Spanish land grants in Florida

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A single page from the Spanish land grant claim of Spanish nobleman John B. Gaudry, who founded a plantation near DeLeon Springs, Florida after he received a land grant in 1807. This is page 8 of 53, depicting a parcel of land adjacent to the St. Johns River. Spanish Land Grant Papers of John B. Gaudry page 8 of 53.png
A single page from the Spanish land grant claim of Spanish nobleman John B. Gaudry, who founded a plantation near DeLeon Springs, Florida after he received a land grant in 1807. This is page 8 of 53, depicting a parcel of land adjacent to the St. Johns River.

Spanish land grants documented claims of land ownership when Spain ceded the territory of Florida to the United States in 1821. Under Spanish rule, land grants were offered to settlers beginning in 1790, to induce settlement of the colony. The United States agreed to honor these land grants when it gained control of the territory, provided that they were shown to be valid.

Spain Kingdom in Southwest Europe

Spain, officially the Kingdom of Spain, is a country mostly located on the Iberian Peninsula in Europe. Its territory also includes two archipelagoes: the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa, and the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. The African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla make Spain the only European country to have a physical border with an African country (Morocco). Several small islands in the Alboran Sea are also part of Spanish territory. The country's mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea except for a small land boundary with Gibraltar; to the north and northeast by France, Andorra, and the Bay of Biscay; and to the west and northwest by Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean.

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Florida is the southernmost contiguous state in the United States. The state is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, and to the south by the Straits of Florida. Florida is the 22nd-most extensive, the 3rd-most populous, and the 8th-most densely populated of the U.S. states. Jacksonville is the most populous municipality in the state and the largest city by area in the contiguous United States. The Miami metropolitan area is Florida's most populous urban area. Tallahassee is the state's capital.

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The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.

Contents

History

In 1819, under the terms of the Adams-Onís Treaty, Spain ceded Florida to the United States in exchange for $5 million and the American renunciation of any claims on Texas that they might have from the Louisiana Purchase. [1]

The United States required that residents had documented or testimonial proof of the validity of their land grants. Land commissions and other government bodies reviewed these claims, either confirming or denying their validity, and thus the ownership of the land. Dossiers were assembled for each land parcel, consisting of survey plats, deeds, wills, royal grants, and other documents supporting the claims. [2]

Publication

In 1942, the Spanish land grants were first published by the Work Projects Administration's (WPA) Florida Historical Records Survey. The records were transcribed into a five volumes, with an introduction written by historian Louise Biles Hill. More recently, the State Library and Archives of Florida published digitized copies of the land grants online. [3]

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Royal Proclamation of 1763 British Parliamentary act setting a western border for the American colonies

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Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo peace treaty that concludes Mexican-American War of 1846-1848

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Adams–Onís Treaty treaty between the United States and Spain, ceding Florida to the U.S.

The Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, also known as the Transcontinental Treaty, the Florida Purchase Treaty, or the Florida Treaty, was a treaty between the United States and Spain in 1819 that ceded Florida to the U.S. and defined the boundary between the U.S. and New Spain. It settled a standing border dispute between the two countries and was considered a triumph of American diplomacy. It came in the midst of increasing tensions related to Spain's territorial boundaries in North America against the United States and Great Britain in the aftermath of the American Revolution; it also came during the Latin American wars of independence.

West Florida region

West Florida was a region on the north shore of the Gulf of Mexico that underwent several boundary and sovereignty changes during its history. As its name suggests, it was formed out of the western part of former Spanish Florida, along with lands taken from French Louisiana; West Florida's capital was Pensacola. The colony included about 2/3 of what is now the Florida Panhandle, as well as parts of the modern U.S. states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

East Florida was a colony of Great Britain from 1763 to 1783 and a province of Spanish Florida from 1783 to 1821. East Florida was founded as a colony by the British colonial government in 1763; it consisted of peninsular Florida, with its western boundary at the Apalachicola River. Its capital was St. Augustine, which had been the capital of Spanish La Florida.

Pinckneys Treaty

Pinckney's Treaty, also commonly known as the Treaty of San Lorenzo or the Treaty of Madrid, was signed in San Lorenzo de El Escorial on October 27, 1795 and established intentions of friendship between the United States and Spain. It also defined the border between the United States and Spanish Florida, and guaranteed the United States navigation rights on the Mississippi River. With this agreement, the first phase of the ongoing border dispute between the two nations in this region, commonly called the West Florida Controversy, came to a close.

United States territorial acquisitions

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Florida Territory territory of the USA between 1822-1845

The Territory of Florida was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from March 30, 1822, until March 3, 1845, when it was admitted to the Union as the state of Florida. Originally the Spanish territory of La Florida, and later the provinces of East and West Florida, it was ceded to the United States as part of the 1819 Adams–Onís Treaty. It was governed by the Florida Territorial Council.

A land grant is a grant of land – held by a government to hold until the land it granted to a person. The United States historically gave out numerous land grants to people desiring farmland. The American Industrial Revolution was guided by many supportive acts of legislatures promoting commerce or transportation infrastructure development by private companies, such as the Cumberland Road turnpike, the Lehigh Canal, the Schuylkill Canal, and the many railroads that tied the young United States together.

A land patent is an exclusive land grant made by a sovereign entity with respect to a particular tract of land. To make such a grant "patent", a sovereign must document the land grant, securely sign and seal the document (patent), and openly publish the documents for the public to see. An official land patent is the highest evidence of right, title, and interest to a defined area. It is usually granted by a central, federal, or state government to an individual or to a private company.

West Florida Controversy

The West Florida Controversy refers to two border disputes that involved Spain and the United States in relation to the region known as West Florida over a period of 37 years. The first dispute commenced immediately after Spain received the colonies of West and East Florida from the Kingdom of Great Britain following the American Revolutionary War. Initial disagreements were settled with Pinckney's Treaty of 1795.

The California Land Act of 1851, enacted following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the admission of California as a state in 1850, established a three-member Public Land Commission to determine the validity of prior Spanish and Mexican land grants. It required landowners who claimed title under the Mexican government to file their claim with a commission within two years. Contrary to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which guaranteed full protection of all property rights for Mexican citizens, it placed the burden on landholders to prove their title.

Botiller v. Dominguez, 130 U.S. 238 (1889), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court dealing with the validity of Spanish or Mexican land grants in the Mexican Cession, the region of the present day southwestern United States that was ceded to the U.S. by Mexico in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Treaty of Vincennes

The Treaty of Vincennes is the name of two separate treaties. One was an agreement between the United States of America and the Miami and their allies, the Wea tribes and the Shawnee, and was signed on June 6, 1803. The purpose of the treaty was to get the native tribes to formally recognize the American ownership of the Vincennes Tract, a parcel of land captured from Great Britain during the American Revolutionary War. The second occurred on August 27, 1804 and was to purchase land from the tribes.

The Cherokee have participated in over forty treaties in the past three hundred years.

Aboriginal title in the Taney Court

The Supreme Court of the United States, under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (1836–1864), issued several important decisions on the status of aboriginal title in the United States, building on the opinions of aboriginal title in the Marshall Court.

George J. F. Clarke prominent citizen of East Florida

George J. F. Clarke was one of the most prominent and active men of East Florida during the Second Spanish Period. As a friend and trusted advisor of the Spanish governors of the province from 1811 to 1821, he was appointed to several public offices under the colonial regime, including that of surveyor general.

Vicente Sebastian Pintado y Brito was a Spanish cartographer, engineer, military officer and land surveyor of Spanish Louisiana and Spanish West Florida. He is known for conducting surveys of lands for settlers who had requested grants in Louisiana and Florida, as well as the so-called "Pintado plan", a street map of Pensacola drawn in 1812 which included the position and size of the solares designated for construction of the city's church and other public buildings. He lived more than 35 years in the Americas and left a large corpus of work consisting of maps, plats, letters and documents vital to an understanding of the complicated sale of lands in Florida and Louisiana during the period. In 1974, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. obtained a donation of the Pintado Collection, a collection of about 1,500 documents now stored in its Division of Manuscripts.

References

  1. ↑ "Transcontinental Treaty". Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved May 29, 2013.
  2. ↑ "Spanish Land Grant Papers of John B. Gaudry". World Digital Library. January 23, 2012. Retrieved May 29, 2013.
  3. ↑ "Spanish Land Grants". Florida Memory. Archived from the original on May 2, 2013. Retrieved May 20, 2013.
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