it authorized by the moral or civil law; but it has been
unblushingly carried out nevertheless.

The Yazoo Fraud was a far different matter. The very name of it was
foreign to Georgia. It was borrowed from the Indian name of a small
stream which empties itself into the Mississippi River. When the
Colony of Georgia was first settled, the land granted to Oglethorpe was
described as lying along the Savannah River, extending southward along
the coast to the Altamaha, and from the head waters of these rivers
westward to "the South Seas." Afterwards Great Britain changed the line
which he had established. She carried the boundary line of West Florida,
a part of her possessions, higher up. The new line started from the
Mississippi at the mouth of the Yazoo River, and ran due east to the
Chattahoochee at a point near where the town of West Point now stands.
As the upper boundary of British West Florida this line came to be known
as the Yazoo line, and the country above and below it to an indefinite
extent came to be known as the Yazoo country. No boundary can now be
fixed to the region then known as the Yazoo country. At the close of
the Revolutionary War, Great Britain made a treaty which has been
interpreted as vesting in the United States and in Georgia the right
and title to these lands, reaching from the Chattahoochee to the Yazoo
River, and extending on each side of this line to a distance that has
never been estimated.

The Yazoo Fraud itself had a somewhat vague beginning. From the best
information that can now be obtained, it may be said that it was set on
foot in 1789, shortly after the close of the Revolution, by a sharper
who was famous in that day. He was known as Thomas Washington, but his
real name was Walsh. Washington, or Walsh, is described as being a very
extraordinary man. He had fought in the service of Georgia, but he
had the instinct of a speculator; and when the war was ended, he gave
himself up to the devices of those who earn their living by their
wits. He was a man of good address, and his air of candor succeeded in
deceiving all whom he met. Those who dealt with him always had the worst
of the bargain.

When Washington, or Walsh, began to operate in Georgia through agents,
he found the way already prepared for him. The War for Independence
had barely closed, when certain individuals, most of them men of some
influence, began to look on our Western possessions with a greedy
eye. They had an idea o