Elijah Clarke was no armchair rebel. He had earned his reputation in some of the Revolution's bloodiest frontier engagements across Georgia and the Carolinas. By 1794, he was a popular figure in a state that felt betrayed by its own federal government. The cause of that resentment had a name: the Treaty of New York, signed in 1790. President George Washington had negotiated it directly with the Creek Nation, guaranteeing their hunting grounds west of the Oconee River -- lands that Georgia settlers desperately wanted. Georgia had not been consulted. To men like Clarke, the treaty was an insult, a distant government trading away their future. When a French-supported scheme to invade Spanish East Florida fell apart in early 1794, Clarke redirected his recruits toward a different target: the Creek lands themselves.

Clarke's frontiersmen moved fast. They established several fortified settlements across the rolling piedmont west of the Oconee, building towns and stockades in territory where the Creek had hunted for generations. The settlers did not see themselves as squatters. They drafted and ratified a constitution, signaling permanence and sovereign intent. They elected their own officials. With little immediate opposition from the Creek, the new republic took shape before either the state or federal government could respond. For a brief window in the summer of 1794, an armed and organized community of American veterans governed themselves on land that belonged, by federal treaty, to another nation entirely.

The federal government saw Clarke's republic as a direct violation of the Treaty of New York and a threat to the fragile peace with the Creek. President Washington pressured Georgia Governor George Mathews to remove the illegal settlers. Mathews was reluctant -- he shared the state's resentment of the treaty and initially turned a blind eye to what he called an "unauthorized military expedition." But Washington's pressure was unrelenting. In September 1794, General Jared Irwin led twelve hundred Georgia militiamen, supported by federal troops stationed along the Oconee, to surround Clarke's fortifications. After negotiation, Clarke agreed to surrender on the condition that he and his men would face no prosecution. The militia burned the settlements and forts to the ground.

Clarke's republic was gone, but the hunger for those lands was not. His occupation had coincided with intensifying speculation over Georgia's western territory, which at that time stretched as far as the Mississippi River. In late 1794, the Georgia General Assembly passed a bill distributing a portion of the lands west of the Oconee -- the very territory Clarke's followers had just occupied -- to veterans of the Revolution and Indian conflicts. Attached to this bill was the Yazoo Act, which authorized the sale of vast western acreage to four private speculation firms: the Georgia Company, the Georgia-Mississippi Company, the Upper Mississippi Company, and the Tennessee Company. The deal was riddled with corruption. Many of the firms' members were political insiders, and the resulting scandal became known as the Yazoo Land Fraud, one of the most notorious episodes of land speculation in American history.