Had these two policies been carried into effect, Virginia's disestablishment would have resembled events in other states. Both disputes arose in the turmoil of post-Revolutionary disestablishment as state legislatures directly challenged the rights of colonial corporations. 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. 22, 105. 33. The rights secured under common law had relied on the king's consent and therefore had not survived the political revolution. Virginia's parish vestries and churchwardens raised an annual levy, punished moral crimes, and administered poor relief. 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. The controversy over Virginia's confiscation of the glebes landed before the Supreme Court in the case of Terrett v. Taylor (1815). Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 591. Despite Virginia's many statutes proscribing evangelical worship, the number of dissenters in Virginia continued to grow as the Great Awakening moved south in the 1750s.Footnote 38 Expanding communities of dissenters began to press for incorporation to secure their property. The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, Vol. 35. 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 discrepancy in their opinions exposed ideological fault lines among leading constitutional thinkers about the rights of a corporation and the definition of religious establishment. 128. 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. 14. 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. Justice Bushrod Washington's concurring opinion echoed Webster's oral arguments. 25. The legislature soon revoked the Episcopal Church's incorporation, prohibited any church from becoming incorporated, and confiscated parish property. 105. The exclusive legacy of the establishment's customary incorporation and its material wealth hung over these post-Revolutionary debates in Virginia. The legislature Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia; Begun and Holden in the City of Richmond, in the County of Henrico, on Monday, The Nineteenth Day of October, in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-Nine (Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 1828), 8384, 113. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. 13. Virginia Constitution (1851), article 32. 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. In the colonial era, Fairfax Parish had stretched along the Virginian bank of the Potomac River near the bustling ports of Georgetown, Maryland and Alexandria, Virginia. 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. 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. 56. 86. 16. None of these leading studies consider how common law bolstered the Church of England. The first judicial ruling that declared a federal law to be unconstitutional came from: Marbury v Madison. Tucker's decision began with a review of common law and colonial statutes to determine the corporate standing of the vestry. "useRatesEcommerce": false None of these works explore how Marshall's experience as a legislator during Virginia's disestablishment shaped his decision in Dartmouth College. 107. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/03-03-02-0233 (accessed November 24, 2020). 51. Since independence, the Virginia legislature had guaranteed the Episcopal Church its property in five separate statutes and formally incorporated the church in 1784.Footnote 95 With these acts, the question of whether or not the church's incorporation had survived the Revolution no longer mattered. See Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak, Corporations and American Democracy: An Introduction, in Corporations and American Democracy, ed. 91. Did a state legislature have the right to seize the property of the parish? (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). 99. 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. 108. For example, in 1751, the vestry of St. Peter's Parish in New Kent County ordered that all persons indebted to the Parish do account with the Church Wardens and Pay to their Hands the Several Sums due from them, and in failure of Payment the church wardens are required to bring suit for the recovery of the same.Footnote 33 Parishes could extend credit securely because they could recover outstanding debts in court. Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14; and Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 664. 50. The corporate rights of churches, and by extension all private corporations, vis--vis the state government became a central question in these deliberations. A few weeks later, the clergy of the Episcopal Church also petitioned the legislature for an act of incorporation. The vestry had won their case. For more on Duvall, see White, The Marshall Court, 32127. George Webb, The Office and Authority of a Justice of the Peace (Williamsburg: Printed by William Parks, 1736), 71. 106. 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. For some examples, see Hening, 7:31415; 9:240; 7:234; 8:365; 9:239. The Virginia Assembly received its first petition for incorporation from a nonconforming church in 1774 from the Peaks of Otter Presbyterian Church in Bedford County. 31 square miles on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River, formerly part of Fairfax County, VA, became Alexandria County, DC. More than 30 years before Dartmouth College, the turmoil of Virginia's disestablishment prompted Marshall to consider the vested property of corporations and to answer the question of whether a legislature could repeal incorporation.Footnote 62. Digital History ID 3528 - University of Houston Although built on the same logical framework as Terrett, Dartmouth's holding explicitly embraced all private corporations in its holding. The corporate rights of parishes were utterly familiar in the colonial Chesapeake, and the legacy of customary incorporation informed legislative debates and litigation in the Early Republic. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. 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. Perhaps it is not surprising that Terrett v. Taylor faded into obscurity. Melish, John, and Benjamin Tanner. 15. 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. Incorporation remained front and center in Virginia's debates over disestablishment precisely because it had been a closely guarded privilege of the established church. Churchwardens wrote contracts for every project that the parish undertook: digging wells, clearing land, or building churches.Footnote 30 The corporate status of churchwardens was particularly important when executing long-term contracts; as individual churchwardens came and went, their contracts remained enforceable. 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. 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. 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. See examples of four lawsuits brought by Bristol Parish in the Prince George County Court Minute Book, 17371740, Mircofilm Reel 9, 94103; 27980; 305; 516, Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA (hereafter LVA). 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. 93. Madison, Notes on Charters of Incorporation, Founders Online. 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. 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. English common law also dictated the legal standing of the Anglican establishment in colonial Virginia. 84. WebHow did the Supreme Court ruling in Dartmouth College v. Woodward support economic growth? 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. 2. The famed orator maintained that Dartmouth College closely resembled a case from 4 years earlier, Terrett v. Taylor (1815). 87. 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. (New York: G.P. However, the question of parish rights and property wound up before the courts again a decade later. See McConnell, The Supreme Court's Earliest Church-State Cases, 15; and From James Madison to the House of Representatives, 21 February 1811, Founders Online. Chamberlayne, ed., The Vestry Book of Saint Peter's Parish, 312. WebIn 1816, the New Hampshire legislature attempted to change Dartmouth College-- a privately funded institution--into a state university. For the text of the incorporating act, see Hening, 9:53237. In each case, incorporation is so inseparably annexed to their offices, that we cannot frame a complete legal idea of any of these persons, but we must also have an idea of a corporation.Footnote 21 In his Commentaries, Blackstone clarified his abstract discussion of corporate rights using accessible examples from parish life. 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. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 59192; Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 52. However, President James Madison vetoed the resulting Act of Incorporation in 1811. 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. Figure 1. The Pawlet decision does not record Marshall's support, but the Chief Justice endorsed Story's rationale just a few years later in his decision in Trustees of Philadelphia Baptist Ass'n v. Hart's Executors (1819).Footnote 116 Ultimately, the Court's decisions in Terrett and Pawlet affirmed the rights of corporations and provided ideological scaffolding for yet another disestablishmentarian case, Dartmouth College. WebIn the first half of the nineteenth century, internal improvements: were supported mainly by people in the West. 116. 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. Another clue to Marshall's views can be found in a closely related case, Town of Pawlet v. Clark (1815), which the Court heard just a few weeks after Terrett. James Madison, Detatched Memoranda, ca. Augusta County, Deed Book 19, No. Eric Michael Mazur argues that Marshall relied on (but did not cite) Story's reasoning in Terrett and Pawlet in his decision in Trustees of Philadelphia Baptist Ass'n v. Hart's Executors (1819). For more on the legal persecution of dissenters and the growth of evangelical community, see Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia; Monica Najar, Evangelizing the South: A Social History of Church and State in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Jewel Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). Dartmouth College v. Woodward was an 1819 Supreme Court case involving the honoring of a contract. Dartmouth College v. Woodward is taken to be the seminal case in the rise of the corporation. Turpin, Call 113 (1804), 113; 129; 139; 148. 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.