Episcopalians, on the other hand, argued that revoking incorporation threatened the fundamental principles of the Revolution by threatening the security of their private property.Footnote 55, In order to build as comprehensive a case as possible for repealing the 1784 Act of Incorporation, evangelical petitioners mounted arguments against any form of religious incorporation. 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. 10, ed. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 707, 695. The Christ Church glebe stood in the part of Fairfax County, Virginia that was ceded to form Washington, DC. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 52. 31 January 1820, Founders Online. Without parsons, vestries, or churchwardens, there were no corporations to claim the property before the Revolution. The controversy over Virginia's confiscation of the glebes landed before the Supreme Court in the case of Terrett v. Taylor (1815). In 1798, Virginia repealed portions of six acts from the 1770s and 1780s that had allowed the Episcopal Church to retain parochial property, which the legislature now deemed inconsistent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. & G. Bartow, 1823), 13 vols. 86. Empowered by common law and affirmed in colonial statutes, parish vestries and churchwardens routinely exercised the unique rights of corporations. 90. Dartmouth's former trustees refused to concede and sued in 1817 to challenge the legislation. 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). Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 182n66. 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. Story also dismissed the argument that the legislature had a constitutional duty to repeal incorporation in order to protect religious freedom. Virginia's parish vestries and churchwardens raised an annual levy, punished moral crimes, and administered poor relief. Although specifically referring to the College, these words brought all benevolent institutions to the foreground, and indeed all private corporations. On March 1 and 2, Dartmouth will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Supreme Courts decision in Dartmouth College v. Woodwardalso known as the T. Ritchie, ed., The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia (Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 1819) (hereafter Revised Code), 79. Eckenrode, Separation of Church and State in Virginia, 121. Town of Pawlet v. Clark, 13 U.S. 292 (1815). Portions of this article also received instructive feedback at the Annual Meeting for the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, the University of Michigan Law & Society Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop, and the Symposium on Roots & Legacies of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) at OU College of Law. Decisions over the legality of state disestablishmentarian policies had lasting consequences for all American corporations. 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. 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. 43. 65. This discussion of religious freedom was not tangential but was essential to Story's line of argument. Webster suggested that if, therefore, it has been shown, that this college is to be regarded as a private charity, this case is embraced within the very terms of that decision [Terrett].Footnote 119 Although Americans celebrate Dartmouth College as the case that asserted these rights, Webster suggested that the Court had already laid this groundwork 4 years earlier in Terrett when it ruled that Virginia could not revoke the charter of a private corporation. 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. Amidst the turmoil of Virginia's disestablishment, he opposed repealing incorporation and confiscating church property. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. for this article. 26. WebIn Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819) the Court promoted business growth by denying states the right to alter or impair contracts unilaterally. 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. Bushrod's Washington's 1797 opinion about the glebe lands is quoted in Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14. Recognizing the widespread existence of common law corporations does not offer a new origin story for all American corporations; instead, it reveals the loss of a once-familiar route to incorporation before the Revolution: common law.Footnote 18 Although the Court endeavored to uphold the rights of customary corporations in Terrett, common law incorporation held little value if state legislatures could simply ignore these institutions corporate status and property claims. Second, reading these cases together underscores why disestablishment was an essential context for the rise of the corporation. He offered an uncompromising defense of the vested rights of parishes to their property.Footnote 90 Washington's prior connection to the case has gone unnoticed by constitutional scholars, and he did not recuse himself from Terrett despite his earlier involvement. 83. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. Hostname: page-component-75b8448494-m747x WebHow did Dartmouth College v Woodward contribute to a greater sense of independence and nationhood? 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 116. 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. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. See Robert E. Wright, Corporation Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 924. In 1801, Maryland and Virginia ceded land to the federal government to create the District of Columbia. 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. 39. 101. 49. The increasing number of religious dissenters, along with intense anti-British sentiment during the war, eroded support for the religious establishment following the outbreak of the Revolution.Footnote 43 In 1782, the American branch of the Anglican Church established itself as the Protestant Episcopal Church, but a new name was not enough to convince wary Americans to rejoin its ranks. Clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church: Petition, June 4, 1784, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, LVA. 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. But he ultimately dismissed the vestry's suit and upheld the Glebe Act as lawful under Virginia's Constitution.Footnote 73. After the repeal of incorporation, Marshall voted in support of a resolution framing the conflict as a matter of private property, reaffirming the vested rights of parishes, and preventing future discussion of glebe confiscation.Footnote 114 The evidence from Marshall's legislative career overwhelmingly suggests that he would have joined Story's decision in Terrett. However, the question of parish rights and property wound up before the courts again a decade later. 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. 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. Of the four Justices, Duvall seems most likely to have dissented. These new perspectives on Turpin, Terrett, and Dartmouth College deepen our understanding of early American corporations in three key ways. 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. The 1786 Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom extended the promise of religious liberty.Footnote 44 Written by Jefferson and championed by Madison, the act abolished state financial support for religion, repealed religious tests, and overturned laws that had curbed free exercise of religion. 71. 123. Gordon, The African Supplement, 38990n8. 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. After Madison's veto, the Fairfax County, VA Overseers of the Poor moved forward with the seizure of Christ Church's property. 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. Whereas Tucker had granted the legislature significant latitude to regulate private corporations, the Court used Terrett as an opportunity to assert the independence of private corporations vis--vis state legislatures, and defended corporations indefeasible and irrevocable titles to their property.Footnote 83, The conflict in Terrett v. Taylor (1815) resembled the earlier Turpin v. Lockett in many ways. Feature Flags: { R. Kent Newmeyer states that Marshall cited Terrett in Dartmouth, although he does not provide this citation. The legislature changed the school's corporate See Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 13133. 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. Tucker's decision in Turpin had trounced private property rights and threatened the foundation of all corporations.Footnote 92, Justice Story rejected the view that the Revolution had made the church's property into a public asset. 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 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.
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