General Wade Hampton, George Walker, William Longstreet, Zachariah Cox, and Matthew McAllister were the parties most active in procuring the passage of the Yazoo Act.  That bribery was extensively practised, there is no doubt, and the suspicion that it even extended to the Executive gained credence as a fact, and was the cause of preventing his name ever being given to a county in the State:  and it is a significant fact of this suspicion, and also of the great unpopularity of the Act, that to this day every effort to that end has failed.  No act of Governor Mathews ever justified any such suspicion.  As Governor of the State, and believing the sovereign power of the State was in the Legislature, and consequently the power to dispose of the public domain, he only approved the Act as the State’s Executive, and fulfilled the duties assigned to him by the law.  But suspicion fastened upon him, and its effects remain to this day.

The pertinacious discussions between the parties purchasing and those opposed to the State’s selling and her authority to sell, created immense excitement, and pervaded the entire State.  The decision of the Supreme Court of the United States was invoked in the case of Fletcher versus Peck, which settled the question of the power of the State to sell the public domain, and the validity of the sale made by the State to the Georgia Company.  In the meantime the Legislature of Georgia had repealed the law authorizing the Governor to sell.  This decision of the Supreme Court brought about an amicable adjustment of the difficulties between the Company and the State, with the Government of the United States as a third party.

The excitement was not so much on account of the sale, though this was bitter, as of the corruption which procured it.  The test of public confidence and social respect was opposition to the Yazoo fraud.  Every candidate at the ensuing election for members of the Legislature was compelled to declare his position on the subject of repealing this Act, and, almost to a man, every one who believed in the power of the State to sell, and that rights had vested in the purchasers and their assigns, was defeated.

James Jackson, a young, ardent, and talented man, who had in very early life, by his abilities and high character, so won the public confidence that he had been elected Governor of the State, when he was ineligible because of his youth, was at this time a member of Congress.  He made a tour through the State, preaching a crusade against the corrupt Legislature, and denouncing those who had produced and profited by this corruption, inflaming the public mind almost to frenzy.  He resided in Savannah, and was at the head of the Republican or Jeffersonian party, which was just then being organized in opposition to the administration of John Adams, the successor of Washington.  His parents had emigrated from England, and fixed their home in Savannah, where young Jackson was born, and where, from the noble qualities of his nature, he had become immensely popular.