how did dartmouth college v woodward contribute to nationalism

In the early 1800s, the Supreme Court decision associated with John Marshall. In short, Story treated the post-1784 parish like any other private corporation. My dissertation has traced and tracked Virginia's glebe confiscations. 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. The leading eighteenth-century Virginian legal writer George Webb noted that in every Virginian parish there were three distinct corporate bodies: churchwardens, vestry, and minister. 11. First, he cited the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries during the English Reformation and the colonial assembly's ability to dissolve vestries as proof that such corporations may be dissolved by the authority of the parliament or legislature alone.Footnote 78 Of course, these establishmentarian precedents provided a shaky framework for the post-revolutionary relationship between corporations and the state. 42. Tucker accepted the arguments made by evangelicals over the previous 15 years that the legislature had violated the provision for religious freedom and the prohibition against emoluments in Virginia's Declaration of Rights by preserving parish property and incorporating the Episcopal Church. 7. In 1817, the college sued to prevent the state of New Hampshire from modifying its colonial charter and turning the school into a public university. 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. 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. 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. WebThe Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) that Indians had a basic right to their tribal lands. 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). The Virginia Declaration of Rights proclaimed that no compact could deprive individuals of certain inalienable rights. Virginia's highest court upheld these policies as lawful, but the US Supreme Court's rejected them as unconstitutional in Terret. 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. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. Decisions over the legality of state disestablishmentarian policies had lasting consequences for all American corporations. 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. 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. Dartmouth College, so often framed as a landmark case because it enabled the rapid transformation of the American economy, was itself the byproduct of another sweeping transformation, the disestablishment of religion. Together, these cases reveal that one of the most significant legal outcomes of disestablishment was the ascendance of the charter. 100. Perhaps the Anglican parish's most visible exercise of corporate power was its acquisition of valuable property. In 52. 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? 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. Virginia's refusal to recognize Terrett underscored the limited practical significance of the case. 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. Virginia did not heed the decision and continued to seize glebe lands. 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. At this point, Christ Church's vestry sued in equity to prevent the sale of its property. Two hundred years ago this week, the Supreme Court issued its now famous ruling in Dartmouth College v. Contracts were only powerful tools if they could be enforced by the courts, and numerous parochial lawsuits appear in vestry books and county court records.Footnote 31 Samuel DuVal had failed to construct a new church according to a contract he had signed with the vestry of Henrico Parish in 1771, and he returned his advance after facing the threat of a lawsuit.Footnote 32 Churchwardens often had to resort to lawsuits to recover outstanding debts. G. Edward White, The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 18151835 (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 608. H.J. Eric Hilt, Early American Corporations and the State, in Corporations and American Democracy, 4042, 48, 400 n.14. 6. The Supreme Court upheld the sanctity of the original charter of the 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. 121. Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. Feature Flags: { 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. See David S. Schwartz, The Spirit of the Constitution: John Marshall and the 200-Year Odyssey of McCulloch v. Maryland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 60; Hobson, The Great Chief Justice, 18183; Wicek, Liberty under Law, 3233; Currie, David P., The Constitution in the Supreme Court: The First Hundred Years, 17891888 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 196Google Scholar. 50. What did Chief Justice Marshall, who had personally taken part in Virginia's disestablishment, make of Terrett? 1. 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. The state took control of the school's governance and established Dartmouth University as a nonsectarian, public university in place of the orthodox college. 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. 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. (New York: G.P. What is the significance of Dartmouth v Woodward? national authority. 10. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 17731776 (hereafter JHBV), May 17, 1774, 103. 65. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 651; and Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. 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. Town of Pawlet v. Clark, 13 U.S. 292 (1815). R. Kent Newmeyer states that Marshall cited Terrett in Dartmouth, although he does not provide this citation. 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. More an exercise in contextualization than a standard account of jurisprudential logic, this article recovers the missing backstory to Dartmouth College by turning to what is perhaps a surprising subject: the long history of church and state in Virginia. T. Ritchie, ed., The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia (Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 1819) (hereafter Revised Code), 79. As a legislator, Marshall had voted to incorporate the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1784 and argued that the legislature did not have adequate grounds in 1786 to revoke its charter. 92. The divergent outcomes in the two cases lay in the distinctions between the Anglican Church in Virginia and in Vermont before the Revolution. Definition. 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. how did dartmouth college v woodward contribute to nationalism Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. Without parsons, vestries, or churchwardens, there were no corporations to claim the property before the Revolution. R.A. Brock, ed., The Vestry Book of Henrico Parish, Virginia 1730-'73 (Richmond, VA: 1874), 148. Phillip Bruce's work offers the only discussion of the corporate power of Virginia's parishes. 89. Given the overwhelming evidence that Marshall agreed with the logic of Terrett, we are left to assume that Duvall alone dissented in Terrett. 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. The case pitted the ascendant Democratic Republicans in the statehouse who supported disestablishment against the Congregationalists on Dartmouth's Board of Trustees. 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. Eckenrode, Separation of Church and State in Virginia, 120. Other works that emphasize the three types of corporations (municipal, religious, and business) leave out the distinctions between statutory and customary corporations. The vulnerability of dissenters property would surface decades later when congregations struggled to sell buildings or land to which they lacked clear title under Colonial-Era deeds. Recent works that focus on the incorporation of religious societies do not explore how English common law had long offered customary incorporation to the established Anglican Church before 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. 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). Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward | Oyez 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. Dartmouth vs. Woodward - Nationalism in America - Google Sites However, the day before delivering his opinion in court, the 82-year-old justice died, supposedly with an opinion striking down the Glebe Act beside him.Footnote 71 The resulting mistrial led to a second trial. 114. Turpin v. Locket, 6 Call 113 (1804), 129. 10 Va. 113, 144. WebHow did Dartmouth College v Woodward contribute to a greater sense of independence and nationhood? 38. 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. Recent accounts of American corporate history rely on Davis's tallies, and therefore also leave out common law corporations. 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. Historians do not have Pendleton's decision, but his views on the glebes were well known. 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. The Court's ruling in Terrett set a significant precedent for the standing of all private corporations vis-a-vis state legislatures and laid the groundwork for the Court's decision in Dartmouth College. Moreover, numerous pieces of legislation, including the 1784 Act of Incorporation and the 1786 Act of Repeal, had expressly affirmed vestries titles to glebes. 125. In Terrett, the Vestry of Christ Church in Alexandria sought to block the Fairfax County, VA Overseers of the Poor from seizing its 517-acre glebe (see Figure 1). Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. 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. Dignan, History of the Legal Incorporation, 3540. Virginia's Constitution prohibited a religious establishment which should have exclusive rights and prerogatives, or compel the citizens to worship under a stipulated form or discipline, or to pay taxes to those whose creed they could not conscientiously believe but the free exercise of religion cannot be justly deemed to be restrained by aiding with equal attention the votaries of every sect.Footnote 104 Story's opinion highlighted that Virginia's rejection of any form of religious incorporation diverged sharply from other states, where general statutes of incorporation for religious societies were common. First, these disputes reveal that the outcome of Dartmouth College was not a foregone conclusion, no matter what Webster argued. 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. 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. Dueling interpretations of corporations ultimately underlay the differences between Tucker's and Story's rulings in Turpin and Terrett. Both disputes arose in the turmoil of post-Revolutionary disestablishment as state legislatures directly challenged the rights of colonial corporations. The 1789 resolution presented a legal rationale against confiscation by declaring that the dispute over the glebes was not of a religious nature but ought to be settled by the rules of private property. Glebes, churches, and chapels that had been purchased, donated, or acquired through grants from the King of England, had been vested in bodies which were capable in law of taking and holding them to their own use, and which actually did take and hold them to that use. Confiscation by the commonwealth would amount to an unconstitutional invasion of right and a usurpation in the Legislature. The legislature sought to guarantee that parishes property would be inviolably preserved. Marshall's support for this declaration foreshadowed the decision in Terrett, and its specific discussion of royal grants gestured toward his logic in Dartmouth College. Whereas Terrett afforded Story an initial opportunity to evaluate the vested rights of corporations, Dartmouth College allowed the Court to establish the sanctity of corporate charters. Newmeyer may have been referencing this ambiguous line about the Court's prior decisions. 12. 70. 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. 14. George Webb, The Office and Authority of a Justice of the Peace (Williamsburg: Printed by William Parks, 1736), 71. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 43, 5052. 13. In 1801, Maryland and Virginia ceded land to the federal government to create the District of Columbia. She thanks the anonymous reviewers and Editor-in-Chief Gautham Rao for their valuable suggestions during the revision process. 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.