For an excellent discussion of the conflict in Dartmouth, see McGarvie, One Nation Under Law, 15289. 119. Constitutional scholars most often discuss the case as a forerunner to Dartmouth College, but a few have found Story's opinion in Terrett puzzling or gratuitous.Footnote 8 One commenter observed that despite apparently being a Contract Clause case, it is hard, from the case's facts, to know just what contract a state had impaired.Footnote 9 Another interpreter argued that Terrett is best understood as a Takings Clause case whereas others suggest that Story's opinion rested on natural law with little grounding in the Constitution.Footnote 10 None of these discussions adequately explain the through line from Terrett to Dartmouth. Clergy of the Presbyterian Church: Petition, May 26, 1784, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, LVA. Other works that emphasize the three types of corporations (municipal, religious, and business) leave out the distinctions between statutory and customary corporations. Given the overwhelming evidence that Marshall agreed with the logic of Terrett, we are left to assume that Duvall alone dissented in Terrett. 75. George Webb, The Office and Authority of a Justice of the Peace (Williamsburg: Printed by William Parks, 1736), 71. 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. Chapter 8 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 he ultimately dismissed the vestry's suit and upheld the Glebe Act as lawful under Virginia's Constitution.Footnote 73. Tucker's decision began with a review of common law and colonial statutes to determine the corporate standing of the vestry. 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. 8. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1833), 3:258, 260, 269, 533, 691. WebIn Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 481 (1819), the Supreme Court ruled that the state of New Hampshire had violated the contract clause in its attempt to install a new 36. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward 17 U.S. 518 The court's decision in Terrett refuted Turpin's logic at every step, despite never mentioning the earlier Virginian case by name. See Robert E. Wright, Corporation Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 924. This decision offered a glimpse of an alternate legal landscape where American corporations existed as fundamentally communal institutions at the discretion of the legislature and charters were negotiable and revocable. 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. 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. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Supreme Court confirmed the "implied powers" of Congress. for this article. 15. The case sought to establish the validity of contracts, especially Story's discussion of colonial corporations in Terrett reveals one the most important links to Dartmouth College because he explicitly mentioned royal grants alongside customary corporations.Footnote 94. 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. Has data issue: false The significance of Story's conclusions can only register once vestries are properly recognized as customary corporations. 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. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, in Gale Encyclopedia of American Law, 3rd ed., Vol. 31 square miles on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River, formerly part of Fairfax County, VA, became Alexandria County, DC. 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. Eckenrode, Separation of Church and State in Virginia, 121. 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. Over the next decade, a host of colonial laws that had empowered the Anglican Church and penalized dissenters were overturned. 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. 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. Woodward opinion advanced a principled originalism. Virginia's Glebe Act exhibited an embarrassing disregard for the rights and property of the Episcopal Church. Finally, these cases clarify why Dartmouth College set such an important precedent in the Early Republic. 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. Inhabitants of St. Asaph's Parish: Petition, Caroline County, December 4, 1786, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, LVA. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. 87. On Pendleton's legal career, see David John Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 17211803: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). Story, however, offered a definition of religious establishment rooted in exclusivity. Incorporation remained front and center in Virginia's debates over disestablishment precisely because it had been a closely guarded privilege of the established church. 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. Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14; and Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 664. The separation of church from state raised difficult questions about how to remove the legal advantages of the former religious establishment, including customary incorporation, and whether it was permissible to strip private corporations of their charters and property. Not only did Washington cite Blackstone's distinction between private and public corporations, he also called attention to the fact that the Court had already set down the differences by quoting at length from Story's opinion in Terrett. 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). 110. 116. What did Chief Justice Marshall, who had personally taken part in Virginia's disestablishment, make of Terrett? Dartmouth College v. Woodward was an 1819 Supreme Court case involving the honoring of a contract. 93. Entailing land was one common method that Virginians used to preserve property across multiple generations. The dissolution of royal government had not affected the vested property of vestries or any corporate bodies. 49. s.n., 182-?, 1820] Map. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 5152. See Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 13133. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1770), I:472. The Court may have offered an ideological defense of customary incorporation in Terrett, but Virginia's continued refusal to abide by the decision underscored the weakness of common law incorporation. However, President James Madison vetoed the resulting Act of Incorporation in 1811. 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. With this sweeping assessment, Marshall drew together the earlier decision in Terrett with Dartmouth College in protecting the rights of all corporations.Footnote 127. 99. 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. But what was the fate of the many laws concerning the legal status and property of the Episcopal Church after independence? Justice Story, in another concurring opinion, also pointed to his earlier decision in Terrett. 123. For some examples, see Hening, 7:31415; 9:240; 7:234; 8:365; 9:239. WebThe case arose when the president of Dartmouth College was deposed by its trustees, leading to the New Hampshire legislature attempting to force the college to become a national authority. The legislative program of disestablishment began in 1776 with the passage of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which guaranteed free exercise. 84. 102. 92. Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of Corporations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 6, 7980. 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. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 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. (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). 90. 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. On March 1 and 2, Dartmouth will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Supreme Courts decision in Dartmouth College v. Woodwardalso known as the The exclusive legacy of the establishment's customary incorporation and its material wealth hung over these post-Revolutionary debates in Virginia. Dartmouth College v. Woodward - Wikipedia 1. Ultimately, the defense and definition of the corporation that was cemented in Dartmouth College emerged from this process of cultural turmoil and settled some of the most hotly contested legal questions left over from the rupture of 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. 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. 14. Marshall included no citations at all in his decision, save two references to Blackstone and an oblique statement that his opinion rested on the former decisions of this Court.Footnote 123 The absence of a citation to Terrett in the text of the decision, then, cannot be taken to mean that the chief justice did not link the two cases.Footnote 124 The omission of any precedent from Marshall's opinion requires looking beyond the decision to piece together what informed his rationale. 125. Figure 2. The New York and South Carolina legislatures rejected numerous petitions for incorporation from dissenting congregations throughout the eighteenth century.Footnote 40 In Maryland, the legislature's mortmain statutes denied Catholics and Protestant dissenters the ability to incorporate; the parishes of Maryland's established Anglican Church, however, held their property under common law incorporation.Footnote 41 Virginia's growing community of dissenters was just beginning to protest against their inability to incorporate on the eve of the Revolution. 5.0 (1 review) Term. See examples of five parish lawsuits in the New Kent County Court listed in C.G. 27. 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. The younger Tucker upheld his father's decision in Turpin and declared that the question in this case is not touched by the constitution of the United Statesthis is a subject over which the supreme court of the United States have no manner of jurisdiction.Footnote 128 But Henry St. George Tucker's Selden opinion did cite Dartmouth College to argue that Virginia's church had been fundamentally a public institution and therefore under complete legislative control.Footnote 129 In a stroke of irony, the distinction between private and public corporations that Terrett had helped forge in American law was now being wielded against parishes. View all Google Scholar citations
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