To the territory of West Florida the United States had no right. Their ownership of the country between the Iberville and the Perdido was a usurpation which no other country was bound to regard; indeed, at the moment when Congress subjected the shores of Mobile Bay to the Mississippi Territorial government, Mobile was still garrisoned by a Spanish force and ruled by the Spanish people. The case of West Florida was the more curious, because in after years the United States government, in order to obtain a title good beyond its own borders, accepted the territory as a formal grant from the King of Spain. Ferdinand VII., the grantor and only rightful interpreter of his own grant,[180] inserted an article into the treaty of 1819 which was intended by him to discredit, and did in fact ignore, the usurpations of the United States: “His Catholic Majesty cedes to the United States, in full property and sovereignty, all the territories which belong to him situated to the eastward of the Mississippi, known by the names of East and West Florida.”[181] According to the Acts of Congress, no territory known as West Florida belonged to the King of Spain, but had been ceded to the United States as a part of Louisiana. The admission by treaty in 1819 that Ferdinand VII. was still sovereign over any territory known by the name of West Florida, threw discredit on the previous acts of President and Congress, and following the confusion due to the contradictory systems they had pursued, created a chaos which neither proclamations, Acts of Congress, treaties, nor decisions of the courts, numerous and positive as they might be, could reduce to order. History cannot tell by what single title the United States hold West Florida.