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The Yazoo land scandal, Yazoo fraud, Yazoo land fraud, or Yazoo land controversy was a massive real-estate fraud perpetrated, in the mid-1790s, by Georgia governor George Mathews [1] and the Georgia General Assembly. Georgia politicians sold large tracts of territory in the Yazoo lands, in what are now portions of the present-day states of ...
The land was portrayed as fertile when in reality it was a pine barren. [1] The Pine Barrens speculation is often conflated with the Yazoo land scandal, which occurred at about the same time and dealt with land in present-day Alabama and Mississippi. The Yazoo scandal "quickly overshadowed" the Pine Barrens scandal. [1]
Prior to 1803, Georgia distributed land via a headright system.Though designed to prohibit corruption, the system actually encouraged it. During early administration, the government abused this system and created what today is generally known as the Yazoo land scandal. [5]
The three areas that constituted the 1789 Yazoo land scandal. Mathews's involvement in the scandal led to his political downfall. The Georgia legislature sought to relieve its burden of its unprotected western lands by encouraging purchase offers from private land speculators. [62]
Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. (6 Cranch) 87 (1810), was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in which the Supreme Court first ruled a state law unconstitutional. The decision created a growing precedent for the sanctity of legal contracts and hinted that Native Americans did not hold complete title to their own lands (an idea fully realized in Johnson v.
It soon became a major political scandal, known as the Yazoo land scandal. [ 144 ] [ 145 ] After Washington issued his 1793 Proclamation of Neutrality he became concerned that Spain, which later that year joined Britain in war against France, might work in concert with Britain to incite insurrection in the Yazoo against the U.S., using the ...
The state of Georgia had maintained a claim over almost the entire area of the present states of Alabama and Mississippi (from 31° N to 35° N), until it surrendered its claim in 1802 following the Yazoo land scandal. In 1804, Congress extended the boundaries of the Mississippi Territory to include all of the Georgia cession. [3]
Presidency of Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson served as the third president of the United States from March 4, 1801, to March 4, 1809. Jefferson assumed the office after defeating incumbent John Adams in the 1800 presidential election. The election was a political realignment in which the Democratic-Republican Party swept the Federalist ...