WebHow did Dartmouth College v Woodward contribute to a greater sense of independence and nationhood? 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44 Written by Jefferson and championed by Madison, the act abolished state financial support for religion, repealed religious tests, and overturned laws that had curbed free exercise of religion. 62. Newmeyer characterizes Terrett as a significant development in the publicprivate distinction in American law. 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. From James Madison to the House of Representatives, 21 February 1811, Founders Online, National Archives. This discussion of religious freedom was not tangential but was essential to Story's line of argument. Evangelicals continued to press the legislature to seize Episcopal parish property. See Fincastle Presbyterian Congregation: Petition, Botetourt County, December 19, 1805, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, LVA. 86. WebDartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819: Business interest promoted Contract law strengthened by extending contract clause to corporate charter, sanctity of contracts The court also had to answer the additional jurisdictional question of whether a county in Virginia could confiscate land in Washington, DC under a state law. 72. Feature Flags: { 18. Finally, integrating customary incorporation into our narratives of early national law drastically reshapes our understanding of the rise of the corporation. Madison, Notes on Charters of Incorporation, Founders Online. 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. 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. 103 (1801). This statute asserted that all property formerly belonging to the Church, of every description, devolved on the good people of this commonwealth, on the dissolution of the British government here. Sixteen years after declaring the Episcopal Church independent from the state and preserving its property, the assembly stripped the denomination of its glebe property.Footnote 68. View all Google Scholar citations 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. 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. See Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14; Albert J. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919) 4:243; and Buckley, Thomas E., After Disestablishment: Thomas Jefferson's Wall of Separation in Antebellum Virginia, The Journal of Southern History 61 (1995): 450n13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Footnote 6, Despite the importance that Webster afforded to the case while arguing Dartmouth, Terrett remains little known today.Footnote 7 The existing literature on Terrett primarily falls into two camps. 96. Given the overwhelming evidence that Marshall agreed with the logic of Terrett, we are left to assume that Duvall alone dissented in Terrett. For Story, Virginia's statutes first incorporating and then undoing incorporationand ultimately vesting parish property in the commonwealthwere utterly inconsistent with a great and fundamental principle of a republican government, the right of the citizens to the free enjoyment of their property.Footnote 100 Virginia's Glebe Act was not, therefore in our judgment, operative so far as to divest the Episcopal church of the property acquired, previous to the revolution, by purchase or by donation.Footnote 101. In 1801, Maryland and Virginia ceded land to the federal government to create the District of Columbia. Total loading time: 0 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). 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. For details of the purchase, see Nan Netherton, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed, Fairfax County, Virginia: A History (Fairfax, VA: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978), 71. Melish, John, and Benjamin Tanner. Dartmouth College v. Woodward was an 1819 Supreme Court case involving the honoring of a contract. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 87. 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. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 650. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, Section 16 and Section 4. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/03-03-02-0233 (accessed November 24, 2020). The case involved the efforts of the New Several sources state either that the decision was unanimous or specifically note that Marshall joined Story's opinion. Story also dismissed the argument that the legislature had a constitutional duty to repeal incorporation in order to protect religious freedom. For example, in Augusta County, the Presbyterian Congregation of Tinkling Spring vested lands and its church buildings in a number of individuals named as trustees on its deed, but these individuals lacked any standing in law to act on behalf of the church. Virginia Constitution (1851), article 32. 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. 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. 19. However, outrage from Virginia's evangelicals led the state to backpedal swiftly. 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. [Philadelphia? For an excellent discussion of the conflict in Dartmouth, see McGarvie, One Nation Under Law, 15289. 41. [Philadelphia? Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 52. The arguments underlying the Dartmouth College decision reflected and developed these points into the landmark statement on corporate rights that it has become. This jurisdictional argument could have been invoked at any point in the ruling to throw out Fairfax County's claim to the glebe lands. 31. The Supreme Court upheld the sanctity of the original charter of the 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). (New York: G.P. 49. His ruling declared two Virginian laws inoperative and contradicted Madison's interpretation of the 1776 Virginian Constitution, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, all of which the sitting president had helped draft. The legislature changed the school's corporate charter by transferring the control of trustee appointments to the governor. Tucker accepted the arguments made by evangelicals over the previous 15 years that the legislature had violated the provision for religious freedom and the prohibition against emoluments in Virginia's Declaration of Rights by preserving parish property and incorporating the Episcopal Church. Eckenrode, Separation of Church and State in Virginia, 120. Parishes amassed their wealth using an annual tax and through private donations.Footnote 34 The colonial parish held wealth in many forms: taxes collected in pounds of tobacco, acres of glebe land, and the bodies and labor of enslaved people. Second, the court had to rule on whether the state legislature had the right to revoke incorporation after chartering the Episcopal Church as a private body. Phillip Bruce's work offers the only discussion of the corporate power of Virginia's parishes. In order to dismiss any constitutional basis for Virginia's revocation of incorporation, he had to argue that nothing in the acts incorporating the church and confirming its property infringed the right to free exercise or constituted an established religion, Story upbraided Virginia's disestablishmentarian laws for treading upon the principles of natural justice, upon the fundamental laws of every free government, upon the spirit and the letter of the constitution of the United States, and upon the decisions of most respectable judicial tribunals.Footnote 105 Story was certainly vague in Terrett about which clause of the Constitution Virginia's laws violated, and scholars have often suggested that natural law was the true rationale for his decision.Footnote 106 But in his Commentaries on the Constitution, Story later included Terrett in his discussion of the Contract Clause and Article VI, Section 1.Footnote 107 Once the vestry is properly regarded as a pre-Revolutionary corporation, the decision's basis in the Constitution comes into clearer focus, as does its close connections in Dartmouth College. Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of Corporations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 6, 7980. First, these disputes reveal that the outcome of Dartmouth College was not a foregone conclusion, no matter what Webster argued. The corporate rights of churches, and by extension all private corporations, vis--vis the state government became a central question in these deliberations. Photograph by the author. Virginia's Glebe Act exhibited an embarrassing disregard for the rights and property of the Episcopal Church. 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).
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