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how did dartmouth college v woodward contribute to nationalism

    how did dartmouth college v woodward contribute to nationalism

    The issue of the general assessment was postponed until the following year. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 49. Perhaps the Anglican parish's most visible exercise of corporate power was its acquisition of valuable property. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 43, 5052. For example, in 1772, the assembly disbanded the vestries in St. John's Parish in King William County and St. Martin Parish in Hanover and Louisa Counties, but the parishes property and rights remained unimpaired.Footnote 29 Virginia's parishes clearly possessed the continuity of life that has long been understood as an essential feature of a corporation. After dwelling at great length on the unconstitutionality of Virginia's statutes, Story ultimately offered one farther objection to uphold the vestry's claim.Footnote 110 Because the Glebe Act had been passed after Christ Church and its glebe had become part of Washington, DC, Fairfax County officials lacked any power to seize the glebe. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 707, 695. 96. 62. See Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14; Albert J. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919) 4:243; and Buckley, Thomas E., After Disestablishment: Thomas Jefferson's Wall of Separation in Antebellum Virginia, The Journal of Southern History 61 (1995): 450n13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Feature Flags: { R, the context of the document and Marshall and Randolph's legal partnership make Randolph's identity almost certain. 19. Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14; and Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 664. District of Columbia. Tucker had recently published a revised version of Blackstone's Commentaries and was widely viewed as one of the nation's leading experts on common law. national authority. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 591. 88. Livingston signed onto Story's and Washington's decisions in Dartmouth that cited Terrett. Given the overwhelming evidence that Marshall agreed with the logic of Terrett, we are left to assume that Duvall alone dissented in Terrett. Daniel J. Hulsebosch and R. B. Bernstein (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 1348. The question of which parochial body held title to parish glebes would become a central issue in disestablishment, and I will return to these properties later on in this story. She also thanks Susan Juster, Bill Novak, Hunter Harris, Katharine Waggoner Karchner, Owen Masters, and Kristina Petersen for their advice, as well as David Tanenhaus, Laurie Wood, and Justin Simard for their comments on an early version of this piece at the Student Research Colloquium at the American Society for Legal History in 2018. WebIn Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819) the Court promoted business growth by denying states the right to alter or impair contracts unilaterally. 32. The controversy over Virginia's confiscation of the glebes landed before the Supreme Court in the case of Terrett v. Taylor (1815). Photograph by the author. Currie discusses Terrett as one of the earliest expositions on the Establishment Clause. Both disputes arose in the turmoil of post-Revolutionary disestablishment as state legislatures directly challenged the rights of colonial corporations. In 1801, Maryland and Virginia ceded land to the federal government to create the District of Columbia. In May of 1784, the United Clergy of the Presbyterian Church sent a memorial to the assembly protesting that the episcopal church is actually incorporated, and known in law as a body, so that it can receive and possess property for ecclesiastical purposes, without trouble or risk in securing it, while other Christian communities are obliged to trust to the precarious fidelity of trustees chosen for the purpose.Footnote 45 Virginia's Presbyterian clergymen argued that customary incorporation still bestowed the Episcopal Church with substantial power , and therefore they sought an act of incorporation for their church. The "era of good feelings" following the War of 1812 reflected rising nationalism and optimism in the United States. The Virginia Supreme Court's chief justice was Edmund Pendleton, a lifelong vestryman in Caroline County and a staunch Episcopalian.Footnote 70 Pendleton had close ties to the Episcopal Church, and the public assumed that he would rule in favor of the vestry and strike down the law. He asked rhetorically whether the objects of religion, charity, and education were of so little estimation in the United States, that contracts for their benefit might not be respected as those of other private corporations. Augusta County, Deed Book 19, No. 41. However, the question of parish rights and property wound up before the courts again a decade later. 10 (Detroit: Gale: 2000), 12224; and William M. Wicek, Liberty under Law: The Supreme Court in American Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 4445. No other state curbed the corporate rights of the former established church to the same degree, which made Virginia's disestablishment an important litmus test for the rights of all corporations in the early national United States. First, these cases reveal the stark disagreements among early American legal theorists about the fundamental nature of corporations, the rights of corporations in relation to the legislature, and the purpose of corporations in society. 120. The divergent outcomes in the two cases lay in the distinctions between the Anglican Church in Virginia and in Vermont before the Revolution. Virginia's highest court upheld these policies as lawful, but the US Supreme Court's rejected them as unconstitutional in Terret. Tucker's opinion had distinguished between the property rights of private persons and corporations. For some examples, see Hening, 7:31415; 9:240; 7:234; 8:365; 9:239. Buckley, Establishing Religious Freedom, 11920. Washington cited the Terrett decision in his opinions in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) and Society for Propagation of the Gospel v. Town of New Haven (1823). WebHow did the Supreme Court ruling in Dartmouth College v. Woodward support economic growth? 40. Unmoved by Marshall's arguments, Madison voted to repeal the act of incorporation for the Episcopal Church after passing the Statute for Religious Freedom.Footnote 63 Virginia's evangelicals had not only succeeded in overturning the specific law but in reshaping the constitutional definition of a religious establishment to include religious incorporation. 101. Second, these cases push historians to understand disestablishment not just as a movement that secured individual rights but also as a process with significant implications for early national corporations. Virginia Constitution (1851), article 32. Christ Church stood in the town of Alexandria at the southernmost point of the federal district, and its glebe lands lay to the northwest in the county. In Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819) the Court promoted business growth by denying states the right to alter or impair contracts unilaterally. Dignan, History of the Legal Incorporation, 3540. For details of the purchase, see Nan Netherton, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed, Fairfax County, Virginia: A History (Fairfax, VA: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978), 71. 3. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1770), I:472. As Marshall said, Laws of incorp[oratio]n. [are] distinct from general laws & not like them repealable: being compacts between two parties and elaborated that a vested Right of any sort cannot be touched. Whereas evangelicals were focused on the righteousness of repeal, Marshall and Randolph focused on the legality of revoking an act of incorporation.Footnote 61, Although Marshall opposed repeal, his comments suggested a way forward for opponents of the law. 75. For Story, Virginia's statutes first incorporating and then undoing incorporationand ultimately vesting parish property in the commonwealthwere utterly inconsistent with a great and fundamental principle of a republican government, the right of the citizens to the free enjoyment of their property.Footnote 100 Virginia's Glebe Act was not, therefore in our judgment, operative so far as to divest the Episcopal church of the property acquired, previous to the revolution, by purchase or by donation.Footnote 101. Dartmouth College v. Woodward was an 1819 Supreme Court case that took place when the state of New Hampshire attempted to rewrite Dartmouth's charter. See Falwell v. Miller, 203 F. Supp. In the 1820s, Virginia's vestries mounted another challenge to the 1802 Glebe Act citing Terrett. Their advocacy of such a radical view is best understood in light of the long history of the Anglican Church's exclusive access to incorporation. Virginia's seizure of the glebes was held unconstitutional because the legislation siezed vested property from longstanding corporate bodies. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, January 9, 1785, Founders Online. s.n., 182-?, 1820] Map. The Glebe Act of 1802 would stand.Footnote 81 Within weeks, counties began confiscating parish lands across the state. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 650. 19 July 2021. Turpin v. Locket, 6 Call 113 (1804), 129. 56. But he ultimately dismissed the vestry's suit and upheld the Glebe Act as lawful under Virginia's Constitution.Footnote 73. The corporations of the established church existed by force of the common law arising from the universal agreement of the whole community.Footnote 19 These common law corporations could shew no charter of incorporation, but rather derived their legal privileges and special status under the presumed consent of the crown and on the basis of custom.Footnote 20 Blackstone mentioned parish churchwardens, bishops, vicars, and the king himself as examples of such customary corporations. 53. Tucker was sympathetic to the Episcopal Church's predicament and expressed disappointment that the question of the glebes had been agitated with such hostility. 38. The Virginia Declaration of Rights proclaimed that no compact could deprive individuals of certain inalienable rights. 28. Virginia's parish vestries and churchwardens raised an annual levy, punished moral crimes, and administered poor relief. 87. He offered an uncompromising defense of the vested rights of parishes to their property.Footnote 90 Washington's prior connection to the case has gone unnoticed by constitutional scholars, and he did not recuse himself from Terrett despite his earlier involvement. The state had vested an indefeasible and irrevocable title to the church to all parish property in 1776.Footnote 96 Then, it expressly conferred incorporation to the minister and vestry, and, in case of a vacancy, the vestry of each parish respectively and their successors forever and affirmed their title to all the property of the late Episcopal church when it chartered the Episcopal Church.Footnote 97 The legislature retained some power over public corporations such as a town, city, or the parish of the established church but only abuse could jeopardize the rights of a private corporation and then only after a judicial judgment.Footnote 98 Story staked out a significant distinction between public and private corporations by insulating private corporations from legislative intrusion.Footnote 99 Once the state had conferred incorporation on the Episcopal Church in 1784, parishes were undoubtedly private corporations and beyond the reach of the legislature. The legislature 115. Adam Winkler, We the Corporations (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018), 4, 408 n.2. Ely, James W. Jr., The Marshall Court and Property Rights: A Reappraisal, The John Marshall Law Review 33 (2000): 104950Google Scholar; Benjamin F. Wright, Jr., The Contract Clause of the Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 38; and David P. Currie, The Constitution in the Supreme Court: The First Hundred Years, 17891888 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 138. For more on Tucker's connection to the case, see Buckley, Establishing Religious Freedom, 11622. Duvall is perhaps best known for his reticence on the Court, and therefore, it seems unsurprising that he left no explanation of his dissent. Mazur, Religion and the Earliest Supreme Court Justices, 17891911, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Politics in the U.S., ed. Tucker's conclusion portended a fatal blow to common law corporations in the new republic; customary incorporation was a precarious mechanism for securing rights and property if states could simply ignore it. 113. Story's discussion of colonial corporations in Terrett reveals one the most important links to Dartmouth College because he explicitly mentioned royal grants alongside customary corporations.Footnote 94. These laws guaranteeing the parish's irrevocable rights to its property had been unconstitutionally revoked by an overeager legislature.Footnote 109. The case sought to establish the validity of contracts, especially 31. See examples of five parish lawsuits in the New Kent County Court listed in C.G. In 1798, Virginia repealed portions of six acts from the 1770s and 1780s that had allowed the Episcopal Church to retain parochial property, which the legislature now deemed inconsistent with the principles of the constitution, and of religious freedom, and manifestly tend[ed] to the re-establishment of a national church.Footnote 67 Although the 1798 law laid the philosophical groundwork for the legislature to claim all parish property, it was not until 1802 that the legislature authorized a specific plan for confiscation when it passed the Glebe Act. Decisions over the legality of state disestablishmentarian policies had lasting consequences for all American corporations. Of the four Justices, Duvall seems most likely to have dissented. 5.0 (1 review) Term. View all Google Scholar citations hasContentIssue false, Religious Establishment and Incorporation, This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (, Copyright The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society for Legal History, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248020000486, The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law, Creating Roles for Religion and Philanthropy in a Secular Nation: The Dartmouth College Case and the Design of Civil Society in the Early Republic, The Marshall Court and Property Rights: A Reappraisal, The Supreme Court's Earliest Church-State Cases: Windows on Religious-Cultural-Political Conflict in the Early Republic, The End of Entail: Information, Institutions, and Slavery in The American Revolutionary Period, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, After Disestablishment: Thomas Jefferson's Wall of Separation in Antebellum Virginia, The Constitution in the Supreme Court: The First Hundred Years, 17891888, The Opinion of Chancellor Tucker in the Case of Selden and Others against the Overseers of the Poor of Loudoun and Others. Inhabitants of St. Asaph's Parish: Petition, Caroline County, December 4, 1786, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, LVA. He wrote that in Terrett and Dartmouth College, it is most obvious, that the effect of [the states'] laws is to abolish the old corporation, and to create a new one in its stead. He asked rhetorically, In what respects do [these cases] differ? None at all, he concluded. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall, 1:52n3. The case involved the efforts of the New Whereas Terrett specifically focused on the status of common law corporations and acts of incorporation, the 1815 decision had suggested that royal grants had likewise survived the Revolution. Parishes amassed their wealth using an annual tax and through private donations.Footnote 34 The colonial parish held wealth in many forms: taxes collected in pounds of tobacco, acres of glebe land, and the bodies and labor of enslaved people. This discussion of religious freedom was not tangential but was essential to Story's line of argument. But looking at this series of cases togetherstarting with Turpin, moving next to Terrett and then considering Dartmouth Collegeoffers several important insights to scholars. See Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 13133. This decision not only allowed the legislature to expropriate the glebes but also asserted that doing so reversed earlier unconstitutional grants of property. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 17731776 (hereafter JHBV), May 17, 1774, 103. 119. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 59192; Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 52. For Lynnhaven Parish in Princess Anne, see Princess Anne County, Deed Book 8, 532; Deed Book 9, 91; Deed Book 9, 103; Deed Book 9, 343; Deed Book 9, 343; Deed Book 14, 42, LVA. WebThe charter vested control of the college in a self-perpetuating board of trustees, which, as a result of a religious controversy, removed John Wheelock as college president in 1815. Donna Batten (Detroit: Gale, 2010), 128; Shirelle Phelps and Jeffrey Lehman, eds., West's Encyclopedia of American Law, 2nd ed., Vol. Virginia's Glebe Act exhibited an embarrassing disregard for the rights and property of the Episcopal Church. The Court held that the Revolution had not affected the corporate standing of the parish and affirmed that incorporation, once granted, could not simply be revoked by the legislature. If the legislature deemed a prior grant merely impolitic, it retained the power to dissolve a corporation and seize its property.Footnote 80 Whereas Marshall had required unconstitutionality as grounds for revoking incorporation, Tucker set the bar far lower. Historians do not have Pendleton's decision, but his views on the glebes were well known. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 5153. Several of the same issues that Tucker had answered in Turpin re-emerged: was the vestry of Christ Church a corporation and, if so, did it hold legal title to the glebe lands? It was a different story in Vermont where there had been no operational Anglican Church before the Revolution. Churchwardens by the Common Law, are made a Corporation to take Care of the Goods of the Church.They are a corporation, only as to Moveables, viz to take Goods, but not Lands, for the Use of the Church.Footnote 23 The vestry purchased and maintained glebes, which were farms of at least 200 acres, to the use of the minister of such parish, for the Time being and his successors for ever.Footnote 24 The minister was a corporation sole, or a persona ecclesia, who had rights to the glebe during his tenure. WebIn 1816, the New Hampshire legislature attempted to change Dartmouth College-- a privately funded institution--into a state university. Justice Story, in another concurring opinion, also pointed to his earlier decision in Terrett. Two hundred years ago this week, the Supreme Court issued its now famous ruling in Dartmouth College v. Empowered by common law and affirmed in colonial statutes, parish vestries and churchwardens routinely exercised the unique rights of corporations. However, outrage from Virginia's evangelicals led the state to backpedal swiftly. The arguments underlying the Dartmouth College decision reflected and developed these points into the landmark statement on corporate rights that it has become. On Marshall's legal career, see G. Edward White, The Marshall Court; R. Kent Newmeyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1996); and Charles F. Hobson, The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law (Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 1996). Tucker's Turpin opinion then dealt quickly with the question that would occupy the Court's attention in Dartmouth College: did the legislature have the authority to dissolve a private corporation? Pendleton's successor, St. George Tucker, was a leading figure in the rising generation of Virginian Republicans and had quietly signaled his approval of the Glebe Act in order to secure his election as a justice by the legislature.Footnote 72 Ideologically aligned with Jefferson and Madison, Tucker reached a radically different conclusion than Pendleton might have. In order to dismiss any constitutional basis for Virginia's revocation of incorporation, he had to argue that nothing in the acts incorporating the church and confirming its property infringed the right to free exercise or constituted an established religion, Story upbraided Virginia's disestablishmentarian laws for treading upon the principles of natural justice, upon the fundamental laws of every free government, upon the spirit and the letter of the constitution of the United States, and upon the decisions of most respectable judicial tribunals.Footnote 105 Story was certainly vague in Terrett about which clause of the Constitution Virginia's laws violated, and scholars have often suggested that natural law was the true rationale for his decision.Footnote 106 But in his Commentaries on the Constitution, Story later included Terrett in his discussion of the Contract Clause and Article VI, Section 1.Footnote 107 Once the vestry is properly regarded as a pre-Revolutionary corporation, the decision's basis in the Constitution comes into clearer focus, as does its close connections in Dartmouth College. Ibid. 43. 37. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York: R.&W. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. Virginia did not heed the decision and continued to seize glebe lands. Michael McConnell characterized Madison's veto message as narrow and suggested that this veto should not be interpreted as opposing all incorporations of religious bodies. However, Madison objected to the bill because it outlined sundry rules and proceedings relative purely to the organization and polity of the church incorporated. Therefore, any act of incorporation for a religious society that specified the rules of internal denominational governance would have qualified as a form of religious establishment under the terms that Madison laid out in this veto message.

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