Georgia’s Long Claim: Bourbon County, Yazoo, and the Boundary Crisis
In the decade following the American Revolution, Georgia behaved unlike any other former colony. While the new United States struggled to define federal authority, western boundaries, and relations with Native nations and foreign empires, Georgia acted as though the war had merely transferred ownership of its colonial charter from the Crown to the state legislature. Where other states retreated from expansive claims or ceded them to the Confederation Congress, Georgia pressed forward—assertively, sometimes recklessly—into territory it could neither administer nor defend.
Three episodes define this posture: the attempted creation of Bourbon County in the Natchez District (1785), the Yazoo land sales of the early 1790s, and the boundary and sovereignty disputes that culminated in the Treaty of New York (1790). Treated separately, each episode can be dismissed as confusion, corruption, or frontier opportunism. Treated together, they reveal a coherent strategy: Georgia’s attempt to convert a colonial paper claim into real political and financial power before a stronger federal government could intervene.
The Charter Logic
Georgia’s claim to land stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River rested on its original colonial charter. Like several English colonies, Georgia’s charter defined boundaries in sweeping, transcontinental terms, projecting westward across a continent that had never been surveyed, governed, or meaningfully controlled by Britain. These claims were legal abstractions, useful for imperial competition but meaningless on the ground.
After independence, most states quietly accepted that such charters no longer carried practical force. Virginia negotiated, compromised, and eventually ceded its western lands. North Carolina initially asserted western claims but soon relinquished them, creating the conditions for the Southwest Territory and, eventually, Tennessee. Georgia did not. Georgia’s leaders adopted a literal interpretation: the Revolution had severed the Crown’s authority, not the charter itself. If sovereignty now resided with the states, then Georgia inherited the charter’s full territorial scope. This reasoning was legally debatable but politically convenient. Georgia was small, poor, thinly populated, and financially fragile. Land—especially land that existed mostly on maps—was its only real asset.
Bourbon County: Asserting the Claim
The Bourbon County episode was the most audacious expression of this logic. In 1785, Georgia’s legislature attempted to organize a county centered on Natchez, a region then under Spanish control as part of West Florida. This was not a misunderstanding or a clerical error. It was a direct assertion of sovereignty over territory Georgia claimed but did not possess. At the center of this effort was Thomas Marston Green, a land agent and political operator active in the Natchez region. Spanish correspondence refers to him as Tomás Green and consistently describes him as acting in coordination with Georgia authorities. This is not incidental language. Spanish officials believed—and wrote explicitly—that Green was working with the Georgia government.
Georgia’s governor at the time was Samuel Elbert, serving from 1785 to 1786. Elbert was a Revolutionary officer, not a speculator, but his administration presided over a legislature that authorized Bourbon County and tolerated Green’s activities. The Georgia capital had technically moved inland to Louisville, but Savannah remained the administrative and commercial center where much of the state’s real decision-making occurred. From Savannah to Natchez was a vast distance by eighteenth-century standards, but not an impossible one. Mail routes ran through South Carolina, across the backcountry, and downriver. Merchants, surveyors, and agents like Green operated continuously along these corridors.
Georgia did not need to control Natchez physically to project authority there. It needed only to assert legitimacy, issue paper titles, and encourage settlement and allegiance.The Bourbon County scheme failed because Spain objected forcefully and possessed actual troops. But the attempt itself matters. Georgia was willing to provoke a foreign empire, strain diplomatic relations, and risk federal embarrassment in order to solidify a claim rooted in charter theory rather than reality.
Yazoo: Monetizing the Claim
Where Bourbon County attempted to establish political control, the Yazoo land sales attempted to extract financial value from the same western claims. By the early 1790s, Georgia’s legislature had grown comfortable treating vast tracts of land as negotiable instruments. These lands were sold in bulk to private companies at prices that reflected neither their size nor their political uncertainty. The key point is not corruption, though corruption was present. The deeper issue was that Georgia believed it had the authority to sell what it claimed, regardless of whether it governed it. The Yazoo sales were simply Bourbon County in financial form.
By the time Edward Telfair governed in the early 1790s, this mindset was entrenched. Telfair did not sign the infamous Yazoo Act—that fell to George Mathews in 1795—but the institutional logic that allowed Yazoo to occur had already been normalized. Georgia’s legislature operated as both sovereign authority and land broker, often indistinguishably.
Northern and foreign investors were drawn in not because Georgia was uniquely corrupt, but because it was uniquely permissive. Other states had already retreated from such expansive claims or placed them under federal oversight. Georgia had not. The Boundary Crisis and the Treaty of New York
All of this collided with federal reality in the late 1780s and early 1790s. The United States government, first under the Articles of Confederation and then under the Constitution, needed clear boundaries, stable relations with Native nations, and workable diplomacy with Spain. Georgia’s unilateral behavior undermined all three. The Creek Nation, whose lands lay squarely within Georgia’s claimed western territory, resisted settlement and land sales. Violence escalated. Georgia responded with militia actions and further assertions of authority, while the federal government attempted to impose a unified Indian policy.
The result was the Treaty of New York (1790), negotiated under President Washington. The treaty recognized Creek territorial rights and attempted to fix boundaries that Georgia had repeatedly ignored. From Georgia’s perspective, this was federal overreach. From the federal perspective, it was damage control. Georgia’s resistance to the treaty was intense and sustained. State leaders argued that the federal government had no right to limit Georgia’s chartered claims. This resistance was not rhetorical. It influenced settlement patterns, militia actions, and legislative behavior throughout the decade.
One System, Not Three Incidents
Seen together, Bourbon County, Yazoo, and the boundary disputes form a single continuum: Bourbon County asserted sovereignty where Georgia had none. Yazoo converted that asserted sovereignty into financial instruments. Boundary resistance defended both against federal intervention. This was not accidental. It was Georgia’s attempt to outrun federal consolidation by turning theoretical claims into facts on the ground—or at least into paper that others would treat as valuable. Georgia’s extremity came from its position. It had contributed less than some states during the Revolution, possessed fewer internal resources, and faced hostile neighbors and Native nations on multiple fronts. Land was not merely an opportunity; it was a survival strategy. Why Georgia, Not the Others? North Carolina and Virginia could afford compromise. They had population density, internal markets, and political leverage. Georgia did not. Holding onto its western claims was a way to remain relevant in a union increasingly dominated by larger, wealthier states. This is why Georgia held onto its charter logic longer than was practical. It was not ignorance. It was necessity.
Conclusion
Georgia’s behavior in the 1780s and 1790s was extreme because its circumstances were extreme. The state attempted to transform colonial abstractions into republican assets at precisely the moment when the federal government was trying to extinguish those abstractions. Bourbon County, Yazoo, and the Treaty of New York are not separate stories. They are chapters of the same struggle: who controlled land, who defined sovereignty, and whether paper could become power before reality intervened. That struggle did not end with Yazoo’s repeal. It flowed westward, into Mississippi, Alabama, and beyond, shaping the frontier world that figures like Thomas Marston Green navigated so effectively. Georgia lost the battle, but it revealed the stakes—and the methods—of early American expansion with unusual clarity.