Mr. Justice BALDWIN.
I fully concur with the Court on all the points embraced in their opinions, as well as the reasons assigned; being fully satisfied with the construction given to the acts of Congress of 1804, 1824, and 1836, I have no desire to add any thing to the conclusive views presented in the opinion. But there are other important considerations necessarily connected with the merits of the case, which induce me to notice them in a separate opinion, leading to the same conclusion on other grounds.
As it has been my assigned duty on several occasions to examine the subject of claims and titles to land, in the various territories which the United States acquired by cession from Georgia, France, and Spain; a broad and varied field of investigation has been opened, on a part of which there has been no opinion of this Court as yet delivered. That part is a review of the political condition of the territory between the Perdido and Mississippi, from 1800 to 1821, under the Louisiana treaty, the various acts of the executive and legislative departments of this government, in relation to its cession, occupation, government, and adjustment of claims therein, the constitution, and laws of nations; before the ratification of the treaty of 1819, and in connexion with that treaty; the judicial exposition of both treaties by this Court. It is a subject of high concern to numerous claimants of land within that territory; to the United States, both in interest and in relation to the formal complaints made by Spain of the omission 'to cause the grants of the king to be respected, according to the stipulation of the eighth article of the treaty of 1819.' This complaint was made soon after the decision of the case of Foster and Elam vs. Neilson, in 1829; and in 1832 the Secretary of State, after the decision of the case of Arredondo, made to the House of Representatives a long and full report in relation to these grants; in which he states the opinion of the executive department to be most decidedly in favour of their confirmation, on every ground on which they could be considered; and especially on the faith and honour of the United States pledged in the treaty. He felt himself to be unable to answer what he declared to be the just demands and complaints of Spain, and assigned as the sole reason why the executive had not recommended an immediate confirmation of the grants by Congress, the two decisions of this Court in those two cases.
Under such circumstances, I take this occasion to throw this responsibility from the Court, in the course now pursued, and hope to show most clearly that those decisions have hitherto been much misapprehended; and when taken in connexion with subsequent ones, they most conclusively establish the right of the grantees of Spain in the disputed territory, derived from grants made between 1803 and 1810, while Spain was in the undisputed possession west of the Perdido, independently of the treaty of 1819, a fortiori by its stipulations. In so doing I admit in the fullest manner, for all the purposes of this case, and the principles it involves, that this Court is bound to take the east boundary of Louisiana to be the Perdido; that it was a political question, which having been settled by the political departments of the government, cannot be questioned in this; and that, as held in Foster and Elam, 2 Peters, 309, no title can be maintained under a Spanish grant; 'singly' on the ground that the Spanish construction of the treaty of 1803 was right, and the American construction wrong.