In Florida (later East Florida) and its capital city of St. Augustine, each treaty uprooted residents and jeopardized their ownership of real property. The high-level negotiators did not forget colonial residents, for the diplomats included clauses in each of the aforementioned treaties to protect ownership of real property or at least mitigate losses. Verbiage in the treaties succinctly expressed the philosophical positions of the party nations that private ownership of land deserved consideration but did not offer any prescriptions for resolving owners’ claims. Defeated and departing nations looked to protect their subjects, while it was the victorious and incoming regimes that handled the claims of the “conquered.”
Once the transfers of sovereignty were completed, private property claimants had to look to their own efforts to defend their ownership. The previous sovereign did not assist with the claims. https://journals.tulane.edu/teclf/article/view/1602/1452
