County were overshadowed by another set of events in Western Georgia. Governor George Mathews, egged on by his base of land speculators and plantation owners, who each wanted a piece of the Western-pie, signed The Yazoo Land Act in 1795. The Yazoo Act authorized the sale of nearly 35 million acres of Creek and Cherokee land in Western Georgia for $500,000. The four major companies who were to buy land would then be able to deal with the Creeks and Cherokee in the area and open it up to settlement. The deal faced significant push back from the people of Georgia as well as many Jeffersonian politicians fueled by the Federalist-Jeffersonian rivalry that had spread across the country in the late 1700s. In the wake of what the people of Clay County saw as aggressive and illegal government overreach, as well as a potential threat to their own liberty, the growing confederacy of native tribes and Georgian townships met again in Bluffton in 1795 to consider their response to the Yazoo Act. For the first time in its brief history, a divide formed among the representatives who met in Bluffton. Surprisingly and luckily for the young confederacy, the divide was not based on ethnicity, but instead by geography. The Eastern tribes and townships, closer to the threat of aggressive Georgian settlers, favored formally declaring independence and writing a constitution to affirm the confederacy's liberty, while the original signers of The Articles of Constitutional Sovereignty saw the danger of catching the negative attention of the state government. After 2 weeks of debate, as a compromise, the convention passed three amendments to their previous governing document. The first named the confederacy as the District of Clay County (DCC). This definition was an attempt to confine themselves to remain members of the state of Georgia and limit unwanted attention from the legislature. The second more specifically laid out the governing structure of the DCC. Third, and most controversial, the so-called, “Territorial Doctrine” set the boundaries of the DCC and laid out the procedure by which new townships could be added. Territorial Expansion With their agreement on paper, many of the founding officials from Bluffton realized that their county was no longer just a liberally independent territory. Their experiment now had official boundaries, and they would have to figure out how to govern their land. But, as Jones and Whitefield scrambled to keep the