Isaiah Scott [1752-]

Name: Isaiah James Scott
Party: Democratic-Republican
District: Georgia 4th
DoB: October 4, 1752
Birthplace: La Grange, Georgia
Residence: Columbus, Georgia
Religion: Calvinist

Background

Born into a Yeoman family, Isaiah was educated in his father's hopes of his becoming a priest by the local preacher. The disciplined environment would create for him a sound basis. After the unexpected death of the preacher from cardial failure, Isaiah took the chance to extend to a more exciting line of work. Apprenticing himself to more than one craftsman, he learned practical skills before setting up his own shops and transferring cotton from plantations to the yeoman households of the countryside to spin and return for wool in exchange for compensation. Taking advantage of the large number of urban unemployed and destitute freedmen in the Southern cities, he also hired cheap labor to construct leisure homes for the families of plantation owners who would vacation at the end of the planting season. Long-term condominium agreements gave him mortgage weight over the landowners, and if their business wasn't going well he could bind them into leasing plantation lands for freedom from charges, building large albeit estates himself which he could efficiently manage and pay minimal rent on.

After setting up his first small ferry company in the rivers in the West, Isaiah relocated to what would soon be known as Columbus where he built his constituency and led the local militia. Reasonably well-off by his 20s, Isaiah would soon have a setback in the Revolutionary War. When British troops occupied Savannah, a large part of his properties were damaged. Civil strife in the South disrupted commerce and led to a total halt in business. Some recompense was offered when he contracted patriots of the area to produce wool for the army that he sold for a profit, but it only covered land rents.

Virtually buying rank, Isaiah led three expeditions into British East Florida, one of which succeeded. He and his militia were decommissioned after the war, subject to the state legislature.

After the war Isaiah delayed his plans to enter Congress to repair his estates and businesses, learning the law to compensate himself by acquiring the seized property of loyalists from the state legislature. Reasoning that an anti-loyalist policy, the capture of slaves freed in the war, and Indian removal would be more supported by the state government than the national, Isaiah was elected to Congress on a radical Democratic-Republican platform of states' rights.