The Long Life of Yazoo: Land Speculation, Finance, and Dispossession in the Southeastern Borderlands, 1789-1840

How did northern investors, financial markets, land speculation, and the law shape the dynamics of Indian dispossession, territorial expansion, and slavery in the Deep South during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? This research uses the Yazoo land sales to explore these questions. By providing a deep history of the Yazoo sales that focuses on the motives, strategies, and networks of speculators in Yazoo lands, as well as the particular political and economic context from which the sales emerged and in which their legal afterlife unfolded, this project offers new insights into the transformation of the Southeastern borderlands and emergence of the Cotton Kingdom.