how did dartmouth college v woodward contribute to nationalism

G. Edward White, The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 18151835 (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 608. In the early 1800s, the Supreme Court decision associated with John Marshall. 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. Newmeyer characterizes Terrett as a significant development in the publicprivate distinction in American law. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 59192. For example, in Augusta County, the Presbyterian Congregation of Tinkling Spring vested lands and its church buildings in a number of individuals named as trustees on its deed, but these individuals lacked any standing in law to act on behalf of the church. 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. Monarchy, aristocracy, religious establishment, entail, primogeniture, and a host of cornerstones of pre-Revolutionary law fell victim to this movement. Contemporary definitions of the corporation and the long-standing hesitancy of scholars to recognize parishes and other common law corporations as true corporations are a legacy of these disputes. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1770), I:472. Although specifically referring to the College, these words brought all benevolent institutions to the foreground, and indeed all private corporations. Photograph by the author. The men characterized charters as irrevocable and compared rescinding incorporation to the tyrannical acts of Great Britain before the Revolution. The discrepancy in their opinions exposed ideological fault lines among leading constitutional thinkers about the rights of a corporation and the definition of religious establishment. 1, 44344, LVA. 89. As state legislatures, courts, and ordinary people answered these queries, they grappled with and ultimately set forth the rights of private corporations in the new nation. WebDartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819: Business interest promoted Contract law strengthened by extending contract clause to corporate charter, sanctity of contracts A challenge to the law reached the Virginia Supreme Court in 1802 after the vestry of Manchester Parish sued to prevent the Chesterfield County Overseers of the Poor from selling their glebe in a case known as Turpin v. Lockett (1804).Footnote 69 Proceedings in Turpin halted the sale of glebe lands as the state's highest court deliberated. My dissertation has traced and tracked Virginia's glebe confiscations. She thanks the anonymous reviewers and Editor-in-Chief Gautham Rao for their valuable suggestions during the revision process. 26. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 43, 47. See James Willard Hurst, The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States, 17801970 (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1970); and Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 17761860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948). 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. Scholarship on Terrett, and early American law more broadly, has overlooked common-law corporations.Footnote 15 Historians of colonial Anglicanism likewise neglect the customary incorporation of the established church.Footnote 16 The near absence of this topic in the literature has obscured its significance. Neither Marshall nor Washington, the two Virginian justices, spoke on behalf of the Court in Terrett. Newmeyer stated that Marshall cited Terrett in Dartmouth College, but does not elaborate any further. The First Disestablishment: Limits on Church Power and Property Before the Civil War, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 162 (2014): especially 31632. But Story insisted that the status of parishes in 1776 was beside the point. Turpin v. Locket, 6 Call 113 (1804). 38. These laws guaranteeing the parish's irrevocable rights to its property had been unconstitutionally revoked by an overeager legislature.Footnote 109. The 85. s.n., 182-?, 1820] Map. He had no time for Tucker's framing of the dissolution of parishes in Turpin as part of the long march of religious reformation. Bushrod's Washington's 1797 opinion about the glebe lands is quoted in Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14. Churchwardens wrote contracts for every project that the parish undertook: digging wells, clearing land, or building churches.Footnote 30 The corporate status of churchwardens was particularly important when executing long-term contracts; as individual churchwardens came and went, their contracts remained enforceable. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. See Fincastle Presbyterian Congregation: Petition, Botetourt County, December 19, 1805, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, LVA. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. Incorporation remained front and center in Virginia's debates over disestablishment precisely because it had been a closely guarded privilege of the established church. See McConnell, The Supreme Court's Earliest Church-State Cases, 15; and From James Madison to the House of Representatives, 21 February 1811, Founders Online. It was a different story in Vermont where there had been no operational Anglican Church before the Revolution. McConnell, The Supreme Court's Earliest Church-State Cases, 13. Although scholars have convincingly argued that the emergence of statutory frameworks for business and religious corporations were distinct processes, litigation during religious disestablishment ultimately enshrined the rights of business corporations and made them powerful vehicles for commercial growth.Footnote 117 Dartmouth College crystallized the implicit logic of Terrett by holding that all charters were contracts and thus offered robust protections to all private corporations. Adam Winkler, We the Corporations (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018), 4, 408 n.2. 127. James Madison, Notes on Charters of Incorporation, [January?] 66. The increasing number of religious dissenters, along with intense anti-British sentiment during the war, eroded support for the religious establishment following the outbreak of the Revolution.Footnote 43 In 1782, the American branch of the Anglican Church established itself as the Protestant Episcopal Church, but a new name was not enough to convince wary Americans to rejoin its ranks. His ruling declared two Virginian laws inoperative and contradicted Madison's interpretation of the 1776 Virginian Constitution, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, all of which the sitting president had helped draft. Ely, Jr., 1050; William M. Wicek, The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought: Law and Ideology in America, 18861937 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 34; Currie, The Constitution in the Supreme Court, 13841; and Stites, Private Interest and Public Gain, 137 n.49. Dignan, History of the Legal Incorporation, 3540. 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. See examples of four lawsuits brought by Bristol Parish in the Prince George County Court Minute Book, 17371740, Mircofilm Reel 9, 94103; 27980; 305; 516, Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA (hereafter LVA). Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia in 2020. Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia; Begun and Held in the City of Richmond, in the County of Henrico, on Monday, The Third Day of May, in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-Four (Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 1828), 43. The first judicial ruling that declared a federal law to be unconstitutional came from: Marbury v Madison. Michael McConnell suggests that the vestry's decision to bring Terrett in federal court was a shrewd strategy for the case to be heard by a friendlier Federalist judge, but this assertion overlooks the court battle in Turpin. 22, 105. The Virginia Declaration of Rights proclaimed that no compact could deprive individuals of certain inalienable rights. 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). With this sweeping assessment, Marshall drew together the earlier decision in Terrett with Dartmouth College in protecting the rights of all corporations.Footnote 127. Because incorporation was rare in the colonial Chesapeake, Anglican parishes were all the more powerful for holding this status. The case pitted the ascendant Democratic Republicans in the statehouse who supported disestablishment against the Congregationalists on Dartmouth's Board of Trustees. English common law also dictated the legal standing of the Anglican establishment in colonial Virginia. This jurisdictional argument could have been invoked at any point in the ruling to throw out Fairfax County's claim to the glebe lands. The dissolution of royal government had not affected the vested property of vestries or any corporate bodies. See Patrick J. Dignan, History of the Legal Incorporation of Catholic Church Property in the United States, 17841932 (New York, P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1935), 2730; Cross, The Anglican Episcopate, 181; Susanna Linsley, The American Reformation: The Politics of Religious Liberty, Charleston and New York 17701830 (PhD diss., The University of Michigan, 2012), 3750. Title to the glebe lands remained vested in the crown and passed to the new sovereign, the state of Vermont, at the outbreak of the Revolution. 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. The Supreme Court upheld the sanctity of the original charter of the Whereas Tucker had granted the legislature significant latitude to regulate private corporations, the Court used Terrett as an opportunity to assert the independence of private corporations vis--vis state legislatures, and defended corporations indefeasible and irrevocable titles to their property.Footnote 83, The conflict in Terrett v. Taylor (1815) resembled the earlier Turpin v. Lockett in many ways. The arguments underlying the Dartmouth College decision reflected and developed these points into the landmark statement on corporate rights that it has become. 10 Va. 113, 144. 37. 50. See Priest, Claire, The End of Entail: Information, Institutions, and Slavery in The American Revolutionary Period, Law and History Review 33 (2015): 277319CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Holly Brewer, Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: Ancient Feudal Restraints and Revolutionary Reform, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997): 30746. Chamberlayne, ed., The Vestry Book of Saint Peter's Parish, 312. None of these leading studies consider how common law bolstered the Church of England. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. Barbara McGraw (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 130. In Turpin, the Virginia Supreme Court considered incorporation twice over. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/03-03-02-0233 (accessed November 24, 2020). Tucker offered a second, more sweeping defense of the legislature's right to dissolve private corporations by distinguishing between the rights of people and corporations. R. Kent Newmeyer states that Marshall cited Terrett in Dartmouth, although he does not provide this citation. 35. Melish, John, and Benjamin Tanner. Entailing land was one common method that Virginians used to preserve property across multiple generations. 42. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. The fight over incorporation and glebes during Virginia's disestablishment had induced Marshall to assert his views on charters, corporations, and vested property rights. 112. The corporate rights of parishes were utterly familiar in the colonial Chesapeake, and the legacy of customary incorporation informed legislative debates and litigation in the Early Republic. First, they weighed whether some of Virginia's oldest and most familiar customary corporationsparish vestries, churchwardens, and ministershad withstood a republican revolution and religious reformation. View all Google Scholar citations Over the next decade, a host of colonial laws that had empowered the Anglican Church and penalized dissenters were overturned. 113. For the text of the incorporating act, see Hening, 9:53237. For more on Duvall, see White, The Marshall Court, 32127. Figure 1. The other chief objection to the 1784 law was that it allowed the Episcopal Church to retain the Glebes, churches, surplus money and other Things, which ought to have become the Property of the Publick.Footnote 54 Evangelicals sent petition after petition calling for the repeal of the 1784 Incorporation Act and insisting that parish property belonged to the entire Virginian public whose taxes had funded its purchase. 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. The Virginia Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court ultimately diverged sharply over the legality of the 1802 Glebe Act and the state's disestablishmentarian program. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 5153. Augusta County, Deed Book 19, No. Despite Virginia's many statutes proscribing evangelical worship, the number of dissenters in Virginia continued to grow as the Great Awakening moved south in the 1750s.Footnote 38 Expanding communities of dissenters began to press for incorporation to secure their property. Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 182n66. Virginia's Anglican establishment faced significant backlash during and after the Revolution. Virginia's seizure of the glebes was held unconstitutional because the legislation siezed vested property from longstanding corporate bodies. Justice Story attacked Virginia's state laws at great length but this narrower jurisdictional holding offered Virginia some room to sidestep the ruling. 124. See Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, 132. 111. & G. Bartow, 1823), 13 vols. 1786, Founders Online. 40. Classic accounts of church and state in Virginia detail the legislation that enforced Anglican conformity, penalized religious dissent, and knit together religion and government but make no mention of how common law conferred significant power to Anglican parishes through incorporation.Footnote 26 A wide range of sources, including legal treatises, colonial legislation, and the records of lawsuits, contracts, and deeds, reveal that Virginia's vestries and churchwardens were acquisitive and litigious corporate bodies. 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? November 27, 1789, Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Richmond, VA: 1828), 8384, 113. Turpin v. Locket, 6 Call 113 (1804), 129. 9. Empowered by common law and affirmed in colonial statutes, parish vestries and churchwardens routinely exercised the unique rights of corporations. Buckley, Establishing Religious Freedom, 11920. Parishes organized Anglican life on both sides of the Atlantic, and these ecclesiastical bodies acted as an essential part of local government in colonial Virginia. In the colonial Chesapeake, where there were few corporations and individuals went to great lengths to preserve wealth from one generation to the next, it was not only the amount of property that parishes held but the relative security of their investments that expressed the special status and corporate power of the established church.Footnote 35 Because of their privileged position as corporate entities, vestries and churchwardens held property securely in perpetuity; parishes could sell their assets more than a century later without any difficulty.Footnote 36 However, dissenting congregations lacked any standing in law and instead had to vest their property in individual congregants.Footnote 37 The exclusivity of common law-incorporation was yet another powerful, material advantage for the established church. Donna Batten (Detroit: Gale, 2010), 128; Shirelle Phelps and Jeffrey Lehman, eds., West's Encyclopedia of American Law, 2nd ed., Vol. A few weeks later, the clergy of the Episcopal Church also petitioned the legislature for an act of incorporation. Webchapter 9 history review. 41. New Hampshire and Virginia directly challenged colonial corporate entitiescolleges and churcheswhile overhauling the relationship between religion and government. Instead, Story saw this case as an opportunity to articulate the power of private corporations and therefore chose not to address the jurisdictional question until he had laid out a detailed critique of Virginia's disestablishmentarian program. 5. 59. The legislative program of disestablishment began in 1776 with the passage of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which guaranteed free exercise. 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. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 49. John Marshall and Edmund Randolph both voted in favor of a resolution in 1789 to prevent any further discussion of the glebes. 53. The exclusive legacy of the establishment's customary incorporation and its material wealth hung over these post-Revolutionary debates in Virginia. Chamberlayne, ed., The Vestry Book of Saint Peter's, From 16821758 (Richmond, VA: The Library Board, Division of Purchase and Print, 1937), 99, 112, 13839, 253, 312. Livingston signed onto Story's and Washington's decisions in Dartmouth that cited Terrett. Second, it is essential to consider these cases within the broader context of religious disestablishment. 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. The vestry of Fairfax Parish had purchased its glebe in 1770 from Daniel Jennings and his wife using money raised from parishioners.Footnote 108 Although the corporate existence of colonial parishes rested on common law, Story argued that the Revolution had in no way impaired the corporation's standing or interfered with the title to this property. 46. All three casesTurpin, Terrett, and Dartmouthinvolved colonial corporations enmeshed in the fallout of post-Revolutionary disestablishment. Perhaps the Anglican parish's most visible exercise of corporate power was its acquisition of valuable property. Blunting the Revolution's Radicalism from Virginia's District Courts, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 106 (1998): 41942Google Scholar. 106. The Church of England was not a single corporation but rather owed its legal standing to numerous ecclesiastical and lay corporations, which were invested with property and rights. Episcopalians, on the other hand, argued that revoking incorporation threatened the fundamental principles of the Revolution by threatening the security of their private property.Footnote 55, In order to build as comprehensive a case as possible for repealing the 1784 Act of Incorporation, evangelical petitioners mounted arguments against any form of religious incorporation. Because previous accounts of Terrett ignore customary incorporation, they also overlook the significance of Story's discussion of royal grants and the durability of pre-Revolutionary corporations. Eric Michael Mazur argues that Marshall relied on (but did not cite) Story's reasoning in Terrett and Pawlet in his decision in Trustees of Philadelphia Baptist Ass'n v. Hart's Executors (1819). 17. The assembly affirmed, for example, that vestries and churchwardens could make bylaws, disburse funds, bring lawsuits, and sign contracts.Footnote 27 Like Virginia's other colonial corporations, vestries were public bodies and could buy or dispose of real estate only with the assembly's approval.Footnote 28 The assembly could dissolve parish vestries whom they deemed incompetent or unqualified. Daniel J. Hulsebosch and R. B. Bernstein (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 1348. 52. Render date: 2023-05-01T16:19:54.698Z The case involved the efforts of the New 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. 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. 47. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, January 9, 1785, Founders Online. Evangelicals continued to press the legislature to seize Episcopal parish property. 117. 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. Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia; Begun and Holden in the City of Richmond, in the County of Henrico, on Monday, The Nineteenth Day of October, in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-Nine (Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 1828), 8384, 113. (hereafter Hening), 2:17172; 1:399400; 3:151. Of the four Justices, Duvall seems most likely to have dissented. "useRatesEcommerce": false Although it may seem contradictory for the Court to reject Virginia's glebe confiscation policy while approving Vermont's plan, Story's decision in Pawlet relied on the same logic as Terrett. 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. 107. https://www.loc.gov/item/91686243/. For the record of votes, see Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia; Begun and Held in the City of Richmond, in the County of Henrico on Monday, The Eighteenth Day of October, in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-Four (Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 1828), 79. Va. 2002) (The portion of 14(20) of Article IV of the Constitution of Virginia which reads, The General Assembly shall not grant a charter of incorporation to any church or religious denomination, violates Plaintiffs' First Amendment rights to the free exercise of their religion made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment). Tucker made two arguments to justify the dissolution of private corporations. Lamoreaux and Novak (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 3, 9; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg quoted from Marshall's decision in Dartmouth College in her dissent in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 573 U.S. 682 (2014). Eckenrode, Separation of Church and State in Virginia, 121. 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? In recognizing a charter as a contract that vested private rights against 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.

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