Newmeyer stated that Marshall cited Terrett in Dartmouth College, but does not elaborate any further. 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. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, January 9, 1785, Founders Online. 39. For some examples, see Hening, 7:31415; 9:240; 7:234; 8:365; 9:239. 85. He argued that most Virginians did not understand the law as a violation of their constitutional rights; therefore, a repeal was not permissible. In recognizing a charter as a contract that vested private rights against Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14; and Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 664. Virginia's Anglican establishment faced significant backlash during and after the Revolution. (Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 194752); and John Nelson, A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690- 1776 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 122. 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. Turpin v. Locket, 6 Call 113 (1804), 129. Putnam's Sons, 1910), 1:77. 52. 128. Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia in 2020. 93. 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. Chief Justice Marshall had personally taken part in these debates while serving as a delegate in Virginia's legislature in the 1780s. 1. District of Columbia. 50. 94. Figure 1. McConnell, The Supreme Court's Earliest Church-State Cases, 13. 92. Buckley, Establishing Religious Freedom, 11920. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. 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. In each case, incorporation is so inseparably annexed to their offices, that we cannot frame a complete legal idea of any of these persons, but we must also have an idea of a corporation.Footnote 21 In his Commentaries, Blackstone clarified his abstract discussion of corporate rights using accessible examples from parish life. The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, Vol. Over the next decade, a host of colonial laws that had empowered the Anglican Church and penalized dissenters were overturned. 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). When working in private practice in Richmond in 1797, Justice Washington had been quietly consulted about the possibility of glebe confiscation. In short, Story treated the post-1784 parish like any other private corporation. 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. R, the context of the document and Marshall and Randolph's legal partnership make Randolph's identity almost certain. 70. Gordon, The African Supplement, 38990n8. 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? But Story insisted that the status of parishes in 1776 was beside the point. 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. WebDartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819: Business interest promoted Contract law strengthened by extending contract clause to corporate charter, sanctity of contracts 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. Eckenrode, Separation of Church and State in Virginia, 120. 118. 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. Sarah Barringer Gordon, The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 72 (2015): 385422; and Amanda Porterfield, Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 66465. 17. The missing link between these cases is incorporation. Another clue to Marshall's views can be found in a closely related case, Town of Pawlet v. Clark (1815), which the Court heard just a few weeks after Terrett. 56. 98. Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of Corporations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 6, 7980. Virginia's Glebe Act exhibited an embarrassing disregard for the rights and property of the Episcopal Church. Inhabitants of St. Asaph's Parish: Petition, Caroline County, December 4, 1786, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, LVA. 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. Although specifically referring to the College, these words brought all benevolent institutions to the foreground, and indeed all private corporations. 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. 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. For a discussion of Virginia's colonial statutes that supported the Anglican establishment and penalized religious dissent, see John Nelson, A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 16901776 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia. 41. Together, these cases reveal that one of the most significant legal outcomes of disestablishment was the ascendance of the charter. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 52. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Supreme Court confirmed the "implied powers" of Congress. WebHow did Dartmouth College v Woodward contribute to a greater sense of independence and nationhood? 120. 9. 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. These laws guaranteeing the parish's irrevocable rights to its property had been unconstitutionally revoked by an overeager legislature.Footnote 109. Melish, John, and Benjamin Tanner. 100. 10, ed. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 591. Bushrod's Washington's 1797 opinion about the glebe lands is quoted in Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14. First, it is essential to recognize that the litigants in Turpin and Terrett, parish vestries, were long-standing customary corporations. None of these works explore how Marshall's experience as a legislator during Virginia's disestablishment shaped his decision in Dartmouth College. An Act Incorporating the Protestant Episcopal Church in the town of Alexandria, in the District of Columbia, January 1811. 14. 74. 12. Several sources state either that the decision was unanimous or specifically note that Marshall joined Story's opinion. s.n., 182-?, 1820] Map. s.n., 182-?, 1820] Map. Such sweeping logic was far from narrow and would have challenged numerous state acts of incorporation on the books in 1811. After the Revolution, Virginia's legislature disestablished the Anglican Church, disregarded its customary incorporation, revoked its post-revolutionary act of incorporation, and seized parish property. In the early 1800s, the Supreme Court decision associated with John Marshall. Two of Virginia's most idiosyncratic disestablishmentarian policiesits revocation and prohibition of religious incorporation and its seizure of church propertyset the state on a collision course to confront parishes over their corporate rights. "useRatesEcommerce": false 6. It supported capitalism, where privately owned companies can compete in a free market (without government controls) The legislature soon revoked the Episcopal Church's incorporation, prohibited any church from becoming incorporated, and confiscated parish property. Under both colonial statute and common law, the vestries in Virginia were a body politic, capable of purchasing and holding lands for the use of the ministers of their respective parishes; and capable of a perpetual succession, and the legal titles to all the glebe lands in Virginia were at the period of the revolution vested in the vestries. But the Revolution had abolished every vestige of the monarchial government and the mere act of rejecting the king and the ancient constitution of the colony, and adopting one totally different therefrom, did operate an immediate dissolution of every part of the body politic connected with, and dependent upon, the ancient constitution, or form of government. Therefore, vestries no longer held their ancient rights after Virginia declared independence.Footnote 74 For Tucker, the Revolution had destroyed the conditions necessary for customary incorporation. Click the card to flip . R. Kent Newmeyer states that Marshall cited Terrett in Dartmouth, although he does not provide this citation. 19. The Glebe Act of 1802 would stand.Footnote 81 Within weeks, counties began confiscating parish lands across the state. 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). 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. 123. 38. But he ultimately dismissed the vestry's suit and upheld the Glebe Act as lawful under Virginia's Constitution.Footnote 73. (Q006) Southern slave states sought to protect their national political interests by. 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. [Philadelphia? See An Act Concerning the District of Columbia, 2 Stat. Tucker relied on Dartmouth College's distinction between private and public corporations while flatly rejecting the rationale of Terrett, and allowed glebe confiscation to proceed. The "era of good feelings" following the War of 1812 reflected rising nationalism and optimism in the United States. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/03-03-02-0233 (accessed November 24, 2020). The Virginia Assembly received its first petition for incorporation from a nonconforming church in 1774 from the Peaks of Otter Presbyterian Church in Bedford County. Story also dismissed the argument that the legislature had a constitutional duty to repeal incorporation in order to protect religious freedom. Perhaps it is not surprising that Terrett v. Taylor faded into obscurity. For the text of the incorporating act, see Hening, 9:53237. Both of his opinions relied on similar language, precedents, and examples. 102. 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. 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. 89. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. The first judicial ruling that declared a federal law to be unconstitutional came from: Marbury v Madison. The 1815 decision had already affirmed that the legislature could not modify or repeal acts creating private corporations. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 5152; and Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 63539. Story took the opportunity to rule affirmatively on the matter in Dartmouth College when asserting that the Revolution had not destroyed vested rights of property and arguing that the legislature did not have the right to seize the property of a corporation.Footnote 122 The justice also returned to the distinction between private and public corporations, just as he had in Terrett. 19 July 2021. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 64546. For example, in 1751, the vestry of St. Peter's Parish in New Kent County ordered that all persons indebted to the Parish do account with the Church Wardens and Pay to their Hands the Several Sums due from them, and in failure of Payment the church wardens are required to bring suit for the recovery of the same.Footnote 33 Parishes could extend credit securely because they could recover outstanding debts in court. 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. Many states sought to level the playing field among denominations by passing general statutes of incorporation that allowed all religious societies to become incorporated.Footnote 42 Not so in Virginia, where the battles over incorporation would ultimately lead to a radical rejection of any form of religious incorporation. Moreover, numerous pieces of legislation, including the 1784 Act of Incorporation and the 1786 Act of Repeal, had expressly affirmed vestries titles to glebes. Justice Story attacked Virginia's state laws at great length but this narrower jurisdictional holding offered Virginia some room to sidestep the ruling. 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. Turpin, Call 113 (1804), 113; 129; 139; 148. After the repeal of the Incorporation Act, no other religious societies became incorporated in the state, and the legislature formally enacted a prohibition against religious incorporation in 1798.Footnote 64 In 1851, the commonwealth formally amended its Constitution to add this provision, which stood in place until 2002.Footnote 65 The hostility toward religious incorporation in Virginia was exceptional, which explains why the state's distinctive policies would become significant test cases for the rights of corporations. See Falwell v. Miller, 203 F. Supp. White, The Marshall Court, 609, 611; Sylvia Snowiss, Judicial Review and the Law of the Constitution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 136; and Currie, The Constitution in the Supreme Court, 141. Defenders of Virginia's Anglican establishment argued that the church promoted publick Peace by enforcing Religion and Morality.Footnote 25 Political rights were tied to spiritual conformity; although religious dissenters might privately hold contrary beliefs, outwardly it was the duty of every good Member of Society to submit[for] the good of the whole.. Virginia Declaration of Rights, Section 1. Virginia's highest court upheld these policies as lawful, but the US Supreme Court's rejected them as unconstitutional in Terret. New Hampshire and Virginia directly challenged colonial corporate entitiescolleges and churcheswhile overhauling the relationship between religion and government. Footnote 112 Not only had the chief justice grown up under the established church, his father had also served as a vestryman and signed property deeds on behalf of his parish.Footnote 113 Marshall would have intimately understood the colonial parish's status as a common law corporation from such a vantage point. 1 / 15. 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. The state took control of the school's governance and established Dartmouth University as a nonsectarian, public university in place of the orthodox college. WebThe Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) that Indians had a basic right to their tribal lands. 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. Tucker's opinion had distinguished between the property rights of private persons and corporations. The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. WebIn 1816, the New Hampshire legislature attempted to change Dartmouth College-- a privately funded institution--into a state university. 51. WebHow did the Supreme Court ruling in Dartmouth College v. Woodward support economic growth? The legislative program of disestablishment began in 1776 with the passage of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which guaranteed free exercise. Part of Terret's obscurity stems from its omission from Chief Justice Marshall's decision in Dartmouth College. Marshall's decision in Dartmouth College endorsed many of the same principles as Story's opinion had in Terrett. Had these two policies been carried into effect, Virginia's disestablishment would have resembled events in other states. Footnote 66, However, the Baptists eventually won this battle. The rights secured under common law had relied on the king's consent and therefore had not survived the political revolution. 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. Of the four Justices, Duvall seems most likely to have dissented. Photograph by the author. for this article. The Court became the final See Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 13133. 1786, Founders Online. After Madison's veto, the Fairfax County, VA Overseers of the Poor moved forward with the seizure of Christ Church's property. Ibid. See Robert E. Wright, Corporation Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 924. 25. Has data issue: false The federal court was a last resort for the Alexandria vestry, and they brought the suit only after Madison's veto and the Fairfax Overseers attempt to seize the glebe. See Alyssa Penick, The Churches of Our Government: Parishes, Property, and Power in the Colonial and Early National Chesapeake (PhD diss., The University of Michigan, 2020). (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1770), I:472. [Philadelphia? Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. 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. 104. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1833), 3:258, 260, 269, 533, 691. The famed orator maintained that Dartmouth College closely resembled a case from 4 years earlier, Terrett v. Taylor (1815). 40. Terrett had outlined many of the key ideas associated with Dartmouth College v. Woodward, and its role as a central precedent makes sense when the parish is rightfully understood to be a colonial corporation. 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. See examples of five parish lawsuits in the New Kent County Court listed in C.G. Scholars of colonial Virginia have focused solely on the ways in which statutory law underwrote the power of the established church while eliding common law from their accounts. John Blair Smith, a leading Presbyterian minister, wrote to Madison during the summer of 1784 that some form of incorporation could have been extremely proper, but that the specific terms of the 1784 act had made the Church a mere political machine, which the State may regulate at pleasure.Footnote 50 Madison concurred and expressed concerns that the law kept the Episcopal Church under legislative oversight.Footnote 51 However, he acknowledged that the necessity of some sort of incorporation for the purpose of holding and managing the property of the Church could not well be denied. Despite his reservations, Madison was willing to support incorporation in order to prevent any sort of religious tax from passing, which he viewed as a much greater evil.Footnote 52, Presbyterians and Baptists organized a petitioning campaign to demand a repeal of the Incorporation Act during 1786.Footnote 53 Echoing Smith and Madison, evangelical petitioners argued that the Act of Incorporation had made the legislature the Head of that church in violation of the state constitution. The Christ Church glebe stood in the part of Fairfax County, Virginia that was ceded to form Washington, DC. 73. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 59192. Recognizing the connections between Virginia's disestablishment and Dartmouth College gives scholars the context that Marshall obscured in his opinion and elucidates why Terrett anticipated Dartmouth College.Footnote 17. 11. Colonists unquestionably accepted the incorporation of parish vestries, churchwardens, and rectors under common law. The 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. Turpin v. Locket, 6 Call 113 (1804). 71. In Turpin, Virginia's highest court had authorized the legislature to disregard customary incorporation, revoke a statute of incorporation, and confiscate parish property. 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. Marshall intimated that, if sense of people, Legislature may interposesense not yet expressed by majority. Only if the people's fundamental rights had been betrayed by a corporate charter could the legislature interpose on their behalf and justifiably revoke incorporation.