Malcolm Gilchrist

Malcolm Gilchrist (October 6, 1786–June 17, 1845) was an American land speculator who surveyed and resold land that had recently been transferred to U.S. governments title from the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw. He also ran a cotton freighting business and managed the shipments south to New Orleans via the Tennessee River. He seems to have also worked as a lawyer.

During the 1828 U.S. presidential election Gilchrist was accused of participating in a politically motivated assault on a physician who was pamphleteering against Andrew Jackson's candidacy.

Early life "A map of the Tennassee state formerly part of North Carolina taken chiefly from surveys by Genl. D. Smith and others," by Mathew Carey (1800) Malcolm Gilchrist was the third son of Catherine Buie and Malcolm Gilchrist Sr., a North Carolina state legislator who moved to Tennessee in the first decade of the 19th century. He was born in Moore County, North Carolina where his father had first settled after migrating from Scotland. Gilchrist Sr. and Thomas Overton (brother of judge John Overton) had represented Moore County in the North Carolina state legislature throughout the 1790s. The family relocated to Maury County, Tennessee in 1809. Around 1818, William Gilchrist, Malcolm Gilchrist's brother, trained a young Tennessean named Archibald Yell in the law (despite Yell's previously limited education), and they later became law partners.

Also in the late 1810s the Gilchrists were involved in surveying northern Alabama. An 1818 letter from John Coffee, who had been appointed surveyor general for the land south of Tennessee, explained that Daniel Gilchrist (another of Malcolm's brothers) had been hired to resurvey an important boundary line in northern Alabama. According to Clarence E. Carter, editor of The Territorial Papers of the United States, Malcolm Gilchrist was one of a number of men who were irregularly hired to survey tracts along the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, beginning in 1817:

Boatman and cotton freighter Gilchrist was a cotton freighter.

James Melton, a bicultural man who was the son of a Cherokee woman and John Melton who lent his name to Melton's Bluff, "worked mainly for Malcolm Gilchrist who settled near Melton's Bluff before Alabama became a state" and was "the 'Commodore Vanderbilt' of the lower Tennessee River. He owned a fleet of flatboats that plied the river from Muscle Shoals to New Orleans and made himself quite a fortune."

Surveying, land speculation, and planting Malcolm Gilchrist was granted surveying contracts on August 4, 1817, and April 7, 1818. Several were also granted to relatives of Andrew Jackson and John Coffee (William Donelson, John Donelson, John Hutchings, Thomas Hutchings), and to Jackson's aides-de-camp (William P. Anderson, Thomas L. Butler). Another Alabama Territory contract surveyor was Isham G. Searcy, who would be deemed part of the Jackson-affiliated "land-office faction" in territorial Florida.

Malcolm Gilchrist was resident in Lawrence County, Alabama by 1824. According to the application to the National Register of Historic Places for Alabama's Courtland Historic District, most of the early settlers in the area were originally Piedmont Virginians or North Carolinians, including the "Gilchrist family, third-generation Scots from Moore County...through the shrewd foresight of Malcolm Gilchrist, a surveyor of Federal lands in the Tennessee Valley, the family acquired some of the most productive cotton acreage in the Courtland area at a very early date, soon establishing themselves as among the first citizens of the county." James Edward Saunders dedicated two pages to the Gilchrists in his Early Settlers of Alabama, including using Malcolm Gilchrist's career as the basis for an unusually frank summary of the early American land business:

In July 1828, in the thick of the 1828 U.S. presidential election between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, Malcolm Gilchrist "of Alabama," William Gilchrist and Archibald Yell from Shelbyville, and Jesse Taylor from "the Western District of Tennessee," were involved in the beating of a Bedford County man named Dr. James Armstrong. Armstrong was the author of a pamphlet itemizing Andrew Jackson's predilection for violence. According to the editor of the Kentucky Reporter of Lexington, the beating was because they had identified Armstrong as the Tennesseean who had been writing anti-Jackson columns. The syndicate buyers in Mississippi included many of the same people who had dominated Alabama land purchases in the 1810s. According to historian Claudio Saunt, the Chocchuma Land Company was one of the most powerful combinations at work in the Choctaw Nation, a secretive enterprise that revealed few details about itself to the public but was known to "composed of planters and other investors from Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Among them were several congressmen...Capitalized at between $50,000 and $300,000, it issued a corresponding number of thousand-dollar shares and purchased approximately 376 square miles from deportees in the 1830s. What the company lacked in financial capital, it made up for in local knowledge and in agents on the ground who could intimidate both indigenous landowners and white farmers who might bid against them." However, despite the syndicate's refined system, "The Chocchuma Company was unable to sell much of the land it had purchased in large tracts owing to its poor quality, location, and other undesirable features."

Death and legacy According to his obituary Gilchrist "was a native of N. Carolina, and emigrated to the west in early life poor, where, by labor and perseverance, he became a man of wealth. He was prized for his integrity and industry, and died as he had lived, an honest man, lamented by his relations and friends." He bequeathed his estate to the children of his brother Daniel.