Not at all hard to do. And in fact, the provisions of the original 1790 Act, were technically made null and void by 1802. But it took until 1952 to fully clarify such; this did not need to happen and this problem could have easily been rectified much earlier.
Truly, this is one of the strangest parts of American history(indeed, truth is far stranger than fiction); one would suspect that if this universe were represented in a TL, that people would be picking this situation apart with a fine toothed comb and commenting on plausibility issues.....