226 The Winning of the West 



promise, after interminable litigation and legisla- 

 tion. 23 The land companies were more important 

 to the speculators than to the actual settlers of the 

 Mississippi; nevertheless, they did stimulate settle- 

 ment, in certain regions, and therefore increased by 

 just so much the Western pressure upon Spain. 



Some of the aggressive movements undertaken by 

 the Americans were of so loose a nature that it is 

 hard to know what to call them. This was true of 

 Elijah Clark's company of Georgia freebooters in 

 1794. Accompanied by large bodies of armed men, 

 he on several occasions penetrated into the territory 

 southwest of the Oconee. He asserted at one time 

 that he was acting for Georgia and in defence of 

 her rights to the lands which the Georgians claimed 

 under the various State treaties with the Indians, but 

 which by the treaty of New York had been con- 

 firmed to the Creeks by the United States. On an- 

 other occasion he entitled his motley force the Sans 

 Culottes, and masqueraded as a major-general of the 



23 American State Papers, Public Lands, I, pp. 99, 101, in, 

 165, 172, 188; Haskin's "Yazoo Land Companies." In Con- 

 gress, Randolph, on behalf of the ultra State rights people, 

 led the opposition to the claimants, whose special champions 

 were Madison and the Northern Democrats. Chief-Justice 

 Marshall, in the case of Fletcher vs. Peck, decided that the 

 rescinding act impaired the obligation of contracts, and was 

 therefore in violation of the Constitution of the United 

 States ; a decision further amplified in the Dartmouth case, 

 which has determined the national policy in regard to public 

 contracts. This decision was followed by the passage of the 

 Compromise Act by Congress in 1814, which distributed a 

 large sum of money obtained from the land sales in the ter- 

 ritory, in specified proportions among the various claimants. 



