legislation providing for the dredging of the Potomac River, and for the dredged material to be used to fill in various tidal basins, marshes, and shores. This created extensive new land along the northern shore of the Potomac River—land which adjoined that of the heirs of James Marshall, John Marshall, and John Kidwell, and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company. Congress passed legislation in August 1886 directing the Attorney General of the United States to protect the interests of the United States to the new land, and giving the courts jurisdiction over these claims. The heirs and other claimants sued to win title to the lands. Decision Majority opinion Associate Justice George Shiras, Jr. wrote the majority opinion for the Court, joined by Chief Justice Melville Fuller and Justices John Marshall Harlan, David Josiah Brewer, and Henry Billings Brown. Justice Shiras first laid out the facts of the case in a lengthy syllabus, and established various classes of claimants. The first issue Justice Shiras confronted was whether any of the parties could lay claim to the bed of the Potomac River (and thus the reclaimed lands built by the government). Shiras held that none of the heirs on the Virginia side of the river could make any claim to the riverbed. Neither Lord Colepeper, his heir Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, nor any of Fairfax's heirs had ever seriously asserted title to the riverbed, and the Black-Jenkins Award clearly re-established that the boundary of Virginia ended at the low-water mark and did not extend to the riverbed. Relying on the Supreme Court's previous decision in Martin v. Waddell, 41 U.S. 367 (1842), Justice Shiras argued that none of the Maryland landholders could claim title to the riverbed, either. The majority held the original landholders were to hold the river and its bed in trust for the public, and that after the American Revolution these public trusts passed into the possession of the state (in this case, Maryland and in due time the District of Columbia). Shiras distinguished Fairfax's Devisee v. Hunter's Lessee, 11 U.S. 603 (1813) by noting that Fairfax's Devisee did not involve Maryland or any Marylander claimant. Even if the riverbed had been assigned to Lord Fairfax and his heirs, Shiras concluded, the logic of Martin v. Waddell still held and delivered the lands into the control of the federal government. The majority dismissed the Kidwell