Land Claims
In 1783, Great Britain ceded to the new republic sovereignty over about one-fourth of the land area of the present-day United States. For the next seventy years, the foremost national project was to extend U.S. sovereignty across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. The 1783 territory of the new nation was augmented by seven separate land acquisitions between 1803 and 1853. All of these territorial acquisitions brought real people with real claims to the land. The process of honoring preexisting private land claims was sufficiently complicated to keep Congress and the courts busy for more than a century. By 1904, the United States had recognized the rights of more than 20,000 claimants to approximately 34 million acres of land.
The first conflict between American sovereignty and prior claims of ownership came in the lands of the Old Northwest Territory, which would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. In that region, French settlers had established trading posts with modest agricultural hinterlands at key sites on the Great Lakes and Ohio and Mississippi valleys. They demanded that the new United States recognize their ownership rights to the lands of their villages. In the 1794 Jay'S Treaty with Great Britain, the United States agreed to uphold the claims of the French in the Northwest, and over the next thirty years almost 3,000 French settlers had their claims validated with clear title recognized by American courts.
The 1803 Louisiana Purchase resulted in a doubling of the American nation. It also produced many thousands of new private claims to lands around St. Louis and New Orleans on the basis of prior grants from the Spanish and French authorities. The U.S. Congress authorized a special board of commissioners to examine private land claims in the new territory of Missouri and state of Louisiana. The board heard more than 3,000 claims from Missouri but rejected most because of inadequate documentation or because the American commissioners thought the claims conflicted with prior Spanish laws. The rejected claimants turned to Congress for special relief, and they kept the private claims before that body until the late 1870s. In Louisiana, more than 9,000 claimants eventually won title to more than 4 million acres of land.
The purchase of Florida by the United States in 1819 predictably brought a new set of private claims, extending to more than 2.7 million acres. The Florida claims, though large in acreage, were small in number. The confirmation of some of these grants allowed some Florida families to build large estates at key sites around Florida, including around Tampa Bay.
The largest volume of private claims concerned lands acquired by the United States after the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the conquest of Mexico and the resulting Mexican Cession of 1848. In newly acquired California, for example, prior claims were filed for as much as 27 million acres of land. In New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona, a comparable amount was claimed under prior grants made during Mexican rule, and for this region Congress established a special Court of Private Land Claims in 1891 to hear appeals. That court was kept busy hearing cases through 1904.
The significance of the private land claims in American history is that the United States did not acquire an empty continent. Dealings with American Indians over land were one matter. Dealings with alien residents who claimed private property from a foreign government's grant was another, and the United States set the pattern early on of attempting to deal fairly with the claimants. A title search on property in some of the most valuable real estate in America today, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Tampa, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Detroit, shows the relevance of the private land claims. Their recognition was the result of the accommodation of the new United States to an older, foreign past.
Bibliography
Gates, Paul W. "Private Land Claims." In History of Public Land Law Development. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968.
Keleher, William A. Maxwell Land Grant: A New Mexico Item. New York: Argosy-Antiquarian, 1964. Reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983.
