By an act of Congress approved April 7, 1798, all that tract of land which today includes the States of Mississippi and Alabama, was constituted one district and called the "Mississippi Territory." Major Winthrop Sargent, a native of Massachusetts, was appointed governor and judges were empowered to frame a code of laws for the Territory, to be drawn from the statutes of other States. This code, known as "Sargent's Code" has been characterized by an able political writer as "directly at variance with all Statute law in America, and utterly repugnant to any known system of jurisprudence derived from the common law of England."[65] Certainly this is true of that part of it "directing the manner in which Money shall be Raised and Levied to defray the charges which may arise within the Several Counties."[66] According to its provisions, the court of general quarter sessions in each county was authorized to make an estimate of the county's average annual expenditure, the estimate to be submitted to the governor and one or more of the territorial judges for approval. The amount approved was then apportioned among the several towns within the county by commissioners biennially appointed by the court of common pleas. If the town numbered sixty or more free citizens, two commissions were appointed; if one hundred or more, three commissioners. These commissioners received the returns of taxables in each township, and assessed the property therein. It was specified that the commissioners should ascertain "the names of all free men, inmates, hired male servants (being twenty-one years of age) and whether profitable or chargeable to the employers" * * * and obtain "a list of all lands not being the property of the United States or appropriated to public uses, the tenements, houses, cabins or other buildings wherein people dwell and which are rented and afford an income to the owners, and all ferries, stores, shops, warehouses, mills, gins, keel or batteaux, boats of the burthen of twenty barrels and upward producing a yearly income, and of the bound male servants and male slaves above the age of sixteen and not exceeding fifty; draught oxen, saddle and draught horses, cows penned or kept up and immediately productive to the owners; together with the stock cattle, including sheep and swine intended for market and thereby productive of annual income and profit."