Jim Bradshaw: When the feds drew their line in the water

More than 70 years ago Friday, on Sept. 28, 1945, President Harry Truman signed a proclamation that set off one of the most important and long-lasting legal battles in Louisiana’s history.
It came about because both state and federal officials began to take notice of how much oil there was in the so-called “tidelands” off the coasts of Louisiana and some other states and just how much money that could mean for whoever owned the mineral rights.
I was reminded of the interminable argument when I came across accounts of the court fights in some old newspapers, and found a concise summary of it all in a Louisiana History journal article by Gregory Blaine Miller (“Louisiana Tidelands Controversy,” Vol. 38, No. 2, Spring 1997).
As Miller points out, nobody paid much attention to the question for most of the state’s history. When Sieur de LaSalle claimed Louisiana for France in 1682 he set the southern boundary about 120 miles into the Gulf, and that was pretty much unchanged, or at least unchallenged, until modern times.
The federal government routinely told them to deal with the coastal states when oil companies began to ask permission to explore offshore in the 1930s. That at least tacitly recognized that Louisiana and its neighbors had some claim to land beneath the Gulf, but nobody said anything about just how far that claim extended.
But in 1937 Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, began to notice a growing interest in offshore exploration, and began to calculate just how much how much money might be involved. A bill was introduced in Congress that year to give the federal government jurisdiction over the seabed, beginning at the waterline. It didn’t pass, but it got people to thinking.
In its very next session, the Louisiana Legislature passed Act 55 of 1938, setting the state’s boundary at 27 miles off the coast. There was some dickering about that, all of which came to a head shortly after Truman signed Proclamation 2667, claiming that Louisiana owned none of the land; if it was under water, it was federal property.
Less than a month later, on Oct. 19, the federal government filed suit against California, claiming it had been trespassing on U.S. property by giving out offshore leases. Similar suits were filed against Louisiana and Texas in December.
Louisiana argued that it had “exercised continuous, undisturbed, and unchallenged sovereignty over the property in question,” but the Supreme Court didn’t buy that. It ruled 6-1 that “the marginal sea is a national, not a state concern.”
Coastal states raised such a fuss over that ruling that Congress passed a Submerged Lands Act in 1953, setting the boundary at three nautical miles from shore for all states, and giving Louisiana and other Gulf states the right to try to prove that their historic boundaries were actually three marine leagues, about nine miles, from the shoreline. Unfortunately, the act did not set out exactly where the shoreline began, which was important because Louisiana’s waterline is constantly changing.
Congress also recognized that states didn’t own everything offshore. It also passed the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, giving the federal government jurisdiction beyond the state boundaries, whatever they were. The state and federal governments continued to squabble over who owned what.
An agreement signed in 1956 set a line three miles off the (still undefined) coastline as the point where the argument could begin. It gave the state jurisdiction inside that three mile limit. Revenue from the area between three miles and nine miles (“three marine leagues”) was held in a special fund until a final settlement could be reached. Everything else was claimed by the feds.
The argument reached the Supreme Court in 1959 and, interestingly, the court decided that Louisiana was entitled only to a three-mile limit, but neighboring Texas could have the full three marine leagues. There were howls and legal skirmishes, but nothing changed.
The fight then shifted focus to the exact location of the coastline. That one went on until 1985, when Congress finally drew a permanent line and decreed that it would not be changed by the wear and tear that is bringing Louisiana’s actual waterline steadily inland.
That means that we will not lose jurisdiction as more land turns to water, but it also means that the state will not benefit if by some act of Providence, the shoreline should begin moving out into the Gulf, with the state adding land instead of losing it.
That could become the cause for another big court fight some day, but right now nobody seems to be worried very much about that possibility.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.