Spanish and Mexican land titles in United States law: the guarantee of 1848 and the California commission of 1851
The treaty of 1848 bound the new sovereign to respect property "of every kind" already held in the ceded territories, and the act of 1851 ordered American commissioners and courts to decide land claims by "the laws, usages, and customs of the government from which the claim is derived" - that is, by Spanish and Mexican law. The same act put the burden on the holder: a claim not filed within two years became public domain.
Why this wins its question: The usual account of Spanish and Mexican land grants after 1848 is a summary sentence - the treaty promised to respect them, and the Californios lost their land anyway - with no text under either half. This object prints both halves from the documents an American lawyer had on his shelf in 1851: the General Land Office's statement that private rights survive a change of sovereignty, articles VIII and IX of the treaty in full, and then the act of 3 March 1851 with the section that makes "the laws, usages, and customs of the government from which the claim is derived" binding on United States courts - and, on the facing pages, section 8 putting the burden of proof on the grantee, sections 9 and 10 opening two levels of appeal against him, and section 13 turning every unfiled claim into public domain after two years. It also recovers the town-lands provision of section 14, which treated the mere existence of a Spanish or Mexican town on 7 July 1846 as prima facie evidence of a grant to its corporation - the clause behind the pueblo land cases - and which is almost never quoted. The limits are stated rather than glossed: one American compilation, primary for the reception and silent about the outcomes.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Before any court sat, the executive stated the rule it believed it was bound by, and it stated it as general law rather than as a favour. The instructions prepared in the General Land Office for the confidential agent sent to examine the archives of California read: "It is a principle of public law, now acknowledged and recognised by the usage of modern nations, that, though the sovereignty changes, private rights remain unaffected by that change; and consequently that the relation of the people to each other under such circumstances, and 'their rights of property, remain undisturbed.'" The same paragraph adds that the treaty ratified on 4 July 1848 "in the most solemn form, and as the supreme law of the land, makes it obligatory upon our government to respect the valid and bona fide titles of individuals". The letter is signed J. Butterfield, Commissioner, and addressed to Wm. Carey Jones, Esq., Confidential Agent.
The treaty text printed in the same volume carries the guarantee in its own words. Article VIII provides that Mexicans established in the ceded territories "shall be free to continue where they now reside, or to remove at any time to the Mexican republic, retaining the property which they possess in the said territories, or disposing thereof, and removing the proceeds wherever they please", and that "In the said territories, property of every kind, now belonging to Mexicans not established there, shall be inviolably respected. The present owners, the heirs of these, and all Mexicans who may hereafter acquire said property by contract, shall enjoy with respect to it guaranties equally ample as if the same belonged to citizens of the United States." Article IX adds that those who become American citizens shall "in the mean time be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction."
The machinery Congress built to make good on that guarantee is printed immediately after the treaty: "AN ACT To ascertain and Settle the Private Land Claims in the State of California. Passed at the 2d Session of the 31st Congress." It constitutes a commission of three commissioners appointed by the President, to continue for three years, and it assumes throughout that the working language of the evidence is Spanish - section 2 requires a secretary "skilled in the Spanish and English languages" to act as interpreter and to keep the record, and section 4 authorises the President to appoint an agent "learned in the law, and skilled in the Spanish and English languages" to superintend the interests of the United States before the board.
The decisive provision for this corpus is section 11, because it makes a displaced legal system the rule of decision in an American court rather than a matter of historical interest. The commissioners "and the District and Supreme Courts, in deciding on the validity of any claim brought before them under the provisions of this act, shall be governed by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the law of nations, the laws, usages, and customs of the government from which the claim is derived, the principles of equity, and the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, so far as they are applicable." Spanish and Mexican land law is thereby applied by American judges to American land, which is why the same American lawyers spent the 1850s translating and printing it.
Town and village land is treated separately, and the treatment recognises the Spanish and Mexican practice of founding towns with a land endowment. Section 14 provides that the act shall not extend to "any town lot, farm lot, or pasture lot, held under a grant from any corporation or town to which lands may have been granted for the establishment of a town by the Spanish or Mexican government, or the lawful authorities thereof", nor to any city, town or village lot where the city, town or village "existed on the seventh day of July, eighteen hundred and forty-six"; the claim is to be presented by the corporate authorities, and the proved existence of the town on that date "shall be prima facie evidence of a grant to such corporation".
The cost of the scheme is written into the same act and falls entirely on the holder of the older title. By section 8, "each and every person claiming lands in California by virtue of any right or title derived from the Spanish or Mexican government, shall present the same to the said commissioners", with his documentary evidence and witnesses; sections 9 and 10 allow either side to carry the case to the District Court and thence to the Supreme Court of the United States, with the government represented throughout by its salaried law agent; and section 13 provides that rejected claims and "all lands the claims to which shall not have been presented to the said commissioners within two years after the date of this act, shall be deemed, held, and considered as part of the public domain of the United States". A title good under the law the act itself made controlling could still be lost by silence, by delay or by the expense of proving it.
The government's own instructions show that the archives, not the grants, were what it doubted, and that it expected to find both good titles and bad ones. The agent is told to abstract "all grants or claims in the territory derived from the government of Spain when her authorities held dominion over the country", with dates, names of original grantees, area, front and depth, water-course, whether surveyed and by which officer, "designating such as are in regular and legal form and appear prima facie to be bona fide valid titles, and such as are fraudulent"; a covering letter of the Department of the Interior of 12 July 1849 directs his attention "in the first place, to the mode of creating titles of land, from the first inception to the perfect title, as practised by Mexico within the province of California", and instructs him to find and secure the record books and files "so that they may be placed in the hands of the acting governor of the Territory for safe custody and future reference."
What this evidence does and does not establish should be stated plainly, and it sets the confidence above. The anchor is a single American compilation of 1851, printed in New York for practitioners; it is primary for the American reception - for the fact and the wording of the treaty, the statute and the official correspondence as American lawyers had them - and it is not a Spanish source. It records what the law commanded in 1851, not what the commission and the courts afterwards did with the claims; no docket, report or decision of the board was opened for this object, and nothing here should be read as a finding about how many titles were confirmed, how long confirmation took, or what it cost the families who held them.