Muscogee County GaArchives Photo Place.....Forsyth Visited For Lots Sale 
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Christine Thacker http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00033.html#0008100 May 21, 2007, 3:17 pm

Source:             Sesquicentennial Supplement IV, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
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Distinguished Forsyth Visited for Lots Sale

                               By Bill Winn 
                               Guest Columnist 

  Among the distinguished persons who visited Columbus in her early days as a 
city, none was more distinguished - or earlier than John Forsyth who in his 
capacity as Governor of Georgia, came to Columbus, for the first public sale of 
lots in July of 1828. 
  Forsyth was, in the phrase of the times, a gentleman of parts and on his 
visit to Columbus he brought a rather large retinue of other gentlemen and 
state officials along with him. They pitched a camp on the banks of tbe 
Chattahoochee on the South Commons near what is now Fourth Street.
With the possible exception of the gentleman from Plains, Forsyth who lived in 
Augusta, ,may well be the most distinguished public servant to claim Georgia 
his home. In a meteroic career, Forsyth became Attorney General of Georgia in 
1808-when he was 28 ,years old-and went on to become successively, Congressman 
(1812), United States Senator (1815). Minister to Spain (1819). Congressman 
again (1823), Senator again (1829), and finally, in 1834, Secretary of State, a 
post he was to hold under two presidents, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.
  A great admirer, and supporter of Jackson, Forsyth fought vigorously against 
the nullification of the tariff acts of 1832, which made him very unpopular in 
many parts of Georgia and the South, and he backed the President in his fight 
on the second Bank of United States. Old Hickory rewarded Forsyth by naming him 
Secretary of State.
  During the years he was Secretary, the most important issues were the 
settlement of disagreements with France over the treaty of 1831, and the 
question of the admission of Texas into the Union. In dealing with both these 
questions, Forsyth showed discretion and tact, qualities he had learned the 
hard way when he had been Minister to Spain, at which time he had secured the 
ratification by the Spanish king of the treaty of 1819, ceding Florida to the 
United States. Imperious and impatient with the Spanish, whom he seems to have 
disliked, Forsyth had been rebuked by the Spanish foreign office for "bad 
manners." During the more than 30 years of public service that followed that 
rebuke, however, Forsyth seems to have mellowed rapidly and mastered all the 
arts of diplomacy.
  At any rate, in 1831, he successfully negotiated a treaty with France over 
the issue of U.S. claims for losses to American vessels in the Napoleonic wars. 
France agreed to pay $5 million in six installments in return for which the 
U.S. was to lower duties on French wines. 
  On the issue of the admission of Texas to the Union, Forsyth, like any good 
diplomat faced with controversy, stalled. He appears to have been opposed to 
admission and, by the end of his service as Secretary of State, nothing had 
been done to settle the issue.
  Forsyth died in 1841 and is buried in Washington in the Congressional 
Cemetary. He had several children, one of whom, Julia married a Alfred Iverson, 
a U.S. Senator from Columbus. 

Special Sesquicentennial Supplement IV
Ledger-Enquirer, Sunday , May 7, 1978. Pg S-7.











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