"Tangled Up in Yazoo: Finance, Native Sovereignty, and the Case of Fletcher V. Peck"

In 1795 Georgia sold millions of acres of western lands possessed by southeastern Indians to private land companies in a corrupt deal that was later nullified by a new state legislature. Georgia’s sale of its western land claims to private companies is usually studied because of the corruption that enabled it, and because it precipitated the landmark 1810 Supreme Court case of Fletcher v. Peck. By establishing the constitutional inviolability of contracts, Fletcher secured the foundation of finance in the United States. Less examined is how it diminished Native land rights across the continent. My paper explains their connection. During the post-revolutionary period, struggles for sovereignty intersected with financial institutions. Creek Indians’ territorial defense precipitated the sale of Yazoo lands as preemption rights that traded like financial instruments and circulated across the Northeast and in Europe. As markets expanded those owning claims to Native territory, investors and their lawyers made novel arguments challenging indigenous sovereignty. By 1810 the Yazoo claims had become a significant legal and political problem. Marshall fatefully solved the former by narrowing Native title to an impermanent occupancy right. By recasting the importance of this seminal court case, my paper demonstrates the possibilities for interweaving borderlands, business, and financial history, and the importance of better understanding the entangled histories of sovereignty and property claims.