After his arrival in New Orleans in 1804, Edward Livingston acquired and began working to perfect a claim to the batture in front of the suburb st mary. This riverfront property had traditionally been used by the public, and Livingston’s claim was met with consternation and the possibility of violent resistance. TJ became convinced that the batture belonged to the United States and ordered Livingston’s eviction in November 1807. An extraordinarily complicated series of lawsuits and appeals to various government authorities followed, including an unsuccessful lawsuit filed in 1810 by Livingston against TJ in the federal circuit court for the district of Virginia and the publication by both men of pamphlets supporting their positions. Livingston eventually did obtain undisputed possession of a share of this extremely valuable property, but he was still litigating related issues in the 1830s (Malone, Jefferson description begins Dumas Malone, Jefferson and his Time, 1948–81, 6 vols. description ends , 6:55–73; William B. Hatcher, Edward Livingston: Jeffersonian Republican and Jacksonian Democrat [1940], 139–89; George Dargo, Jefferson’s Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions [1975], 74–101, 208–18; John Wickham to TJ, 16 May 1810, and note).