USA > Georgia > Miscellanies of Georgia, historical, biographical, descriptive, etc > Part 10
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KING'S GAP. KING'S TRAILS.
without any distinct thought whither it was carrying me save only that it was tending seaward. And to the sea at length it came, and with lovely, modest assuredness and di- rectness, crossed the shelving, sandy beach and kissed the vast Ocean's briny lip. My horse planted his fore-feet fet- lock deep in the edge of the sea in sign of ready -obedience and stood awaiting my intimations. He gazed with me on that great convex lignid world, and with me vainly strained his vision to desery its invisible bounds. But this unavailing strain of the eye continued not long. Old Neptune, proud of his Trident and wantoning in his. sea-controlling power, kind also to the uneasy, perplexed surveyor of his tossing domain, struck a divine blow on the topmost billow of the remote outline, and quickly the ever-bending, never-ending convexity of the dread waste of waters subsided and became a vast, level, aqueous plain, on which a slight mist rested low, and I beheld the Halcyon brooding and hatching her young on the still wave. No upswelling watry sphere inter- tepted now my vision which lengthened immeasurably, ade- quate to the broad, flat, ocean floor that spread out before me, beyond which I caught a view of the old World and of Georgia's parent land, and saw, too, wonderful to tell, my tiny little King's Trail recommencing plain on the British shore at the very water's edge and inviting me over. The dim trans-Atlantic East was beginning by this time, how- ever, to redden under the rays of the yet unseen Sun, when Lo! on a sudden, all my dream vanished, for dreams cannot stand the sun, and left me and my true steed stand- ing where we were statue-like and aghast forever.
And now for days and weeks this dream haunted and har- rassed me more than King's Trails had ever done-so im- portunate was it to be interpreted. How stolid I was ! How slowly penetrable my mind to the light! But the dream pursued me none the less for my dullness, and I had no op- tion but to work and worry, as best I could, at its solution. At last in a happy moment, light began to break in by piece- meal upon me; and first, it occured to me how devotedly
خة معـ
ruest
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KING'S GAP. KING'S ,TRAILS.
loyal to the British Crown, all the Indian Traders, great and small, of the Colonial Era were-the McGillivrays, the Mc- Intoshes, the McQueens, the Barnards, the Galphins, the Graysons, the Pantons and others. Then it slowly came up to my mind what mighty influence these shrewd, enterpris- ing traders acquired among the simple savages, and how they employed that influence and their utmost art besides in making them, too, loyal and devoted to the mighty Trans- Atlantic King, whom they were taught not only to rever- ence as their Great Father, but almost to worship as their more than human Earthly Sovereign. And then next, who does not know that all over Great Britain, the Public Roads are and ever have been called the King's Highways as well in common as in legal parlance? And now putting all these things together, I knew (for indeed it was very plain) whence King's Trails came and how they got their name ; for that the Indian traders who had been accustomed across the ocean in their old country to hear the broad pub- lic roads there called by the King's Title, had naturally as well as interestedly bestowed the same title on the narrower trading and traveling routes through the Indian country here, practicable only for pedestrians and ponies and pack- horses. The Indians themselves easily accepted the desig- nation, partly through mere indifference, partly from real homage for the great King and their estimation of his trad- ing and official subjects who came among them, as they were taught to believe, not to make war upon them, or to wrong them out of their lands, but for better and more agreeable objects. Thus King's Trails in Georgia were legitimately descended and named from the King's highways in Great Britain. Behold ! then here, how clear the evidence and argument (though suggested by a dream) that these King's Trails not only had their derivation from England, but were of no mean lineage there, but of undoubted right royal gen- ealogy.
Nor is this although a curious, by any means a sing- ular case of high loyalty in colonial times delighting to
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KING'S'GAP. KING'S TRAILS.
express itself by the bestowment of the regal name. The State of New York has to this day, a King's county and a Queen's. Others of the Old Thirteen the same or similar. Maryland, for instance, has her Queen Ann and Prince George, Virginia her King and Queen, a King William, a King George, to say nothing of her Princes and Princesses of counties. South Carolina cherishes her King's Mountain, glorious by Revolutionary battle and blood and victory. And her Charleston, Queen City once, sitting lowly and beautiful, Venice-like, in the lap of the sea, radiant with pearls, yet richer far in wealth of the soul than of the mines ! She, although stricken and in sackcloth now, cannot but take pride still in that King Street of hers, Royalty's namesake and remembrancer, felicitons beyond compare in its superb sweep of slowbending, graceful curvature and in the stirring scene of cultured life and animated traffic that used to pervade its farstretching, crescent-like length ; narrow, but the more beautiful because narrow, darkened and adorned at once by its tall rows of imposing houses on either side, softly illum- ed at the same time by Heaven's overarching azure as its mild-beaming, eternal sky-light. In like manner, as long as King's Gap shall remain or as the tradition of King's Trails shall last, Georgia may lay a true, an ancient, and though a modest, yet not an unromatic claim to somewhat of her own, reminding of Kingly State and times, and of the sceptered hand and gemmed brow our Ancestors loved and honored once, but which, in their greater love for freedom, they hastened to renounce and abjure for a Republic under which the hapless people of the South now lie prostrate, victims of a system of mis-government, oppression, wrong and corruption hideous to contemplate, diabolical to inflict, terrible and debasing to endure, and which is assuredly des- tined in its miserable effects, to be not much worse felt in the long run by its victims than by its perpetrators, who in their insane, vindictive blundering to enslave and ruin us, are forging chains for themselves likewise, and are even now blindly pulling down the temple of American liberty in ruins on their own heads.
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THE PINE BARREN SPECULATION.
CHAPTER VI.
THE PINE BARREN SPECULATION OF 1794-5.
Having been led in speaking of the causes of the Land Lottery System, a couple of chapters back, to mention the infamous Pine Barren Speculation of now some eighty years ago, it is not inopportune to pause here for the purpose of branding a little more memorably that very extraordinary and nefarious piece of money seeking greed and criminality. Indeed, the fact that its revolting effect on the popular mind, combined with the still greater shock of the Yazoo Fraud, conduced largely to the subsequent abandonment by the State of the old Head Right mode of disposing of the pub- lic Territory and the adoption of the Land Lottery System in its stead, imparts to it no small historic interest and gives it a valid claim to be noticed and rescued from oblivi- on. To this end we now shift the scene, and quitting the rich, variagated, oak and hickory lands of the Upcountry, changeful with the seasons from grave to gay, from green to sere, content ourselves a while with gazing on the dreary platitude and unchangingness of regions nearer the sea, sad with perpetual verdure, with streaming, ever-gray long moss and the aerial moaning of the lordly pines over those vast and lonely wilds. Here the sandy barrens salute us- the land of the gopher and salamander, of fish and game, of wiregrass and wild cattle and of herdsmen and hunters almost as wild, who love their rough lives of desultory labor and leisure, never fearful of want, however scanty their store in hand, for the woods and streams hold always stores for them, which their pleasure in capturing is scarcely less than their zest in enjoying. How beneficent is God ! Who conciliates to the denizens of every land the homes he has
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THE PINE BARREN SPEUCLATION.
given them, and has rendered even these uninviting and never to be cultivated realms of nature dear to the hearts and sufficient for the wants of the unsophisticated dwellers there. Nor dear to their hearts only, but to those likewise of all the truly filial children of Georgia wherever they in- habit, from the mountains to the sea. To all these her broad maternal bosom has everywhere a touching fascination and charm. They love every inch of her soil, broken or level, sterile or fertile, all her upcountry and lowcountry, her oaky woods and piny woods, her hills and dales, her mountains and valleys, her forests and fields, her rivers and streams, her towns, her cities and her rural scenes. For all, all is Georgia!
Montgomery county, created in 1793, by cutting off the lower end of Washington, originally comprised all the coun- try, now embraced in several counties, beginning from the upper line of Emanuel as first formed, and extending from the Ogechee on one side and the Oconee and Altamaha on the other as far down as the upper edge of Liberty county. The whole was one immense, sterile pine forest, the same that so much impressed the celebrated English traveler, Captain Basil Hall, forty-six years ago, whose interesting and graphic account of it* is now and will for centuries to come still be as true and applicable as it was when written. Here flow the Ohoopies the Canoochies, the Yam-Grandy and other streams notorious for barren lands, the haunt of deer, and for limped waters rich with fish. Here nature reigns and will continue to reign supreme as she has done for ages past, secure in vast barrens not less mighty than mountains and marshes and deadly climes under equatorial suns, in giving perpetuity to her throne against man's in- vasions. Here, too, as in other similar pine regions of the South, even war and a dire peace prolific of curses every- where else, have alike swept over innocuous, inflicting no change. It is grateful to feel that there are some things of earth, not amenable to change at man's hands ; some things
*See his Travels in North America in 1827-1828. Vol. 2. Chapters 19-20.
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THE PINE BARREN SPECULATION.
sacred, stable, ineffaceable in this fickle, fleeting, ever- perishing world, the prey of crime, revolution, ruin and de- cay. How this feeling deepens by time and thought and renders the eternal monuments of nature of whatever sort dearer and dearer to the soul of him who has always loved her in all her diversities and who has grown old and sad, contemplating the frailty of men and the vanity and tran- sientness as well of their proudest as of their poorest works.
It was in this wide extended, sterile solitude that the scene of the Pine Barren Speculation was laid by its authors and projectors. Here they found fitting soil for sowing their crop of villainy, fitting ground whereon to plant the lever of their scheme of fraud. Here they beheld outspread and neglected millions of barren acres-so barren as not only to have attracted no immigration but no attention. No settlers were drawn thither even by the gratuitous terms of the Head Right system of that period, requiring the payment of nothing but office fees. Whilst the counties of Green and Hancock, which had been carved out of the upper end of Washington, had already become populous and flourishing communities, the huge lower section now converted into Montgomery county, remained a desolate waste. But these lands, though they had no attractions for honest, industri- ous settlers, presented a temptation at once, novel and pow- erful to unprincipled speculators, who did not suffer them to remain long unnoticed after they were set off into a separate county. Lynx-eyed fraud quickly saw its opportuni- ty in the very neglect to which they were abandoned, and pounced upon them for its own vile enrichment soon after the new county was formed. It conceived the bold, cunning idea of coining their very barrenness into an infamous value never before imagined, and to this end it devised and work- ed out that monstrous scheme of villainy which was still the subject of loathing rememberance and mention in my early boyhood. Its originators and managers had made up their minds from the outset to shrink from no exorbitance of in- iquity that might be deemed conducive to their ends ; and
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THE PINE BARREN SPECULATION.
they played accordingly an intrepid and magnificent game of felonious knavery .- Fraud, forgery, bribery, perjury- such were the crimes that stood in their way, but at which they balked not. The incorrupt mind recoils from the hor- rid catalogue and would fain regard the story of so much diabolism as a distempered fable. But, alas! the daily ex- perience which surrounds and shocks us, or rather has ceased to shock us in these our own times, forbids such a solace. In the presence of the stupendous pecuniary atroci- ties which are now of familiar occurrence, practiced alike by men in private and public life, the grossest villainies of the past are dwarfed and vindicate themselves as at once en- titled to a stronger belief and a mitigated infamy.
The plans of the miscreants were well laid and unflinch- ingly followed out. In the vast uninhabited woods they planted or found at wide distances the necessary accomplices and tools : First, men who were to act as magistrates and form one of those peculiar legal devices of that day called Land Courts ; of which the function was to issue or rather to profess to issue the land warrants which were the initial step under the Head Right system. Next, other men were planted or found, who as county surveyors, were to make or rather to profess to make and return the locations and surveys contemplated by these Warrants. And the pains were also taken to have all these official accomplices regularly elected and commissioned to the offices they were intended to abuse; their election to which was a thing not difficult to effect among the ignorant, unsuspecting settlers scattered thinly over the immense wilderness. And it was this obvious fa- cility of electing men that could be used as tools, that un- doubtedly stimulated and encouraged, if it did not originally suggest, the idea of the great Pine Barren Speculation, the whole machinery of which stood on these basely designed elections. Here, too, moreover, we see the reason why this fraud followed so quickly after the formation of Montgomery county and had not been attempted or ever conceived sooner. For as long as the Territory remained a part of Washington county, the voters entitled to a voice in these elections were
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THE PINE BARREN SPECULATION.
altogether too numerous, intelligent and vigilant to have per- mitted any hope of success in such a conspiracy.
Organized now and ready to enter on their flagitious work, these vile persons had every thing entirely to them- selves and in their own hands. There were none to inter- fere with them, or embarrass, or deter, and they carried out their projects without fear and with gratuitous boldness and extravagance. Not satisfied with seizing on the two or three millions of acres that really existed in the new county and casting them into their mint of fraud, they trebled the number and went to the length of issuing and returning into the Surveyor General's office, Land Forgeries to the amount of six or seven millions of acres. This fact appears by two printed Reports, now before me, made by the Survey- or General in 1839 to a special Finance Commission, compos- ed of Judge Berrien, Judge Wm. W. Holt and myself. One of these Reports presents the actual number of acres in each county of the State ; the other, the number in each county as shown by the maps and Records of the Surveyor General's office .* Upon comparing the two, it will be seen that the number appearing by the official maps and records as lying in the original county of Montgomery, exceeds the true number, by several millions. How did such a monstrous excess get into the Surveyor General's office and upon the maps and records there ?
There never has been, there never can be but one answer to this question. Fraud and forgery aided by official con- nivance and corruption, afford the only solution. There is no other possible way of accounting for the phenomenon. Had the lands been but moderately fertile or had they pos- sessed any other qualities or accidents of a nature to confer value and make them the object of desire and competition, it would not have been strange for the same thing to have happened to them from these causes as from like reasons has often happened elsewhere in rich new countries under the Head Right system : namely, that after all the veritable land should have been actually and in good faith first
*See copies of these statements at the end of this chapter.
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THE PINE BARREN SPECULATION.
taken up and covered once with warrants and surveys, the avidity of acquisition might have been so great as to lead to the same identical lands being afterwards again and again taken up by other persons, thus covering or, in the expres- sive phrase coined specially for the case, shingling the coun- try with layer after layer of successive competing Head Right warrants and claims , all which being returned to the Surveyor General's office, necessarily occasioned a great ex- cess of land on the maps and records there beyond what ex- isted in nature. But it would be glaringly absurd to account in this way for the redundant millions in the Sur- veyor General's office of the utterly worthless lands of which we are now speaking ; lands, which nobody wanted or would have even as a gift, and for which there never has been the least competition. Why, as late as 1839, not more than half the land in that region was (judging by the Comptroller General's report, made to the above mentioned Finance Commission*) deemed worth owning and paying taxes for ; although the lumber trade had by that time given some value to portions of it lying near the rivers, that had previously been valueless.
Thus the spuriousness of an immense proportion of the surveys and returns in question is manifest. But though the most of them were undoubtedly the progeny of fraud and forgery, yet not all were so. A good many genuine ones were with covinous shrewdness and design intermixed, and this intermixture of somewhat that was genuine was an important, well considered point in the scheme of fraud, in as much as it tended to give color and unsuspectedness to the muchwhat that was false, fraudulent and fictitious.
But not only was it a part of the scheme that genuine surveys should be thus intermingled with the spurious in the returns made to the Surveyor General's office, but it was also requisite that good lands should be lyingly intermin- gled with the barren on the maps and records there. For all the vast quantity of land real and fictitious that was
*See Comptroller General's report at the end.
-
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PINE BARREN SPECULATION.
returned into the Surveyor Generil's office as having been duly surveyed and taken up, could have been turned to no profit by the conspirators but for another adroit stroke of villainy to which they had recourse and without which their whole plan would have broken down. I allude to the false land-marks put on the maps and plats of the surveys. Something base and fraudulent in this way had to be done to enable them to palm off any large amount of these pine barrens as rich lands. This was, indeed, the vital point in their nefarious strategy, and in order to make sure of it, they caused the different kinds of trees indicative of a rich soil, such as the oak, the hickory, the walnut, dogwood, buckeye, etc., to be entered as corner and station trees on the maps of the surveys :- Not however on the maps of all the immense number of surveys which they had caused to be fabricated and returned, but on enough of them to answer their purposes, a judicions, deceptive interspersing of lauds marked as rich among the barrens which notoriously formed most of the county. Suspicion was thus kept down and an imposing verisimilitude attained, and along with it as much land feigned to be rich as they could expect to be able to work off on ignorant second purchasers or as they would be willing to pay Grant Fees for.
For there was no evading the payment of the Grant Fees, which, though little in each case, would in the aggregate have amounted to a great sum. Up to this point, fraud and forgery had cut off costs and labor making both very light, but for which, the outlay in office fees requisite for their vast operations would alone have been an insuperable im- pediment in their way. But now fraud and forgery could no longer be made to serve any purpose. Their turn was at an end as soon as the forged documents of survey were accepted and registered in the Surveyor General's office. Thence- forward what had to be done was simply to get from that office certified copies of these maps and surveys, upon which being presented and passed at the rest of the State House offices ; (among others, at the Treasury, where the Grant Fees were paid and a receipt countersigned therefor,)
4
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PINE BARREN SPECULATION.
genuine Grants under the Great Seal and the Governor's signature were issued as a matter of course, except in cases where a caveat had been interposed, a thing which never happened in relation to these lands, there being no compe- tition for them.
The actors in this huge, concatenated fraud had now ar- complished so much of their programme as was to be carried out in Georgia. They had sowed the seed here, but they had to go elsewhere to reap their villainous harvest. Hlad they dared to offer their fraudulent and fictitious lands for sale here where their worthlessness and nothingness were so well known, it would have led to the public explo- sion of their whole plot and to their own no small endangerment besides, for those were times in which such caitiffs felt all the while in Georgia no little dread of a certain Judge Lynch who not unfrequently, disgusted with the too slow footsteps, or too dim vision, or too feeble or too uncertain arm of the more regularly constituted powers, came to their relief by a prompt assumption of their difficult duties. These speculators therefore in barren lands, at once daring and cautious, betook them- selves (as was indeed their plan from the outset) to other localities, to the distant places where their unavowed and unsuspected copartners and confederates lived and whence they themselves had come with evil, vile intent among us. And there they and their coadjutors failed not to find those who fell victims to their swindling arts. 'To what extent they succeeded in effecting sales, in turning the barrens of Montgomery into gold in their own pockets and involving innocent, deceived people in loss for their own base emolu- ment, is of course unascertainable now, and has long since ceased to be a matter of interest or curiosity. That their snecess was not small, however, is probable from all the cir- cumstances of the case and from the general rumor and belief which descended from those times down to a later period.
For to those remote parts whither they hied to enact the crowning scene of their villainy, to find the bag of gold at the end of their tortuous drama of iniquity, fame had carried
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PINE BARREN SPECULATION.
exciting accounts of the fertility and advantages of the Oconee country. Nor was she careful in her loud, undiscriminating praises, to make due distinction between the richness of the upper portion and the sterility of the lower. People afar off were thus greatly misled and prepared to beeasily practised up- on and cheated, and were, moreover, carried away by the cheap rates at which these supposed fertile lands were offered for sale by men whom they cost very little more than the crimes they had committed in connection with them. And when in addition, the solemn grants of the State of Georgia were paraded under the autographic signatures of her Gov- ernor and great State House officers, with her huge, dangling, waxen Great Seal appended and with also certified plats of survey attached to each grant under her Surveyor General's official hand, richly marked besides with natural growth indicative of a fertile soil, it is by no means surpris- ing that thousands should have been befooled and swindled. And that such was the case contemporaneous story indig- nantly told and was not unsupported by after-occurring facts. For many a bootless pilgrimage from distant States and sections was made years afterwards by the sufferers and their agents in search of those fabled lands. In vain, how- ever, did they thread the woods and interrogate thie trees. No land marks, no corners or stations could they ever find responsive to the well drawn, false speaking charts they brought along with them. No oaks, and hickories, no wal- nut, dogwood or buckeye, nor any kindly soil did they ever encounter to cheer their wearisome explorings or raise their sunken spirits. But barren wastes spread out sad and in- terminable before their eyes, and the tall sighing pines sounded a Ingubrious sympathy in their ears. The golden dreams they had been made to cherish were dispelled for ever. Reluctantly they awoke to the bitter reality of being the victims of a great concocted turpitude, and with heavy hearts wended their way back to their far off homes, full of indignation, and cursing and hating more than ever before the villains and villainies of the world.
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