Pre-American claims, European or Native, were essentially ignored.26 Representative William Findlay, speaking in Congress, exhorted them to think of the sale of lands as if they were “not only to keep a wholesale but a retail store”. The market began the moment that land became open for properly recorded white habitation via military victory or extortionate treaty, and not a second before.
Even in the rarer instances where Natives were parted with their land by supposedly more “humanistic” colonizers, like William Penn’s supposedly equal exchange for lands of the Lenni Lenape (as immortalized on canvas by Benjamin West in his painting William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians When he Founded the Province of Pennsylvania in North America), these “trades” were in fact surrenders, and not the origin point of the market as such. They were a process of bloody (call it primitive, if you like) accumulation, outright deception, dishonest promises, or any combination thereof, intended to release assets into a “fair” market which, while retaining an obvious bias towards large capitalists and speculation companies, nevertheless prized, as capitalist partisans do, the supposed equality of exchange.27 William Penn’s miserly expansion of his hoard of land, and the violent defilement of his treaty promises to the Lenni Lenape, was not an act of capital accumulation, but a necessary prelude to it. But I’m splitting hairs here.
Of primary importance was that the codification of the national land market, combining violent conquest with frictionless exchange, become national. By 1795, the national market was by no means total; Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia had all yet to fully relinquish their claims and continued to sell western lands at lower rates than the established $2/acre price.28 The looseness of title and lack of structuration in state markets provided enormous opportunities for speculation. Early in the year, legislators in Georgia sold around 35 million acres in what is now Mississippi and Alabama to four land speculation companies. The lands, beyond the Chattahoochee River and between the 31st and 35th parallel, were maintained over and against conflicting claims from South Carolina, the federal government, and Spanish Florida.29 These claims of dominion were all as fictitious as corresponding ones were in the Northwest before Wayne’s victory. As I wrote about previously, this territory was the indigenous home of the Creeks, Choctaws, Chikasaws, and Cherokees, who still occupied it in great numbers, along with Seminoles in Spanish Florida. Speculators were undaunted. In particular, John Wereat, agent for Representative Albert Gallatin, A.J. Dallas, and Jared Ingersoll, spent years agitating for sale of the Georgian west. Governor Matthews was under pressure to accept the sale from, essentially, every major political figure in Georgia at all levels of government, with Federalists in particular overrepresented among politicians with tied to the companies.30 He capitulated to the “Yazoo government” in January 1795, selling all 35 million acres for 1.5 cents each.31 The largest share went to the Georgia Company for $250,000.32 The companies likewise offered assistance in Native suppression (and extermination), and were enjoined to provide settlements and townships within five years. In a sense, Georgia was buying military assistance with the discount it offered on the tracts, along with the establishment of a much-desired “buffer zone” against Native attacks of the type that would later obsess Andrew Jackson.33 The speculators went north and sold “warranties” to tracts in their holdings, picking up $2 million (mostly in notes) in Boston alone.34
3. Yazoo
To the Georgians’ credit, they did not take kindly to this sale, with newspapers, juries, and other commentors commonly decrying the sale as unconstitutional “because it violated sacred republican principles that demanded the interests of the people be put before that of speculating companies and government officials”.35 The furor escaped the sphere of fiery denunciation against the unlawful “alienation of territory”36 and quickly became mortally violent, with Georgia becoming a “perilous residence for all concerned with the speculation”. In Augusta, mobs were formed to hunt down the speculators, and a mob from Hancock chased their implicated senator to South Carolina and killed him.37 Unsurprisingly, “anti-Yazoo” sentiment congealed quickly into a political party which took over the Georgia legislature, and by January of 1796, the act had been rescinded, with crusading legislators noting that the Yazoo land fraud had been in direct contravention of the state constitution and inimical to the “public good” itself. Two days after the sale had been declared null and void, the 1795 act itself was ritualistically destroyed with “fire from heaven” (a fun bit of pageantry that seems to have been accomplished with a magnifying glass, like when a sadistic child burns ants).38
The army of second-order investors reacted with a slower fury than the anti-Yazoo, building a case for their own dispossession. The investors organized into a potent capital bloc which agitated for over a decade first against the state, then Congress. Anti-Yazoo John Randolph “of Roanoke”, Representative from Virginia, regularly blocked and rebuked their plaintive calls for solvency, referring to them as the mutterings of a united class of land speculators, “a monster generated by fraud, nursed by corruption” and an “atrocious public robbery”.39 One imagines that his furious denunciations were the product of not only some type of Republican zeal against the Federalists, but also owed in some part to hostility against upstart land-grubbing “finance capitalists”40 from the wealthy landed overclass, whose membership was to be determined by primogeniture, composed of sober men such as himself.
But the affair grew tiresome, especially for the Jeffersonian Republicans, who saw it as imperative to march their yeoman colonizers into the Mississippi Territory (established in 1797) and occupy it as quickly as possible. James Madison (secretary of state), Albert Gallatin (secretary of the treasury, the same one who had been involved in the original Yazoo sale), and Levi Lincoln (attorney general) were dispatched by Jefferson to clear up the hopeless morass in the territory of not only those who claimed to have been sold fraudulent warrants in the Yazoo sale, but also holders of titles from European colonial powers like Spain predating American claims,41 squatters and preemptive tenant settlers, and, of course, any and all title held by the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees, which were to be “extinguished”,42 indicating a new policy of “formal commitment” to dispossession.43 Jefferson’s agents worked to incorporate the Mississippi Territory much as the Northwest Territory had been incorporated, producing the Compact of 1802. Under the compact, Georgia was promised the first $1.25 million of the proceeds from the federal government’s sale of lands in the territory, set aside 5 million acres for satisfaction of earlier, “private” claims, and established conditions for the eventual Mississippi statehood.44
It wasn’t until 1810 that the Yazoo claims were “resolved” in any fashion, despite being the continued locus of both sectarian fighting between the parties, the factions of capitalists they represented, and, finally, clashes over Georgia “state’s rights” against pernicious northern Federalism. The New England Mississippi Land Company, supposedly representing the Yazoo petitioners, and having argued against John Randolph & Co. for over a decade to no avail, found their suit finally taken up by the Supreme Court in Fletcher v. Peck.45 Chief Justice Marshall’s court demonstrated a “militant assertion of contractual rights and national authority” and, in effect, recontextualized the Yazoo fraud as a binding contract, spearheaded by the common law “toryism” of newcomer Justice Joseph Story.46 The secondary purchasers had won a substantial victory, but the Republican dominated Congress under James Madison made no moves to honor the Fletcher v. Peck decision; it wasn’t until distaste over the prosecution of the War of 1812 swept Federalists into power. Composed primarily of capitalists and landowners from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, the party was already driven by animus over the economic damage caused by Jeffersonian foreign policy.47 Time had gone on long enough, in their view, that the Mississippi Territory needed to be settled in the same way the Old Northwest had been. After Andrew Jackson’s victory over the Creeks in the Redstick War, the stars had finally aligned to release the floodgates of settlers into the Territory; Federalists ascendant, looking to both finally achieve recompense and make up deficits accrued in the War of 1812, created the “Mississippi Stock”, awarding claimants $4.2 million worth.48
The Mississippi Stock was a strange financial instrument, and definitely not a stock. In fact, it functioned much like a Treasury bond – albeit one that did not bear interest. Claimants received the Stock upon relinquishing all originary claims to Yazoo land, which they could exchange the Stock for cash at the Treasury Office in Washington. This option only became available after the federal government’s outstanding debt of $1.25 million was paid to Georgia, as the Stock claims were also paid out of land sales. The second option for a Stockholder was to present it as a certificate at any federal land office in the Mississippi Territory for payment of land, with every $100 in stock (though it only came in $75 and $150 denominations) accompanied by only $5 in cash or specie.49 By 1816, after an extensive period of interview and appeal from prospective claimants, the Stocks were trading in securities markets, especially in Boston – often at less than half its value, only occasionally edging up to around 80% of par.50 Trading below its value made the stock immensely valuable for speculators and planters, who made extensive use of the Stock to create and expand holdings which were then put immediately into use growing cotton, with slave labor of course. The Mississippi Territory was an Eden for cotton planters, who had traditionally crowded in to the Georgia-South Carolina Piedmont region, and saw in the Mississippi lowlands a much more fertile country linked by navigable rivers. In addition, cotton had itself become America’s most valuable crop – a position clinched even further by Britain’s lifting of the blockade after the War of 1812 and the resumption of normal trade. British markets were starved for American cotton, and the price rose to 50 cents a pound on average by 1815,51 with an expectation of 1,000 pounds/annum per slave.52 Given the obvious paucity of labor costs in slave production, their output was almost pure profit. Access to bewildering profit of this type is what the Mississippi Stock offered.
The Stock also paired nicely with the requirement of bringing lands to auction to contribute to an enormous inflation in land prices in the Mississippi Territory “Cotton Kingdom”. When land from the Creek cession first went on sale at the Milledgeville land office in 1817, speculators crowded in to exchange their Stock. This initial offering raised $12,000 in cash, but also saw more than $177,000 in Mississippi Stock used as payment. At another sale in Huntsville, $1.1 million in Mississippi Stock was paid – 75% of the total bill.53 Huntsville averaged a sale price of $7.78/acre in 1818, nearly four times the minimum price of $2/acre, with recorded prices as high as $120/acre.54 The Stock also enabled ever-more-dramatic, to the point of dizzying, volumes of sale when married to an extremely forgiving credit system. Under an 1800 law, the land office extended credit to all buyers in the form of a four-year mortgage. This required 25% of the purchase money to be paid in 40 days after the day of sale, with the remainder to be paid in equal payments at every year for four years at 6% interest. If the tract was not paid off within a year after the date of the 4th year payment, it was to be sold and forfeited – but often, those in arrears would simply to refuse to abandon their land and improvements. Given Stock and a marginal cash amount would suffice to secure a provisional title, and given also that the land office was unable and unwilling to enforce payment, this created an epidemic of indebtedness along the frontier. Competition at the point of sale, enshrined in the requirement to sell at auction, engendered an enormous speculative bubble, backed by nothing more than the Mississippi Stock and a few wisps of cash. Emerick notes that, between 1818 and 1822, debt due from individuals alone for public lands increased from $3 million to nearly $17 million.55 “Alabama feaver” fully had American capital in its grip.56
The Mississippi Stock signifies a crucial moment, bridging, in a way, the gap between the protean early land market, riven with inconsistencies and pesky vestiges of tenancy over title, and the land market to come, in which the shaky early steps became a powerful westward stride, all the way to the Pacific. In the Stock, the political oddities of the “early Republic” were overwhelmed by the appearance of land titles as a pure financial asset. The shock of their entrance into the land business came at a time in which the fabulation of American banking and finance was reaching a crucial stage – culminating in a delirious, headlong rush into the Panic of 1819, in which the Stock played an essential role. More in Part Two!
Treat, P. J. (1910). The National Land System, 1785-1820. E. B. Treat, 2.
Rohrbough, M. J. (1968). The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837. Oxford University Press, 6.
For more on this, see Robbins, R. M. (1962). Our landed heritage: The public domain, 1776-1936. University of Nebraska Press.
Treat, The National Land System, 1785-1820, 6.
Jensen, M. (1939). The Creation of the National Domain, 1781-1784. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 26(3), 324.
Ibid., 341.
Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 5.
Freund, R. (1946). Military Bounty Lands and the Origins of the Public Domain. Agricultural History, 20(1), 17.
Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 9.
Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 11.
Alexander Hamilton, “First Report on Public Credit”, cited in Rohrbough (p 13). Treat suggests that Hamilton’s First Report and his subsequent “Report of a Uniform System for the Disposition of the Lands, the Property of the United States” were written with complete disregard for the 1785 Ordinance whatsoever, “without consideration” – likely due to the fact that the initial offering had not exactly been felicitous with respect to payment of the domestic debt.
Treat, The National Land System, 1785-1820, 70-72.
Sylla, R. (1998). U.S. securities markets and the banking system, 1790-1840. Review (00149187), 80(3), 86.
Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 22.
I’m really not exaggerating here. Putnam, Washington’s surveyor general, was the chief representative of the Ohio Company of Associates, a large speculator in the Northwest Territory, and then a territorial judge before he ascended to his post. The other two judges in the territory, John Cleves Symnes and George Turner, were speculators there. Winthrop Sargent, another Company leader, was territory secretary. The actual surveyors were regularly often speculators. This is just one territory in 1796, mind you.
Pelzer, L. (1914). The public domain as a field for historical study. State Historical Society of Iowa, 15.
Dater, H. M. (1939). Albert Gallatin—Land Speculator. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 26(1), 21–38. This piece really exceptionally traces Gallatin’s life and associations, in particular his personal connection to Rousseau from his childhood.
With this in mind, accusations of corruption appear a bit irrelevant. A case in point: Treat makes mention of a corruption scheme occurring immediately before the mid-December ratification of the law of 1796, in which “a Mr. Randall and a Mr. Whitney”, representing a group of land speculators, attempted to bribe sitting members of Congress with holdings on the Michigan peninsula. The speculators offered over half a million dollars for a bulk purchase of the claim, along with services in “quieting the Indians” (the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi nations). Once accomplished, they would have the claim surveyed and subdivided into 40 tracts, 24 of which they were prepared to offer to Congressmen, particularly those on the Land Office Committee. Randall was jailed for their egregious attempt to corrupt the august legislature while in-session, but released a week later. The pair’s crime, in actuality, was to propose the contravention of the land market, the smooth and reliable functioning of which was paramount. Open graft had to be punished in order to support a system which was coming into being that provided regular and consistent opportunities for ownership without political entanglement via pure exchange.
Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 18.
Treat, The National Land System, 1785-1820, 91.
Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 51.
To say nothing of the ultimate fear of the settler, the loss of property. Maulden notes that in addition to an estimated 1,500 dead, the casualties of the war also included “two thousand horses through theft, and $50,000 in property damages between 1783 and 1790, and the violence was so extensive that it threatened the United States’ claims to the region itself”. See Maulden, K. (2016). A Show of Force: The Northwest Indian War and the Early American State. Ohio Valley History, 16(4), 20–40.
These battles represented some of the first actions of George Washington in his newly-created role as Commander-in-Chief and the establishment of a standing army, directed by his Secretary of War, Henry Knox. That they were such resounding defeats did not exactly instill confidence, as you may imagine.
For more on the Northwest War, see Hogeland, W. (2017). Autumn of the Black Snake: The creation of the U.S. Army and the invasion that opened the West. Farrar, Straus and Giroux – a decently broad book, if a bit epic boomer war history, patriotic apologist, and occasionally specious. See also Sugden, J. (2000). Blue Jacket. University of Nebraska Press.
Treat, The National Land System, 1785-1820, 80.
Coles, H. L. (1956). Applicability of the Public Land System to Louisiana. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 43(1), 41.
Greer, A. (2014). Dispossession in a Commercial Idiom: From Indian Deeds to Land Cession Treaties. In J. Barr & E. Countryman (Eds.), Contested Spaces of Early America (pp. 69–92). University of Pennsylvania Press, p 74.
Treat, The National Land System, 1785-1820, 108.
Kennedy, B. E. (2021). Mississippi Stocks and the 1795 Yazoo Land Sale: Slavery, Securities Markets, Native American Dispossession, and the Panic of 1819 in Alabama. The Alabama Review, 74(3), 206. There is much to be said on the difference between rule by the European colonial powers and the Americans when it came to Native nations, with the former being primarily concerned with the creation of loyal subjects to the relevant Crown and the latter preferring extermination as a prelude to occupation. Ultimately, the goal and intent (subjugation and dominion) was the same, but “styles of dispossession” could differ greatly. See Greer, A. (2014). Dispossession in a Commercial Idiom: From Indian Deeds to Land Cession Treaties. In J. Barr & E. Countryman (Eds.), Contested Spaces of Early America (pp. 69–92). University of Pennsylvania Press, 70.
Lamplugh, G. R. (2015). Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1807–1845. UPA, 15.
Kennedy, Mississippi Stocks, 205. Didn’t hurt that many highly-placed judges, federal attorneys, Congressmen, etc. were all heavily involved with the companies in question. With only a single exception, every yea vote for the act was involved with the speculators. See Haskins, C. H. (1891). The Yazoo land companies. The Knickerbocker press, 25. and Kennedy, B. E. (2015). The Yazoo Land Sales: Slavery, Speculation, and Capitalism in the Early American Republic [Ph.D., University of Florida].
Haskins, C. H. (1891). The Yazoo land companies. The Knickerbocker press, 206.
Saunt, C. (2000). Taking Account of Property: Stratification among the Creek Indians in the Early Nineteenth Century. The William and Mary Quarterly, 57(4), 736.
Haskins, The Yazoo land companies, 230.
Kennedy, Mississippi Stocks, 206.
Haskins, The Yazoo land companies, 234.
White, G. (1849). Statistics of the state of Georgia: Including an account of its natural, civil, and ecclesiastical history ; together with a particular description of each county, notices of the manners and customs of its aboriginal tribes, and a correct map of the state. W. Thorne Williams, 50-52.
Haskins, The Yazoo land companies, 227-228.
Ibid., 237.
Lamplugh, Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities, 17.
Cotterill writes: “The Georgia grants gave no trouble, since there were only some 130 of them, and the judging of their validity presented no difficulty." But in dealing with the British and Spanish grants, the two commissions found themselves involved in a wild tangle of doubtful, overlapping, and contradictory claims without parallel in the entire history of the public domain. It was estimated that there were 23 different classifications of these claims. It is only by a ruthless and self-denying sacrifice of details that any intelligible account of them can be given.” See Cotterill, R. S. (1930). The National Land System in the South: 1803-1812. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 16(4), 426.
United States. (1832). American state papers: Documents, legislative and executive, of the Congress of the United States. Gales and Seaton, 562.
Finkelman, P., & Garrison, T. (2009). Compact of 1802. In Encyclopedia of United States Indian Policy and Law (pp. 203–203). CQ Press.
Garrison, T. A. (2008). United States Indian Policy in Sectional Crisis. In Congress and the Emergence of Sectionalism: From the Missouri Compromise to the Age of Jackson. Ohio University Press, 102.
For an extended (overlong) breakdown of the case, see Magrath, C. P. (1966). Yazoo: Law and politics in the New Republic : the case of Fletcher v. Peck. Brown University Press.
Sellers, C. G. (1994). The market revolution: Jacksonian America 1815 - 1846. Oxford Univ. Press, 57.
Kennedy, Mississippi Stocks, 221.
Sammons, F. (2020). “The Fruit of the Yazoo Compromise”: Mississippi Stock and the Panic of 1819. Journal of the Early Republic, 40(4), 672.
Kennedy, Mississippi Stocks, 215.
Ibid., 221.
Morgan, D. T., & Abernethy, T. P. (2009). The Formative Period in Alabama, 1815-1828. The University of Alabama Press, 36.
Kennedy, Mississippi Stocks, 222.
Sammons, “The Fruit of the Yazoo Compromise”, 674.
Emerick, C. F. (1899). The credit system and the public domain (Vol. 3). Cumberland Presbyterian Publishing House, 6-7.
Emerick, The credit system and the public domain, 10.
Ruffin, T. (1918). Papers of Thomas Ruffin, Vol. 1. North Carolina State Documents Collection. http://digital.ncdcr.gov/u?/p249901coll22,63754, 198.
Not sure if this is within the scope of this series, but these pieces highlight how the creation of land as a financial asset basically captured any capacity for the rights of citizens to be evenly implemented, and in turn, foreclosed any possibility of egalitarian democracy (or even just a good life). In other words, if the land that carries people is captured up in speculative markets then their right to place has been extinguished and replaced with the ever present spectre of precarious land relations. Everyone and everywhere become open to displacement, dispossession, and degradation as long as we understand land as a financial asset.