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. 93. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 591. The Virginia Declaration of Rights proclaimed that no compact could deprive individuals of certain inalienable rights. The legislature Traditional accounts for the rise of the business corporation focus on the shift from special acts of incorporation to general incorporation statutes, but do not address the existence of common law corporations. For more on Story's legal career, see Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 52. Newmeyer stated that Marshall cited Terrett in Dartmouth College, but does not elaborate any further. Total loading time: 0 An Act Incorporating the Protestant Episcopal Church in the town of Alexandria, in the District of Columbia, January 1811. 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. The assembly affirmed, for example, that vestries and churchwardens could make bylaws, disburse funds, bring lawsuits, and sign contracts.Footnote 27 Like Virginia's other colonial corporations, vestries were public bodies and could buy or dispose of real estate only with the assembly's approval.Footnote 28 The assembly could dissolve parish vestries whom they deemed incompetent or unqualified. Tucker's decision began with a review of common law and colonial statutes to determine the corporate standing of the vestry. Turpin v. Locket, 6 Call 113 (1804). On Marshall's legal career, see G. Edward White, The Marshall Court; R. Kent Newmeyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1996); and Charles F. Hobson, The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law (Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 1996). But looking at this series of cases togetherstarting with Turpin, moving next to Terrett and then considering Dartmouth Collegeoffers several important insights to scholars. 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. Tucker made two arguments to justify the dissolution of private corporations. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. At this point, Christ Church's vestry sued in equity to prevent the sale of its 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. 103. The Virginia Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court ultimately diverged sharply over the legality of the 1802 Glebe Act and the state's disestablishmentarian program. 118. 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). 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. Part of Terret's obscurity stems from its omission from Chief Justice Marshall's decision in Dartmouth College. 71. 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. 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 33. WebHow did Dartmouth College v Woodward contribute to a greater sense of independence and nationhood? 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. Scholarship on Terrett, and early American law more broadly, has overlooked common-law corporations.Footnote 15 Historians of colonial Anglicanism likewise neglect the customary incorporation of the established church.Footnote 16 The near absence of this topic in the literature has obscured its significance. Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. 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. 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. Moreover, numerous pieces of legislation, including the 1784 Act of Incorporation and the 1786 Act of Repeal, had expressly affirmed vestries titles to glebes. Marshall had invoked the irrevocable nature of charters as far back as 1786 when he, Randolph, and Madison discussed under what circumstances the legislature could permissibly strip the Episcopal Church of its incorporation. The indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity would enable ecclesiastical corporations to swallow government, and he argued that the power of all corporations, ought to be limited in this respect.Footnote 88 Madison articulated a far-reaching vision of non-establishment at the national level by insisting that any form of religious incorporation not only entangled church and state but also threatened liberty.Footnote 89. Bushrod's Washington's 1797 opinion about the glebe lands is quoted in Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14. Blunting the Revolution's Radicalism from Virginia's District Courts, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 106 (1998): 41942Google Scholar. 119. Hostname: page-component-75b8448494-m747x The Court became the final Gordon, The African Supplement, 38990n8. Pawlet arose in the only other state that confiscated Anglican Church property, Vermont, where the legislature passed statutes in 1794 and 1805 empowering towns to seize glebe lands for schools.Footnote 115 Story wrote on behalf of the Court to uphold Vermont's laws. 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. 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. 123. For example, in 1772, the assembly disbanded the vestries in St. John's Parish in King William County and St. Martin Parish in Hanover and Louisa Counties, but the parishes property and rights remained unimpaired.Footnote 29 Virginia's parishes clearly possessed the continuity of life that has long been understood as an essential feature of a corporation. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, January 9, 1785, Founders Online. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 52. 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. Virginia's seizure of the glebes was held unconstitutional because the legislation siezed vested property from longstanding corporate bodies. 12. & G. Bartow, 1823), 13 vols. Eckenrode, Separation of Church and State in Virginia, 120. 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. 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. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. November 27, 1789, Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Richmond, VA: 1828), 8384, 113. Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia in 2020. 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. Virginia's parish vestries and churchwardens raised an annual levy, punished moral crimes, and administered poor relief. WebIn the first half of the nineteenth century, internal improvements: were supported mainly by people in the West. 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. 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. 5.0 (1 review) Term. First, these disputes reveal that the outcome of Dartmouth College was not a foregone conclusion, no matter what Webster argued. Phillip Bruce's work offers the only discussion of the corporate power of Virginia's parishes. 61. In the colonial Chesapeake, where there were few corporations and individuals went to great lengths to preserve wealth from one generation to the next, it was not only the amount of property that parishes held but the relative security of their investments that expressed the special status and corporate power of the established church.Footnote 35 Because of their privileged position as corporate entities, vestries and churchwardens held property securely in perpetuity; parishes could sell their assets more than a century later without any difficulty.Footnote 36 However, dissenting congregations lacked any standing in law and instead had to vest their property in individual congregants.Footnote 37 The exclusivity of common law-incorporation was yet another powerful, material advantage for the established church. 94. 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. (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). 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 Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 63334, 650. For more on the connection between Tucker's political views and his jurisprudential philosophy and outlook as a jurist, see Doyle, Christopher, Judge St. George Tucker and the Case of Tom v. Roberts. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 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. 83. 89. 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. 10, ed. Of the four Justices, Duvall seems most likely to have dissented. WebIn 1816, the New Hampshire legislature attempted to change Dartmouth College-- a privately funded institution--into a state university. 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. https://www.loc.gov/item/91686243/. For a comparison of the two policies of confiscation, see Gordon, The Landscape of Faith.. 103 (1801). 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). An Address to the Anabaptists Preachers Imprisoned in Caroline County, Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg: Prudie & Dixon), February 20, 1772, 12. "useRatesEcommerce": false Dartmouth College v. Woodward was an 1819 Supreme Court case that took place when the state of New Hampshire attempted to rewrite Dartmouth's charter. 116. 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 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. Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, 132. Currie, The Constitution in the Supreme Court, 14041. Putnam's Sons, 1910), 1:77. With this sweeping assessment, Marshall drew together the earlier decision in Terrett with Dartmouth College in protecting the rights of all corporations.Footnote 127. The case sought to establish the validity of contracts, especially 96. First, these cases reveal the stark disagreements among early American legal theorists about the fundamental nature of corporations, the rights of corporations in relation to the legislature, and the purpose of corporations in society. None of the leading studies of colonial Anglicanism mention the corporate status of parishes under common law. 54. 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. 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. Washington cited the Terrett decision in his opinions in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) and Society for Propagation of the Gospel v. Town of New Haven (1823). This jurisdictional argument could have been invoked at any point in the ruling to throw out Fairfax County's claim to the glebe lands. By narrowly addressing the Glebe Act in the context of religious reformation, Tucker ducked the underlying question of whether a legislature could revoke the incorporation of a private religious society in the absence of an established church, or the charter of any private corporation for that matter. 10 Va. 113, 144. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, in Gale Encyclopedia of American Law, 3rd ed., Vol. Incorporation remained front and center in Virginia's debates over disestablishment precisely because it had been a closely guarded privilege of the established church. Marshall's decision in Dartmouth College endorsed many of the same principles as Story's opinion had in Terrett. 45. Eric Hilt, Early American Corporations and the State, in Corporations and American Democracy, 4042, 48, 400 n.14. Eckenrode, Separation of Church and State in Virginia: A Study in the Development of the Revolution (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1910), 120; Buckley, Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 168. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 17731776 (hereafter JHBV), May 17, 1774, 103. In colonial Virginia, rectors, churchwardens, and vestries of the established Anglican Church were incorporated under common law. 36. 59. 8. Although scholars have convincingly argued that the emergence of statutory frameworks for business and religious corporations were distinct processes, litigation during religious disestablishment ultimately enshrined the rights of business corporations and made them powerful vehicles for commercial growth.Footnote 117 Dartmouth College crystallized the implicit logic of Terrett by holding that all charters were contracts and thus offered robust protections to all private corporations. 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. 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.. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1833), 3:258, 260, 269, 533, 691. 32. (New York: G.P. For the text of the incorporating act, see Hening, 9:53237. Churchwardens by the Common Law, are made a Corporation to take Care of the Goods of the Church.They are a corporation, only as to Moveables, viz to take Goods, but not Lands, for the Use of the Church.Footnote 23 The vestry purchased and maintained glebes, which were farms of at least 200 acres, to the use of the minister of such parish, for the Time being and his successors for ever.Footnote 24 The minister was a corporation sole, or a persona ecclesia, who had rights to the glebe during his tenure. 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. 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. In both instances, the contract has been altered, without the assent of the corporation, its obligations have been impaired.Footnote 120 Washington, who had once called Virginia's glebe confiscation a humiliation, drew together the Virginia Glebe Act and the actions of the New Hampshire legislature by labelling both as laws that were repugnant to the Constitution in his opinion Dartmouth College.Footnote 121. 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. 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. Several sources state either that the decision was unanimous or specifically note that Marshall joined Story's opinion. 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). 35. In Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819) the Court promoted business growth by denying states the right to alter or impair contracts unilaterally. 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. WebIn 1816, the New Hampshire legislature attempted to change Dartmouth College-- a privately funded institution--into a state university. 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. 107. 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. Mazur, Religion and the Earliest Supreme Court Justices, 17891911, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Politics in the U.S., ed. 25. It was a different story in Vermont where there had been no operational Anglican Church before the Revolution. 74. 108. 48. 1. These laws guaranteeing the parish's irrevocable rights to its property had been unconstitutionally revoked by an overeager legislature.Footnote 109.
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