There was of course a good deal of lawlessness and a strong tendency to settle assault and battery cases in particular out of court.  The officers of justice at times had to subdue criminals by open force.  Andrew Jackson, who was District Attorney for the Western District, early acquired fame by the energy and success with which he put down any criminal who resisted the law.  The worst offenders fled to the Mississippi Territory, there to live among Spaniards, Creoles, Indians, and lawless Americans.  Lawyers drove a thriving business; but they had their own difficulties, to judge by one advertisement, which appears in the issue of the Gazette for March 23, 1793, where six of them give notice that thereafter they will give no legal advice unless it is legally paid for.

    Endless Land Speculations.

All the settlers, or at least all the settlers who had any ambition to rise in the world, were absorbed in land speculations:  Blount, Robertson, and the other leaders as much so as anybody.  They were continually in correspondence with one another about the purchase of land warrants, and about laying them out in the best localities.  Of course there was much jealousy and rivalry in the effort to get the best sites.  Robertson, being farthest on the frontier, where there was most wild land, had peculiar advantages.  Very soon after he settled in the Cumberland district at the close of the Revolutionary War, Blount had entered into an agreement with him for a joint land speculation.  Blount was to purchase land claims from both officers and soldiers amounting in all to fifty thousand acres and enter them for the Western Territory, while Robertson was to survey and locate the claims, receiving one fourth of the whole for his reward. [Footnote:  Blount MSS., Agreement between William Blount and James Robertson, Oct. 30, 1783.] Their connection continued during Blount’s term as Governor, and Blount’s letters to Robertson contain much advice as to how the warrants shall be laid out.  Wherever possible they were of course laid outside the Indian boundaries; but, like every one else, Blount and Robertson knew that eventually the Indian lands would come into the possession of the United States, and in view of the utter confusion of the titles, and especially in view of the way the Indians as well as the whites continually broke the treaties and rendered it necessary to make new ones, both Blount and Robertson were willing to place claims on the Indian lands and trust to luck to make the claims good if ever a cession was made.  The lands thus located were not lands upon which any Indian village stood.  Generally they were tracts of wilderness through which the Indians occasionally hunted, but as to which there was a question whether they had yet been formally ceded to the government. [Footnote:  Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, April 29, 1792.]

    Land Tax and Land Sales.