Yazoo land scandal

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 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 Alabama and Mississippi, to political insiders at very low prices in 1794. Although the law enabling the sales was overturned by reformers the following year, its ability to do so was challenged in the courts, eventually reaching the US Supreme Court. In the landmark decision in Fletcher v. Peck (1810), the Court ruled that the contracts were binding and the state could not retroactively invalidate the earlier land sales. It was one of the first times the Supreme Court had overturned a state law, and it justified many claims for those lands. Some of the lands sold by the state in 1794 had been shortly thereafter resold to innocent third parties, greatly complicating the litigation. In 1802, because of the ongoing controversy, Georgia ceded all of its claims to lands west of its modern border, to the U.S. government, in exchange for which the government paid cash and assumed the legal liabilities. Claims involving the land purchases were not fully resolved until legislation passed in 1814 established a claims-resolution fund.

The Yazoo land fraud is often conflated with the Pine Barrens speculation, another land scandal which took place in east Georgia at about the same time. In this case, the state's high-ranking officials were making multiple gifts of land grants for the same parcels, resulting in the issuance of grants totaling much more land than was available in the state of Georgia.

The origins of the Yazoo land scandal lay in the desire of the U.S. state of Georgia to firm up its territorial claims after the American Revolutionary War, and to supply a great demand for land to develop. The territory claimed by Georgia ran as far west as the Mississippi River, and included most of the present states of Alabama and Mississippi (from 31° N to 35° N, excepting only the coastal areas of those states). Some of this territory was claimed and occupied by Native Americans, and southern portions of the territory were also claimed by Spain as part of Spanish Florida. Lands along the Mississippi near present-day Natchez, Mississippi had been settled during the British administration of West Florida, and had a strong Loyalist presence. Some Georgia authorities and speculators thought these developed lands could be seized.

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