Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/317

304 to have been bribed, rose in anger against their Legislature and elected a new one, which declared the sales "null and void," burned the Yazoo Act, as it was called, in the public square of Louisville, and called a State Convention which made the repealing Act a part of the Constitution.

This series of measures completed the imbroglio. No man could say to whom the lands belonged. President Washington interposed on the part of the central government; the Indians quietly kept possession; hundreds of individuals in the Eastern States who had bought land-warrants from the Yazoo companies, claimed their land; while Georgia ignored President Washington, the Indians, the claimants, and the law, insisting that as a sovereign State she had the right to sell her own land, and to repudiate that sale for proper cause. In this case the State maintained that the sale was vitiated by fraud.

Doubtless the argument had force. If a sovereign State had not the power to protect itself from its own agents, it had, in joining the Union, entered into a relation different from anything hitherto supposed. Georgia put the utmost weight on the Rescinding Act as a measure of States-rights, and the true Virginia school made common cause with Georgia. Republicans who believed in the principles of 1798 considered the maintenance of the Rescinding Act a vital issue.

At length Congress took the matter in hand. Madison, Gallatin, and Levi Lincoln were appointed commissioners