14. My dissertation has traced and tracked Virginia's glebe confiscations. No other state curbed the corporate rights of the former established church to the same degree, which made Virginia's disestablishment an important litmus test for the rights of all corporations in the early national United States. District of Columbia. Tucker was sympathetic to the Episcopal Church's predicament and expressed disappointment that the question of the glebes had been agitated with such hostility. 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. The famed orator maintained that Dartmouth College closely resembled a case from 4 years earlier, Terrett v. Taylor (1815). Public opinion toward the Anglican establishment had soured in Virginia before the Revolution, and the state began dismantling the established church in 1776. These radical policies set Virginia apart from other states and made these disputes a critical litmus test for the rights of all corporations. Michael McConnell suggests that the vestry's decision to bring Terrett in federal court was a shrewd strategy for the case to be heard by a friendlier Federalist judge, but this assertion overlooks the court battle in Turpin. 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). Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, 13233. In Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819) the Court promoted business growth by denying states the right to alter or impair contracts unilaterally. 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. 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. WebIn Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819) the Court promoted business growth by denying states the right to alter or impair contracts unilaterally. See An Act Concerning the District of Columbia, 2 Stat. C. G. Chamberlayne, ed., The Vestry Book of Petsworth Parish, Gloucester County, Virginia, 16771793 (Richmond, VA: The Library Board, Division of Purchase and Print, 1933), 208. 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. See Fincastle Presbyterian Congregation: Petition, Botetourt County, December 19, 1805, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, LVA. District of Columbia. 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. Michael McConnell characterized Madison's veto message as narrow and suggested that this veto should not be interpreted as opposing all incorporations of religious bodies. However, Madison objected to the bill because it outlined sundry rules and proceedings relative purely to the organization and polity of the church incorporated. Therefore, any act of incorporation for a religious society that specified the rules of internal denominational governance would have qualified as a form of religious establishment under the terms that Madison laid out in this veto message. national authority. Eckenrode, Separation of Church and State in Virginia, 121. Augusta County, Deed Book 19, No. Story's reasoning in the two cases was identical; namely, that the state could not take vested property from corporate bodies. For more on Story's legal career, see Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. 72. Newmeyer stated that Marshall cited Terrett in Dartmouth College, but does not elaborate any further. 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. Their advocacy of such a radical view is best understood in light of the long history of the Anglican Church's exclusive access to incorporation. Together, these cases reveal that one of the most significant legal outcomes of disestablishment was the ascendance of the charter. The legislature changed the school's corporate 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. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 52. 62. Justice Bushrod Washington's concurring opinion echoed Webster's oral arguments. 8. 1 / 15. When Marshall wrote in Dartmouth College that almost all eleemosynary corporations, those which are created for the promotion of religion, of charity or education, are of the same character[t]he law of this case is the law of all, his words encompassed not only a small college in New Hampshire but also a contested church in the nation's capital. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 5153. 17. WebIn the first half of the nineteenth century, internal improvements: were supported mainly by people in the West. 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. 10. 2. Livingston signed onto Story's and Washington's decisions in Dartmouth that cited Terrett. WebPetitioner Dartmouth CollegeIn 1816, the New Hampshire legislature attempted to change Dartmouth College-- a privately funded institution--into a state university. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 43, 5052. 41. Ibid. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 59192; Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 52. Part of Terret's obscurity stems from its omission from Chief Justice Marshall's decision in Dartmouth College. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1833), 3:258, 260, 269, 533, 691. 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. 71. A few weeks later, the clergy of the Episcopal Church also petitioned the legislature for an act of incorporation. However, dissolving a vestry did not destroy the corporation itself or interfere with its legal rights. 5.0 (1 review) Term. Putnam's Sons, 1910), 1:77. Justice Story, in another concurring opinion, also pointed to his earlier decision in Terrett. Marshall, the Dartmouth College Case, and Originalism - Law Story also dismissed the argument that the legislature had a constitutional duty to repeal incorporation in order to protect religious freedom. For example, he pointed to the parish rector to illustrate the concept of a corporation sole, and invoked parish churchwardens as an example of a lay civil corporation.Footnote 22 Blackstone's reliance on parochial examples underscores just how familiar these institutions were to English subjects living under the established Anglican Church. 1 / 15. a. 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. 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. Tucker argued that the 1784 Act of Incorporation had amounted to an entirely new, and essentially different, constitution of incorporation.Footnote 75 Parish ministers and vestries had accepted a private foundation under this act, which must be construed as a total surrender of their former state.Footnote 76 Tucker concluded, the ancient vestries were dissolved, either by the change of government, or by the act for incorporating the protestant episcopal church: and that the new bodies corporatewere private incorporations, essentially differing from the former, and owing their existence and their rights, solely to that act of the legislature.Footnote 77 According to Tucker, the Revolution had destroyed the conditions necessary for customary incorporation, and the legislature had reconstituted vestries as private corporations. for this article. November 27, 1789, Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Richmond, VA: 1828), 8384, 113. Tucker's Turpin opinion then dealt quickly with the question that would occupy the Court's attention in Dartmouth College: did the legislature have the authority to dissolve a private corporation? Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, in Gale Encyclopedia of American Law, 3rd ed., Vol. WebDartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819: Business interest promoted Contract law strengthened by extending contract clause to corporate charter, sanctity of contracts 11. Although Randolph is simply called Mr. 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. 127. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 59192. 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. Parishes organized Anglican life on both sides of the Atlantic, and these ecclesiastical bodies acted as an essential part of local government in colonial Virginia. 40. What did Chief Justice Marshall, who had personally taken part in Virginia's disestablishment, make of Terrett? 32. After dwelling at great length on the unconstitutionality of Virginia's statutes, Story ultimately offered one farther objection to uphold the vestry's claim.Footnote 110 Because the Glebe Act had been passed after Christ Church and its glebe had become part of Washington, DC, Fairfax County officials lacked any power to seize the glebe. Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) - Study.com 122. 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. It was a different story in Vermont where there had been no operational Anglican Church before the Revolution. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 591. 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. The confusion over which justices joined Story's opinion in Terrett is widespread in the literature. 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. Second, reading these cases together underscores why disestablishment was an essential context for the rise of the corporation. 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. 101. See Newmeyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, 132. Chapter 8 The divergent outcomes in the two cases lay in the distinctions between the Anglican Church in Virginia and in Vermont before the Revolution. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. R.A. Brock, ed., The Vestry Book of Henrico Parish, Virginia 1730-'73 (Richmond, VA: 1874), 148. Daniel Webster, who argued on behalf of his alma mater, invoked Terrett repeatedly in his arguments before the Court. 47. 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. 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. John Blair Smith to James Madison, June 21, 1784, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0043 (accessed April 4, 2019). 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. 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. This ambiguity leaves scholars with no choice but to rely on historical context to reconstruct Marshall's reasoning in Dartmouth College. 74. (hereafter Hening), 2:17172; 1:399400; 3:151. 105. After Madison's veto, the Fairfax County, VA Overseers of the Poor moved forward with the seizure of Christ Church's property. 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 fight over incorporation and glebes during Virginia's disestablishment had induced Marshall to assert his views on charters, corporations, and vested property rights. 42. 36. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 64546. James Madison and John Marshall, both members of the House of Delegates, voted in favor of the law, which reaffirmed parishes claims to their pre-Revolutionary property and recognized the formerly established church as a newly reorganized, private corporation.Footnote 48 The legislature tabled general incorporation and postponed voting on a general assessment until the following year.Footnote 49, Critics initially attacked the specifics of the 1784 Incorporation Act without raising fundamental objections to religious incorporation. In 1801, Maryland and Virginia ceded land to the federal government to create the District of Columbia. Blunting the Revolution's Radicalism from Virginia's District Courts, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 106 (1998): 41942Google Scholar. Tucker, Henry St. George, The Opinion of Chancellor Tucker in the Case of Selden and Others against the Overseers of the Poor of Loudoun and Others, in Commentaries on the Laws of Virginia, 3rd edition (Richmond: Printed by Shepherd & Colin, 1846), 453Google Scholar. Woodward opinion advanced a principled originalism. Finally, these cases clarify why Dartmouth College set such an important precedent in the Early Republic. 52. Amidst the turmoil of Virginia's disestablishment, he opposed repealing incorporation and confiscating church property. 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. 37. 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. In short, Story treated the post-1784 parish like any other private corporation. 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. Tucker had recently published a revised version of Blackstone's Commentaries and was widely viewed as one of the nation's leading experts on common law. Justice Story attacked Virginia's state laws at great length but this narrower jurisdictional holding offered Virginia some room to sidestep the ruling. WebThe Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) that Indians had a basic right to their tribal lands. 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 rights secured under common law had relied on the king's consent and therefore had not survived the political revolution. Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia in 2020. chapter 9 history review Flashcards | Quizlet 56. WebIn 1816, the New Hampshire legislature attempted to change Dartmouth College-- a privately funded institution--into a state university. 26. In 1801, Maryland and Virginia ceded land to the federal government to create the District of Columbia. 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. See Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 33745; Mays, The Letters and Papers of Edmund Pendleton, 17341803 (Charlottesville: Published for the Virginia Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1967), 2:63742. The formerly established church worried that their change in appellation would lead to cavilsdisputes and litigations over parish property and hoped that the state would reaffirm their customary corporate rights under a formal act of incorporation.Footnote 46, The Committee for Religion in the Virginia House of Delegates endorsed the Episcopal Church's request for incorporation while also recommending a general act of incorporation to benefit all other religious societies.Footnote 47 The legislature passed an act incorporating the Episcopal Church in the fall session of 1784. 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. 116. The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. 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. 98. 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). In Virginia, customary corporations and irrevocable charters were likewise attacked as an un-republican vestige of legal favoritism. 33. 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. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 43, 48. T. Ritchie, ed., The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia (Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 1819) (hereafter Revised Code), 79. 50. 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. 108. hasContentIssue false, Religious Establishment and Incorporation, This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (, Copyright The Author(s), 2021. Although numerous congregants had made contributions to the church, the pious intentions of such benefactors cannot be effectually carried into execution, the elders of the Church not being incorporated, so as to be capable of taking care and holding lands and Slaves for the use of the minister. The governor dissolved the colonial assembly in the turmoil of the Revolution before it could respond either affirmatively or negatively to the church's request.Footnote 39. An appeal sent by the Baptist General Committee declared that churches could only be regulated by the Law of God and not the Law of the State; by the acts of the Apostles, and not by the Acts of an Assembly.Footnote 56 The petitioners invoked Article 16 of Virginia's Declaration of Rights to argue that if religion can be directed, only by reason and conviction; not by force and violence, we cannot see with what propriety the General Assembly could incorporate the Protestant Episcopal Church.Footnote 57 These wide-ranging criticisms of the 1784 Act gave rise to a fundamental opposition to all forms of incorporation for religious societies, a development that did not happen in other states.Footnote 58, In the midst of these debates over repeal, Madison heard the expertise of two of Virginia's leading legal minds: Edmund Randolph, then Governor of Virginia and future United States Attorney General and Secretary of State, and John Marshall, member of Virginia's legislature and future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.Footnote 59 One brief page of notes remains extant from this meeting, which has largely escaped the attention of constitutional scholars.Footnote 60 Although hurried and abbreviated, the document captures Randolph and Marshall's resounding objections to repealing a charter of incorporation.
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