USA > Georgia > Miscellanies of Georgia, historical, biographical, descriptive, etc > Part 15
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SECTION V (Continued.)
To quit the Yazoo Legislature with only the little notice that has yet been taken of
JAMES GUNN
would be unjust as well to him as to our theme, and would be pretty much such a slighting of him as it would be to snub Satan in giving an account of Pandemonium and its population, which, by the way, Dante came very nigh doing, for in all his long, downward journey under the escort of Virgil through the nine circles of his ever-narrowing, ever- intensating Hell, he fails to encounter or mention his Dia- bolic Majesty until having reached the nethermost depth where the reign of frost begins and never ends, he comes upon him at last writhing in lone, unsociable misery, wedged in eternal ice, with a hard, merciless chill upon him in the very neck of that inverted, infernal hollow cone .*
What made this very undeserving or rather ill-deserving man, Gunn, so unduly prominent and distinguished in Georgia for a number of years is a puzzling question, one which finds no sufficient solution in any facts of his history which have come down to us. He belonged not to Georgia but to Virginia during the Revolutionary war, and came to the South in the army of General Greene, when that illus- trious commander was sent hither by Washington towards the close of the great struggle to retrieve the Carolinas and Georgia after that tremendous blow, the loss of the battle of Camden. The first trace of him I have succeeded in dis- covering presents him as a Captain of Dragoons in the Vir- ginia line, above which rank he never rose, nor is there any evidence of his ever having won distinction in it. Indeed, nothing is particularly known of his military career except
*"Lo 'imperador del doloroso regno Da mezzo 'l petto uscia fuor della ghiaccia."
Dell' Inferno, Canto 34.
"The emperor of the dolorous realm from mid breast stood forth out of the ice."
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his wanton and even wicked impressment and bringing to Georgia for his own use of the celebrated stallion Romulus, about which the indefatigable widow, Amy Darden, never ceased to beset Congress, until finally she got her pay after nearly forty years of importunity; and then, secondly, he was afterwards guilty of another disreputable and improper piece of conduct about horses which brought upon him formal censure and reprimand from Gen. Greene ; and lastly, it is recorded of him that he failed to arrive in time with his dragoons to take part in a difficult and hazardous affair near Savannah as late as 1782, in which Gen. Wayne had
ordered him to co-operate. The success of that attempt was complete, however, without his presence or aid, and as it was the last blow of the war (for in a very short time Sa- vannah was surrendered to Gen. Wayne by the British and the war ended in Georgia as it had already done substantial- ly, at least, everywhere else,) no inquiry was ever instituted whether his non-arrival in time was his misfortune or his fault. Such, neither more or less, is the whole story. of Gunn's Revolutionary services so far as it is known at this day.
Upon the close of the war, he took up his residence in Georgia, and seems to have thriven rapidly under the sun- shine of peace. For soon we read of him under the title of Colonel heading a posse of militia and breaking up a gang of runaway negroes who, having become demoralized during the war, had quitted the plantations, some for the British camps, some for the swamps, in one of which on Bear Creek they, after the peace, fortified themselves in their rude way both for greater safety and with a view of living permanent- ly by plunder, fish and game. This dispersing of the runa- ways was undoubtedly a very good thing done by Col. Gunn, but it was also the easiest and least perilous thing in the world, and any other Colonel or other commander of the posse could have done it as well, and the solemn pains with which it is circumstantially narrated in a stately history of the State savory a little of the ludicrous,
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and fails to help us to any solution of Gunn's subsequent rapid rise and distinction.
For even if this feat could be supposed (as it cannot be) of any worth towards such a solution, it was more than coun- terbalanced by the ruffianly, disgraceful conduct of which he was guilty towards Gen. Greene .* That pure and noble man, second only to Washington in Revolutionary merit and glory, and to whom Georgia and the Carolinas owed such an incalculable debt of gratitude for their final deliverance from the clutches of the enemy, a debt which Georgia rejoiced to acknowledge by bestowing upon him a fine estate and a beau- tiful homestead near Savannah, this man who had so well earned and was so worthily enjoying honor and homage from the whole country, had hardly set his foot on the soil of Georgia as a resident, invited citizen, when he was met by Gunn with what sort of welcome and hospitality ? With pistol in hand, with challenge to mortal combat for alleged wrong done him by Gen. Greene as his commanding officer in the aforementioned matter about horses. Not the least strange thing in the case was that such a man as Colonel, afterwards General, James Jackson, should be Gunn's second and the bearer of his challenge. In apology for him, how- ever, let it be remembered that he was then a very young man, not more than 27 or 28 years old, and that he was by temperament not only pugnacious and intrepid in the high- est degree, but also impetuous and somewhat hasty. More- over he was a strong believer in the Code to which all gen- tlemen bowed in those days, and which holds every one answerable by duel for whatever wrong he inflicts on anoth- er's honor; a code which allows not a man to decline serving his friend or even a stranger as a second in a proper case. To all which it must be added that he was fresh from asso- ciation with Gunn as a brother officer in the field, and that he looked upon him as a gentleman and as his own peer; an opin- ion which must have subsequently undergone no small mod- ification. Now all these things made it obligatory on Jack-
* Simms' Life of Gen. Greene, chapter 35.
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son, according to his views, not to refuse to be Gunn's second in any proper case, and the only error committed by him was in too hastily consenting to be his second before looking well into the case, and being sure it was a proper one. I say this was his only error, because his subsequent conduct made it so and made abundant amends for it besides. For upon his calling upon Gen. Greene with the challenge, and the General's declining to accept it and stating to him at the same time the circumstances which had prompted it, and his reasons for not accepting it, Jackson saw at once that Gen. Greene was right and that a challenge was not proper in the case ; and so seeing, he determined on the spot to withdraw from the matter and did withdraw, communicating to his principal this determination and his reasons. But these reas- ons, which were as imperative as honor itself with the noble Jackson, who ever felt bound to recede from what was wrong as well as to insist upon what was right, were thrown away upon Gunn's base, diabolic nature, and he renewed the challenge by another hand, which, upon Gen. Greene's again declining, the brute who sent it threatened to assault him on sight in the streets,-a threat, indeed, which he never attempted to execute, though from his character no man could have felt sure of his abstaining from this outrage. So much was Gen. Greene wounded by this treatment on his first reaching his new home in a land of strangers, that he laid the whole matter before Washington by letter and asked his opinion and advice. Washington's reply fully sus- tained and commended the course he had pursued. Indeed, what can be more preposterous or pernicious than that supe- rior officers, even up to the very highest, should be held answerable to their subalterns by duel for their acts towards such subalterns in the administration of their commands?
It only remains to be remarked about this behavior of Gunn's, that if any thing could add to its enormity, it is the fact that he had pocketed the alleged wrong for so long a space, and reserved his call in regard to it for a time and cir- cumstances which made that call an outrage, not only on
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Gen. Greene, but one also on the pride, honor and hospital- ity of Georgia; a call, moreover, from which he refused to desist even after his second, and that second such a man as James Jackson, had so strongly advised against it and stamped it with his disapproval and withdrawal from it as a second.
Yet in spite of all his unworthiness and demerits, Gunn continued to mount up. He next became a Brigadier Gen- eral of militia, an office bestowed then, and for half a centu- ry afterwards, by the direct votes of the Legislature. Nor did he stop there. When Georgia acceded to the new Fed- eral Constitution, and the new Federal Government under it was about to go into operation in 1789, he was chosen along with William Few, as one of our first Senators in the Na- tional Congress, where his good fortune still pursued him, and, in the allotment of periods of service among the Sena- tors, gave him a full term of six years, while only four years fell to his colleague, Few.
No particular causes have reached us for this, his great and undeserved political advancement. He had no popu- lar hold, such as grows out of long residence among a people, and strong and widely ramified sympathies and at- tachments with them. Nor, as we have seen, was his brow wreathed with laurels, gathered on the battle fields of the Revolution, far and near, like those of Gen. Anthony Wayne and Col. George Matthews, our unhappy Yazoo-ruined Gov- ernor, causing our people to take them, new comers as they were, at once to their bosoms and to clothe them with their highest honors, and as they would still more have rejoiced to have done by Gen. Greene, had it pleased the Almighty to spare him to us. And, then, after Georgia, upon the close of the war, became Gunn's home, he did nothing of which we know to commend him to his new fel- low citizens, -much certainly to discommend. There is but. one way, and that not a very flattering one to him, of ac- counting for his extraordinary rise. It is simply that he was well gifted as a demagogue, as a shrewd, supple courtier
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of the people and their officials and representatives; alto- gether unscrupulous, now bold, bullying, overbearing, now cringing, caressing, insinuating, according as circum- stances demanded ; master alike of the arts of intimidation and cajolery ; in fine, possessed of the talents and qualities by which in free elective countries bad and worthless men so often attain to influence and power ; dexterous, unprincipled, invincible in seeking, incompetent and base in filling office. It is not hard to understand how such a man should have won the Senatorship the first time. The second time his success was undoubtedly in no small degree the work of his potent Yazoo friends and partners, and whom he repaid in the manner he had stipulated and to which we have adverted, namely, by the prostitution of his Senatorial influence and opportunities to their service. His energy, activity and con- spicuousness in the scenes of the Yazoo Fraud stand in strong contrast to his insignificance, bordering on nothing- ness, in his Senatorial sphere, in which he was mainly dis- tinguished for his tardiness of attendance and general indif- ference to duty. Some natures there are, which are aroused and find a congenial element only in plotting and doing things ignoble and bad, sinking into torpor and inanity in all the upper and purer atmospheres of life and action. Such a nature undoubtedly belonged to Gunn, who, with all his fair opportunities, both military and political, is destined, should he unhappily live in history, to be known there only as the chieftain of a great land robbing villainy and as the precursor and type in this country of a class of public men, now become shameless and common, pecuniary profligates and felons, disgracing the Congress of the United States and all the important places in the Government.
His life and his long and inglorious Senatorship ended very nearly together. The precise time of his death I do not know, though it must have been not long before the meeting of the Legislature in 1802, for we find that Body indulging in a singular eccentricity of legislation in regard to him, exempting his estate from escheat and vesting it in a nephew,
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a Virginian, bearing his name. His last term in the Senate expired on the 3d of March, 1801, and that striking contrast to him and proud exemplar of all patriotism and of all pub- lic and private honor and elevation of character, Gen. James Jackson, had already been chosen to replace him now, as some years previously, on the expiration of Mr. Few's time, he had been chosen to serve with him as a colleague.
SECTION VI.
The banded speculators had now gotten all they wanted from the Legislature : A law of sale making them un- shackled owners of vast and invaluable tracts of Indian ter- ritory, free from any dependence on the extinction of the Indian title or the consent of the General Government ; con- ditions designedly left out in their case and for their behoof, whilst they were rigorously required, as we have seen, as against our citizen soldiers. In all other respects, likewise, this Yazoo Law was moulded by the speculators to suit their own views and interests, and in so moulding it, they made it a Law, which even more strongly than the Yazoo Act of 1789, was calculated to interfere with Indian rights and Spanish pretensions, and with our Spanish negotiations, and to put the peace of the country with the Indians and with Spain at hazard and at the mercy of the Yazoo purchasers, and of whomsoever might become their sub-claimants.
Such being the manifest political tendency and danger of this second Yazoo sale in its aspect on national affairs, it could not but attract the attention of Washington, who, faithful to his policy of 1789, at once took his stand against this huge aggravation of the crime then so well thwarted by him. Accordingly, the first aların on this new occasion was sounded by him; the first movement in opposition came from him. Upon receiving from Augusta a transcript of the nefarious Legislation, he lost no time in laying it before Congress, with the following Message :
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"February 17th, 1795.
"Gentlemen of the Senate and House of Representatives :
"I have received copies of two Acts of the Legislature of Georgia, one passed on the 28th of December, the other on the 7th of January last, for the purpose of appropriating and selling the Indian lands within the territorial limits claimed by that State. These copies, although, not officially certified, have been transmitted to me in such a manner as to leave no doubt of their authenticity. These Acts embrace an object of such magnitude, and in their consequences may so deeply effect the peace and welfare of the United States, that I have thought it necessary to lay them before Con-
gress.
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(signed) GEO. WASHINGTON.
It would be quite superfluous to enter upon any inquiry as to the grounds Washington had for the importance he attached to this subject, and for the great solicitude it occa- sioned him. Enough certainly is to be found in the fore- going pages to render that matter plain. As little difficult is it to see why in his message he coupled the State Troops Act of the 28th of December, with the Yazoo Act of the 7th of January, and communicated them together to Congress ; although the former viewed merely by itself was an inno- cent thing, containing nothing that was wrong or alarming; a result that was prevented by the clause in it prohibiting any steps being taken under it until two months after the Indian title should be extinguished, and in regard to the Tallassee country, not until the consent of the General Government should be given. But although thus innocent in itself, it was perverted to iniquity by being tied to the Yazoo Act, the sinister aims of which it was made at once malignly to aid and elucidate.
It is note worthy that Washington, after simply submit- ting the matter and the two obnoxious Legislative acts of Georgia to Congress, stopped short with a very brief ex- pression of his opinion about them. He recommends no Legislation nor suggests any measures whatever to the two
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Houses. The reasons for this reticence in his message are obvious. No new Legislation was wanted. A law had been passed in 1793 regulating Indian affairs and intercourse. which was ample in its provisions for all emergencies that could arise. So Washington thought, and so the Commit- tee to whom the subject was referred, and Congress itself thought ; therefore no further Legislation was proposed from any quarter. The Committee contented themselves with a Report and Resolutions presented on the 23rd of Feb- ruary, in which they emphatically denounced the Yazoo sale as an absolute conveyance to the Companies of Indian territories amounting, say the Committee, to three-fourths of all the lands held by the Indians under the sauction of National treaties within the limits claimed by Georgia, of which treaties the sale was of course a direct and gross in- fringement, which the Government of the United States would be bound to resist whenever attempted to be practi- cally carried out. The Committee further declare that the prerogatives over Indian affairs involved such wide, various and serious consequences, and so deeply affected the general good, that they could properly belong only where the Con- stitution had vested them-in the National Authorities, whose duty they pronounced it to be, to secure the Indians in their rights under the National Treaties ; and they call upon the President not to permit infractions of these Trex- ties by our own citizens or others, and assure him of the full support and co-operation of Congress in all these matters. Still further, they call upon him not to permit treaties for the extinguishment of Indian titles to be held at the in- stance of individuals or States, even where the property in the lands would, upon such extinguishment, belong to such individuals and States, &c. And they wind up by recom- mending that all persons who shall be assembled or embod- ied in arms on lands belonging to the Indians, for the purpose of warring against them, or committing depre la- tions upon thein, shall thereby become liable to the rules and articles of war established for the government of the Troops of the United States.
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This Report and Resolutions met the full sanction of Con- gress and the country, which thus stood shoulder to shoulder with Washington in his well known Indian and anti-Yazoo policy. Even before the above mentioned Act of 1793 was passed, and when consequently he had nothing to guide him and point out his duty on this subject, but the broad gener- alities of the Constitution, he had not hesitated to take on himself the responsibility of effectually oppugning and nulli- fying the first Yazoo sale by forbidding and arresting all at- tempts of the beneficiaries under it to occupy the Indian lands. Now, that his sense of duty in the matter and his Executive ability were both abundantly reinforced by appro- priate legislation from Congress and by such expressions and resolves as had promptly emanated from that Body in response to his message, nothing could be more certain than the overwhelming discomfiture which awaited the Yazooists at his hands, should they dare to provoke a conflict with him by attempting to wrest their ill-gotten lands from the Indians, either by outright force or by any treaties or ar- rangements of their own with them, whether open or covert.
The dangers thus impending over the Yazoo purchasers from the national arm, though in the distance and contin- gent on prior aggressive movements by those purchasers themselves, had been fully foreseen by them all the while, and they saw, too, that they were dangers from which their only mode of escape (to which they were prompt to resort) was to hasten, after their purchase from the State, to sell off their lands and to leave to those, who should purchase of them, to succeed also to all the threatened difficul- ties and perils of the case, whether coming from the General Government or from Georgia. In the actual event of things, however, it befell not either the original grantees or their sub-purchasers to have this apprehended collision with the General Government. For Georgia, quickly intervening with her rapid, unsparing vengeance, as we shall soon see, crushed the villainy ere it reached
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the stage at which to incur blows from the Federal arm. And this speedy, clearly foreseen vengeance of Georgia it was, far more than what was remotely feared from the Fed- eral arm, that caused the Companies to be in such a culprit hurry to trade off their wicked landed plunder before anoth- er Legislature should meet and have a chance of dealing with their crime. To this end their agents and emissaries were dispersed promptly and widely over the country. They were successful in finding for some two or three millions of acres, an early market in the South at an immense per- centage of profit. But it was the North, then as now the home of monied capital and of an intense adventurous love of gain, that was chiefly the buyer and the victim. The Georgia Company dispatched thither, during the summer, a shrewd, plausible, persuasive salesman, who acquitted him- self alike to the satisfaction of his employers and to the cap- tivation of quite a number of the solid men of Boston, selling them eleven millions of acres at eleven cents per acre, thereby making a profit of nearly a million of dollars to his Com- pany. These Bostonians subsequently organized under the name of the New England Mississippi Land Company, and proceeded to scatter their lands at greatly increased prices among thousands of beguiled Northern people upon whom soon fell that Tower of Siloam, the Rescinding Act of Geor- gia, and held them crushed, though not killed, for almost a score of years, until at length the Supreme Court and Con- gress came to their rescne. They were, or rather were as- serted years afterwards by their Congressmen to be, innocent buyers without notice, second purchasers, ignorant and un- suspecting of the fraud that vitiated their title from its very birth. A story not very likely, when we recall how the fraud glared out on the face and in all the facts of the Yazoo legisla- tion, how it resounded through the newspapers all over the United States, how it stuck ont obvious in the very deeds (all without any general warranty of title) which were made by the Companies to their under-purchasers, and by these latter to their successors. And then as to the unlawfulness and
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criminality of the sale by the State in a national point of view, who can with decency pretend that Washington's above- noticed message and the action of Congress thereon was not warning enough to put the whole world on notice and on its guard .*
Sales of large amount were also made with the least pos- sible loss of time by the several companies in various other
* Mr. Lucas, of Virginia, in his speech on the Yazoo Claims, in the House of Representatives, January, 1805, adverting to the pretence of the want of notice on the part of the New England purchasers, says : "That they should not have heard of the notorious fraud that had taken place at the passing of the Act of 1795 is a great astonishment to me ; that they should have made a purchase of eleven millions of acres without making inquiries sufficient to discover what almost everybody knew throughout the United States, if possible. increases my astonishment. For my part, having never thought of purchasing any land from the Georgia land companies, I made no inquiry about the Acts of the Legisla- ture of Georgia ; yet the corruption was so flagrant, the fraud so notorious, that it reached my ears soon after it was passed." Mr Lucas then proceeds to allude to President Washington's message, above quoted, as a proclamation to the whole country against the Yazoo Sale, which must be presumed to have come to everybody's knowledge, and was quite enough to put everybody on notice. He then proceeds to say : "I should rather think that the speculators of New England, sober and discreet, as they style themselves to be, found the bargain so good and tempting, the means of pleading ignorance of fraud committed in the original purchase so easy, the means on the part of the State of Georgia or its vendees to prove the notice so difficult, that the sober and discreet speculators of New England thought it advisable to make a gambling bargain, expecting that the two extremities of the United States being engaged in the same specu- lation, would combine their influence to press hard upon the centre and save through the conflict their speculation in whole or in part. Other strong cir- cumstances lead still more to the beliet that the New England Company were well aware of the danger which did exist in making a purchase from the Geor- gia Land Companies and that they were taking unusual risks on themselves. This appears clearly from the face of their deeds ; not only the covenant of warranty is special instead of being general, but another extraordinary cove- nant is entered into by which the Georgia Company 'is not liable to the refunding of any money in consequence of any defect in their title from the State of Geor- gia, if any such there should appear hereafter to be!' Was not such covenant smelling strongly of the fraud which the Georgia Grant was impregnated with ? Could the New England Company take more clearly every risk on themselves? Could they more expressly preclude themselves from every remedy in law or equity in case of eviction!"- Benton's Ab. of Congressional Debates, Vol. 111 p. 323, 324.
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