how did dartmouth college v woodward contribute to nationalism

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. Second, it is essential to consider these cases within the broader context of religious disestablishment. 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. John Marshall opposed these policies while serving as a delegate in Virginia's legislature, and his views on these issues prefigured his opinion in Dartmouth College. 41. 124. Justice Story attacked Virginia's state laws at great length but this narrower jurisdictional holding offered Virginia some room to sidestep the ruling. The fact that the Virginia legislature received its first petition for incorporation at the very end of the Colonial Era shows just how effectively Virginia's laws had dissuaded dissenters from settling in the colony or seeking legal rights. WebDartmouth College was established under a charter granted by the provincial government; but a better constitution for a college, or one more adapted to the condition of things 10, ed. The legislature changed the school's corporate charter by transferring the control of trustee appointments to the governor. 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. 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. Had these two policies been carried into effect, Virginia's disestablishment would have resembled events in other states. Figure 2. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 5152. 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). But looking at this series of cases togetherstarting with Turpin, moving next to Terrett and then considering Dartmouth Collegeoffers several important insights to scholars. Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) has long been hailed as a landmark Supreme Court decision and a significant step in the rise of the American commercial economy. James Madison and John Marshall, both members of the House of Delegates, voted in favor of the law, which reaffirmed parishes claims to their pre-Revolutionary property and recognized the formerly established church as a newly reorganized, private corporation.Footnote 48 The legislature tabled general incorporation and postponed voting on a general assessment until the following year.Footnote 49, Critics initially attacked the specifics of the 1784 Incorporation Act without raising fundamental objections to religious incorporation. 28. James Madison, Detatched Memoranda, ca. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. 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. For more on how Virginia's dissenters challenged the Anglican establishment, see Thomas Buckley, Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 17761787 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977); and John Ragosta, Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia's Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Turpin, Call 113 (1804), 113; 129; 139; 148. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. WebThe Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) that Indians had a basic right to their tribal lands. Eckenrode, Separation of Church and State in Virginia, 120. The state had no claim on the property of the former established church, which was still vested in its parishes. 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. 103. Woodward opinion advanced a principled originalism. 94. Story made no such exception but instead declared, the dissolution of the regal government no more destroyed the right to possess or enjoy this property than it did the right of any other corporation or individual to his or its own property.Footnote 102 In Story's rendering, a private corporation carried out the rights of its constituent members, and therefore, any state incursion on the powers of a private corporation amounted to an attack on the fundamental rights of private citizens. The caveat that brought this case to the United States Supreme Court was that Christ Church and its glebe now stood in the new capital city, Washington, DC (see Figure 2).Footnote 84 Christ Church sought an act of incorporation from Congress in order to stave off the seizure of their property.Footnote 85. Like Turpin, Terrett, and Pawlet, the dispute at the center of Dartmouth College emerged from an acrimonious disestablishmentarian dispute.Footnote 118 A theological rift between the college's more liberal president and its evangelical trustees became politicized when the newly elected legislature modified the college's charter in 1816. WebPetitioner Dartmouth CollegeIn 1816, the New Hampshire legislature attempted to change Dartmouth College-- a privately funded institution--into a state university. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall, 1:52n3. The famed orator maintained that Dartmouth College closely resembled a case from 4 years earlier, Terrett v. Taylor (1815). The Supreme Court's 1819 decision limited the power of a state legislature to invalidate a royal charter, or indeed to alter any corporate contract.Footnote 1 Scholars have emphasized that the legal structure of the modern U.S. business corporation had its genesis in Dartmouth College and called the case an epochal moment in the history of American corporations.Footnote 2 Chief Justice John Marshall's definition of the corporation in Dartmouth College remains a touchstone for scholars and the courts today.Footnote 3, However, when Daniel Webster appeared before the Court, he cast Dartmouth College as an already-settled matter of law, not a potential milestone. 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). Clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church: Petition, June 4, 1784, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, LVA. One of the only previous citations to this document appears in Mary Sarah Bilder, James Madison, Law Student and Demi-Lawyer, Law and History Review 28 (2010): 411 n.116. 53. In 1801, Maryland and Virginia ceded land to the federal government to create the District of Columbia. Justice Bushrod Washington's concurring opinion echoed Webster's oral arguments. 18. 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. 107. All three casesTurpin, Terrett, and Dartmouthinvolved colonial corporations enmeshed in the fallout of post-Revolutionary disestablishment. Such a logic would unravel all pre-Revolutionary property claims, including the property of any other corporation created by the royal bounty or established by the legislature and undermine the inheritances of every man in the state.Footnote 93 It made no difference that Virginia's parishes had secured their assets under common law and not through royal grant or legislative charter. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 64546. 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. This statute asserted that all property formerly belonging to the Church, of every description, devolved on the good people of this commonwealth, on the dissolution of the British government here. Sixteen years after declaring the Episcopal Church independent from the state and preserving its property, the assembly stripped the denomination of its glebe property.Footnote 68. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. Dartmouth College v. Woodward is taken to be the seminal case in the rise of the corporation. [Philadelphia? Story, however, offered a definition of religious establishment rooted in exclusivity. A few weeks later, the clergy of the Episcopal Church also petitioned the legislature for an act of incorporation. 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. 86. Render date: 2023-05-01T16:19:54.698Z Marshall had so many connections to Virginia's disestablishment that it would have been impossible for the circumstances of Turpin and Terrett not to have shaped his thinking about Dartmouth College. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, January 9, 1785, Founders Online. 52. See Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, 132. s.n., 182-?, 1820] Map. After Madison's veto, the Fairfax County, VA Overseers of the Poor moved forward with the seizure of Christ Church's property. Although Randolph is simply called Mr. On Pendleton's legal career, see David John Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 17211803: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). 113. Although built on the same logical framework as Terrett, Dartmouth's holding explicitly embraced all private corporations in its holding. English common law also dictated the legal standing of the Anglican establishment in colonial Virginia. Virginia's refusal to recognize Terrett underscored the limited practical significance of the case. 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. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Supreme Court confirmed the "implied powers" of Congress. See Robert E. Wright, Corporation Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 924. Story wrote that Terrett was decided by a majority, which suggests that at least one of the four justices present for the case (Livingston, Marshall, Washington, and Duvall) disagreed with Story's opinion.Footnote 111 There is ample evidence to conclude that Marshall acquiesced with Story's rationale in Terrett. 100. 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. Dueling interpretations of corporations ultimately underlay the differences between Tucker's and Story's rulings in Turpin and Terrett. See An Act Concerning the District of Columbia, 2 Stat. Thomas Buckley, Establishing Religious Freedom: Jefferson's Statute in Virginia (Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press, 2013), 12224; and H. Jefferson Powell, A Community Built on Words: The Constitution in History and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 8595. Phillip Bruce's work offers the only discussion of the corporate power of Virginia's parishes. 10 Va. 113, 144. 42. 114. 2. To err on the side of caution, this article understands the term majority in the text of the decision to be a reflection of non-unanimity. Over the course of the next several decades, more than 35,000 acres, dozens of enslaved men and women, and other glebe property would be seized.Footnote 82 Although the Glebe Act had not authorized the sale of churches or their contents, counties auctioned off churches, pews, bells, communion silver, and books. For the text of the incorporating act, see Hening, 9:53237. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, January 9, 1785, Founders Online. Madison, Notes on Charters of Incorporation, Founders Online. Although numerous congregants had made contributions to the church, the pious intentions of such benefactors cannot be effectually carried into execution, the elders of the Church not being incorporated, so as to be capable of taking care and holding lands and Slaves for the use of the minister. The governor dissolved the colonial assembly in the turmoil of the Revolution before it could respond either affirmatively or negatively to the church's request.Footnote 39. The 1815 decision had already affirmed that the legislature could not modify or repeal acts creating private corporations. 105. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 59192. 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, 27, 82. The state took control of the school's governance and established Dartmouth University as a nonsectarian, public university in place of the orthodox college. Newmeyer may have been referencing this ambiguous line about the Court's prior decisions. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. 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? Marshall the young legislator voiced a firm commitment to the vested rights of corporations and the irrevocability of charters decades before he would confront these issues from the bench. The case pitted the ascendant Democratic Republicans in the statehouse who supported disestablishment against the Congregationalists on Dartmouth's Board of Trustees. The discrepancy between the Virginia court's ruling in Turpin and the United States Supreme Court's decisions in Terrett and Dartmouth underscores the competing definitions of corporations in the early republic. 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. 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. 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). 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. Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. 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. 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. Dartmouth College, like Terrett, distinguished between public and private corporations and insisted on the insulation of private corporations from the legislature.Footnote 125 Marshall declared in Dartmouth that all contracts and rights respecting property, remained unchanged by the revolution, which echoed Story's statement in Terrett that the dissolution of the regal government no more destroyed the right to possess or enjoy this property than it did the right of any other corporation or individual to his or its own property.Footnote 126 The significant difference between these statements, of course, lay in the Marshall's use of the word contract. Marshall expressly grounded his decision in the Contract Clause by framing all corporate charters as contracts. Bushrod's Washington's 1797 opinion about the glebe lands is quoted in Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14. 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. It was a different story in Vermont where there had been no operational Anglican Church before the Revolution. 10. More than 30 years before Dartmouth College, the turmoil of Virginia's disestablishment prompted Marshall to consider the vested property of corporations and to answer the question of whether a legislature could repeal incorporation.Footnote 62.

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