how did dartmouth college v woodward contribute to nationalism

• 8 September 2023

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. 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. 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? Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 - Casetext 87. But he ultimately dismissed the vestry's suit and upheld the Glebe Act as lawful under Virginia's Constitution.Footnote 73. WebDartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819: Business interest promoted Contract law strengthened by extending contract clause to corporate charter, sanctity of contracts Recent accounts of American corporate history rely on Davis's tallies, and therefore also leave out common law corporations. Putnam's Sons, 1910), 1:77. 84. Decisions over the legality of state disestablishmentarian policies had lasting consequences for all American corporations. 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. 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. 83. WebIn 1816, the New Hampshire legislature attempted to change Dartmouth College-- a privately funded institution--into a state university. 109. 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. In the 1820s, Virginia's vestries mounted another challenge to the 1802 Glebe Act citing Terrett. 115. Virginia Declaration of Rights, Section 1. The famed orator maintained that Dartmouth College closely resembled a case from 4 years earlier, Terrett v. Taylor (1815). McConnell, Michael W., The Supreme Court's Earliest Church-State Cases: Windows on Religious-Cultural-Political Conflict in the Early Republic, Tulsa Law Review 37 (2001): 743Google Scholar; Mark McGarvie, One Nation Under Law (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 15289; and Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Landscape of Faith: Religious Property and Confiscation in the Early Republic, in Making Legal History: Essays in Honor of William E. Nelson, ed. 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. Perhaps it is not surprising that Terrett v. Taylor faded into obscurity. The case sought to establish the validity of contracts, especially 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. 41. More than any other line in the document, Marshall's final observation revealed that this discussion was not abstract, but rather concerned the 1784 Act of Incorporation. In short, Story treated the post-1784 parish like any other private corporation. An Address to the Anabaptists Preachers Imprisoned in Caroline County, Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg: Prudie & Dixon), February 20, 1772, 12. The prospect of general incorporation for religious societies was proposed in June and again in November of 1784, but the House never voted on a specific bill. Other leading studies of early American corporations that do not discuss common law incorporation include Andrew M. Schocket, Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007); Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortunes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Sharon Ann Murphy, Other People's Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); and Pauline Maier, The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 50 (1993): 5184. 62. The confusion over which justices joined Story's opinion in Terrett is widespread in the literature. 90. 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. s.n., 182-?, 1820] Map. 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. 118. Marshall voiced a commitment to protecting vested rights and preventing legislative intrusion by voting to support the resolution against glebe confiscation in 1789. See Society for Propagation of the Gospel v. Town of New Haven, 21 U.S. 464 (1823), 48182; and Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 66466. 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. 5. Turpin v. Locket, 6 Call 113 (1804), 129. Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14; and Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 664. For a comparison of the two policies of confiscation, see Gordon, The Landscape of Faith.. Dueling interpretations of corporations ultimately underlay the differences between Tucker's and Story's rulings in Turpin and Terrett. While Dartmouth College had been incorporated by a royal charter in colonial New Hampshire, the litigant in Terrett, a parish vestry, had been incorporated under common law in colonial Virginia. Other works that emphasize the three types of corporations (municipal, religious, and business) leave out the distinctions between statutory and customary corporations. 108. Although Story never mentioned Turpin v. Lockett, his opinion systematically excoriated its rationale. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. 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. 72. 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. Town of Pawlet v. Clark, 13 U.S. 292 (1815). Legislators and the public debated church and state in the language of religious freedom, but the courts decided these cases by delineating the rights of corporations. 103 (1801). In contrast, Dartmouth afforded power and protection to all chartered corporations. Daniel Webster, who argued on behalf of his alma mater, invoked Terrett repeatedly in his arguments before the Court. In a remarkable twist of fate, St. George Tucker's son, Henry St. George Tucker, presided over the case, Selden v. Overseers of the Poor of Loudoun, as chancellor of the Winchester Chancery Court in 1830. The state took control of the school's governance and established Dartmouth University as a nonsectarian, public university in place of the orthodox college. 48. None of these works explore how Marshall's experience as a legislator during Virginia's disestablishment shaped his decision in Dartmouth College. Blunting the Revolution's Radicalism from Virginia's District Courts, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 106 (1998): 41942Google Scholar. 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? (hereafter Hening), 2:17172; 1:399400; 3:151. From James Madison to the House of Representatives, 21 February 1811, Founders Online, National Archives. 43. 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. s.n., 182-?, 1820] Map. 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. Madison explained that the law, which incorporated the church and laid out rules for the ecclesiastical corporation's government, exceeds the rightful authority to which governments are limited by the essential distinction between civil and religious functions and violates in particular the article of the Constitution of the United States which declares that Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.Footnote 86 Madison had been convinced by Virginia's evangelicals that incorporation was a form of religious establishment.Footnote 87 After leaving office, he would elaborate on the threat posed by propertied religious corporations in his Detatched Memoranda. 14. Since independence, the Virginia legislature had guaranteed the Episcopal Church its property in five separate statutes and formally incorporated the church in 1784.Footnote 95 With these acts, the question of whether or not the church's incorporation had survived the Revolution no longer mattered. For the text of the incorporating act, see Hening, 9:53237. 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. Turpin and Terrett were not only connected by the similarity of their circumstances but also by the presence of Justice Bushrod Washington on the Supreme Court. 128. 125. 1786, Founders Online. Rethinking the Dartmouth College Case in American Political Tucker, Henry St. George, The Opinion of Chancellor Tucker in the Case of Selden and Others against the Overseers of the Poor of Loudoun and Others, in Commentaries on the Laws of Virginia, 3rd edition (Richmond: Printed by Shepherd & Colin, 1846), 453Google Scholar. [Philadelphia? 56. Political leaders inclined to enlightenment rationalism, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, allied with evangelicals to initiate the piecemeal process of dismantling the established church. The Pawlet decision does not record Marshall's support, but the Chief Justice endorsed Story's rationale just a few years later in his decision in Trustees of Philadelphia Baptist Ass'n v. Hart's Executors (1819).Footnote 116 Ultimately, the Court's decisions in Terrett and Pawlet affirmed the rights of corporations and provided ideological scaffolding for yet another disestablishmentarian case, Dartmouth College. 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. Marshall, the Dartmouth College Case, and Originalism - Law 46. 45. Chief Justice Marshall had personally taken part in these debates while serving as a delegate in Virginia's legislature in the 1780s. For more on the importance of Dartmouth College, see Mark, Gregory A., The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law, University of Chicago Law Review 54 (1987): 144183CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGarvie, Mark D., Creating Roles for Religion and Philanthropy in a Secular Nation: The Dartmouth College Case and the Design of Civil Society in the Early Republic, Journal of College and University Law 25 (1999): 52768Google Scholar; Francis N. Stites, Private Interest and Public Gain: The Dartmouth College Case, 1819 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971); and Rodney A. Smolla, The Constitution Goes to College: Five Constitutional Ideas that Have Shaped the American University (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Currie, The Constitution in the Supreme Court, 14041. The Revolution upended the relationship between the governed and their government and threw the doors wide open to challenging a range of inherited legal doctrines and customs. 119. 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).

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