48 YAZOO FRAUD. 



YAZOO FRAUD. 



The following account of the Yazoo fraud has been con- 

 densed from a history of the same which appeared in the Mil- 

 ledge ville Recorder, in the year 1825. 



The Yazoo speculation was in embryo immediately after 

 tha Revolutionary war. Certain characters viewed our west- 

 ern territory as the land of promise, not for all the good 

 people of Israel, but for a few only who possessed wealth and 

 family influence, and who, by getting into their possession im- 

 mense tracts of country, might soon command thousands of 

 liege vassals bending the knee and paying them homage in their 

 lordly principalities. Their cupidity was exhibited by an asso- 

 ciation of persons styling themselves the " Combined So- 

 ciety," in which an oath was exacted from every individual of 

 secrecy as to their plans and movements. The secret leaked 

 out, and the society, composed of divers persons and soldiers 

 of the war, of aristocratic pretensions, who had combated the 

 British arms more from a desire to erect an oligarchy in Ame- 

 rica than to throw off a foreign yoke, became disbanded. In 

 the year 1789, the famous swindler Thomas Washington, as 

 he called himself, but whose real name was Walsh, set on foot 

 the 1789 speculation. He was a most extraordinary man, one 

 who had borne arms honorably in the service of Georgia, but 

 who cared not for any of the obligations by which, in civil 

 life, man is bound to his fellow. In the daily habit of specu- 

 lation, he would unhesitatingly sell to any applicant, lands, 

 houses, horses, carriages, and negroes, before he had a shadow 

 of property in them. He was artful and cunning in the ex- 

 treme, and, under the appearance of the most perfect candor, 

 succeeded in defrauding most men with whom he dealt. This 

 man associated himself with others, and instigated by the des- 

 criptions of one Sullivan, a captain in the Revolutionary army, 

 who had headed a mob in Philadelphia which insulted the old 

 Congress, and had to fly to the Mississippi for his life, persuad- 

 ed the Virginia Yazoo Company to make its application to our 

 General Assembly. So extravagant were Sullivan's descrip- 

 tions, that in our State, where Washington's character was 



