The Rise of Federal Title

The failure of federal efforts to reform title meant that federal officials in the territories found themselves, unwillingly, adjudicating conflicting claims to ownership, often in ad hoc, unplanned fashion outside of courts. This chapter describes three sets of adjudications of territorial land rights. The first involved conflicting assertions of different Native nations to ownership, as federal officials, as part of their effort to “extinguish” Native title, had to decide which nation owned which land. The effort led them to try to understand Native land laws in an effort to parse these claims. The second required wading into the land rights of the French habitants of the Illinois Country, where territorial officials similarly attempted to understand past French land law to confirm preexisting claims to title. The third concerned veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were promised land in the U.S. Military District in the Northwest Territory. Frequently defrauded out of their rights, these holders of the so-called bounty lands appealed to the U.S. Secretary of War to protect their title. In all three cases, the result was that federal officials distilled the territories’ plural sources of ownership into a single federal title issued under federal authority. This decades’ worth of difficult and unheralded legal and administrative work became the foundation for the federal land system, especially when the Harrison Land Act of 1800 codified the resolution to long-standing heated debates about the public lands.