by Adam Winkler
CHAPTER 3: THE CORPORATION’S LAWYER
1. On Webster, see Robert Vincent Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (1997); Maurice Glen Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court (1966); Everett Pepperrell Wheeler, Daniel Webster: The Expounder of the Constitution (1904). The quotes are from Baxter, 16, 245, and Remini, 8. The fish story is recounted in Seth P. Waxman, “In the Shadow of Daniel Webster: Arguing Appeals in the Twenty-First Century,” 3 Journal of Appellate Practice & Process 521, 522 (2001).
2. See Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time, 146.
3. See Gregg D. Crane, Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (2002), 235 n. 99; Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 15–16, 153–154.
4. See Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 84 (quoting Story).
5. See Francis N. Stites, Private Interest & Public Gain: The Dartmouth College Case, 1819 (1972), 23–26; R. Kent Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (2007), 245; R. Kent Newmyer, “John Marshall as a Transitional Jurist: Dartmouth College v. Woodward and the Limits of Omniscient Judging,” 32 Connecticut Law Review 1665, 1668 (2000).
6. On the Dartmouth College case generally, see Stites, Private Interest & Public Gain. Dartmouth College’s 1769 charter can be found at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/rauner/dartmouth/dc-charter.html?mswitch-redir=classic.
7. See Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 7.
8. See Henry Cabot Lodge, Daniel Webster (1911), 75; Stites, Private Interest & Public Gain, 6–22.
9. On the mixed public and private nature of the corporation, see David Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation,” 107 American Political Science Review 139 (2013).
10. See Richard S. Grossman, Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World Since 1800 (2010), 224; Thomas Linzey, “Awakening A Sleeping Giant: Creating a Quasi-Private Cause of Action for Revoking Corporate Charters in Response to Environmental Violations,” 13 Pace Environmental Law Review 219, 232–233, 239 (1995); Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin, “Origins of the American Business Corporation,” 5 Journal of Economic History 1, 22 (1945). See also Scott Bowman, The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought: Law, Power, and Ideology (1996), 50 (“eighteenth-century English law regarded corporate enterprise as an instrumentality of the state”).
11. See Stites, Private Interest & Public Gain, 53–54 (quoting opinion).
12. Ibid., 40–41.
13. See Everett Pepperrell Wheeler, Daniel Webster: The Expounder of the Constitution (1904), 28 (quoting Story); Rufus Choate, “A Discourse Commemorative of Daniel Webster,” in Addresses and Orations of Rufus Choate (1897), 241 (quoting Goodrich); Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 80.
14. See Lodge, Daniel Webster, 84; Stites, Private Interest & Public Gain, 66–67.
15. See Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 32–33; Timothy R. Johnson, Oral Arguments and Decision Making on the U.S. Supreme Court (2004), 2.
16. See Wheeler, Daniel Webster: The Expounder of the Constitution, 29–31 (quoting Story).
17. Lodge, Daniel Webster, 72; Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time, 27–28.
18. Choate, “A Discourse Commemorative of Daniel Webster,” 272 (quoting Goodrich). Webster’s argument is available in Edwin P. Whipple, The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster (1879), 1–23.
19. Wheeler, Daniel Webster: The Expounder of the Constitution, 30–31.
20. See Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819).
21. On Parliament’s right to alter corporate charters, see also Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 100.
22. Marshall was wrong about the absence of state contributions to Dartmouth, and may have known it. See Stites, Private Interest & Public Gain, 67.
23. See Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private.”
24. On Marshall’s basing corporate rights on the rights of the members, see Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court, 251.
25. Ibid., 245–247. See also R. Kent Newmyer, “John Marshall as a Transitional Jurist: Dartmouth College v. Woodward and the Limits of Omniscient Judging,” 32 Connecticut Law Review 1665 (2000).
26. See Stites, Private Interest & Public Gain, 103; Herbert Hovenkamp, “The Classical Corporation in American Legal Thought,” 76 Georgetown Law Journal 1593, 1616–1619 (1988) (on reservation clauses and quoting Cooley); James W. Ely Jr., “The Protection of Contractual Rights: A Tale of Two Constitutional Provisions,” 1 New York University Journal of Law & Liberty 370, 373, 400 (2005); James W. Ely Jr., “Whatever Happened to the Contract Clause?,” 4 Charleston Law Review 371 (2010); Sue Davis, Corwin and Peltason’s Understanding the Constitution (17th ed. 2008), 157.
27. See Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 108–109.
28. On the life of the Second Bank of the United States, see Edward S. Kaplan, The Bank of the United States and the American Economy (1999).
29. See McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819); Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 177–178.
30. On Taney, see Carl Brent Swisher, Roger B. Taney (1961); Bernard Christian Steiner, Life of Roger Brooke Taney: Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1922).
31. See Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (1989), 38, 61; Andrew Jackson, Veto Message on the Bank of the United States, July 10, 1832, available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp; Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time, 356–357, 400; John H. Wood, A History of Central Banking in Great Britain and the United States (2005), 123–130. On Jackson’s populist slogan, see Robert C. McGrath, American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (1993), 52.
32. See J. Willard Hurst, The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States, 1780–1970 (1970), 120; Maier, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Business Corporation,” 51.
33. See Hovenkamp, “The Classical Corporation,” 1634–1635; P. M. Vasudev, “Corporate Law and Its Efficiency: A Review of History,” 50 American Journal of Legal History 237, 255–256 (2008–2010).
34. See Andrew Jackson, Veto Message on the Bank of the United States, July 10, 1832, available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp.
35. See Larry Schweikart, “Bank of the United States,” in Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia, ed. Peter Knight (2003), 1:112; Kaplan, The Bank of the United States, x.
36. See Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time, 400, 421.
37. See James F. Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President’s War Powers (2007), 24.
38. On the animosity between Webster and Taney, see Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney (1872), 234; Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, 24–33; Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 23–25; Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time, 435–460. On Taney’s nominations, see Joseph Pratt Harris, The Advice and Consent of the Senate: A Study of the Confirmation of Appointments by the United States Senate (1953), 63–64.
39. See Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time, 437; Harris, The Advice and Consent of the Senate, 63–64.
40. See Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 23 (italics in original)
41. See Charles River Bridge Company v. Warren Bridge Company, 36 U.S. 420 (1837).
42. See Roscoe Pound, “The Charles River Bridge Case,” 27 Massachusetts Law Quarterly 17 (1942); Bernard Schwartz, “Supreme Court Superstars: The Ten Greatest Justices,” in The Supreme Court in American Society: Equal Justice Under the Law, ed. Kermit Hall (2001), 495.
43. See Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time, 444.
44. See Bank of Augusta v. Earle, 38 U.S. 519 (1839).
45. See Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 181–193; Timothy S. Huebner, The Taney Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy (2003), 186; Howard Jay Graham, Everyman’s Constitution: H
istorical Essays on the Fourteenth Amendment, the “Conspiracy Theory,” and American Constitutionalism (1968), 73–75.
46. See Bank of Augusta v. Earle, 38 U.S. 519 (1839); Huebner, The Taney Court, 122.
47. See 1 The Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 511 (1939). See also Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, 36; Huebner, The Taney Court, 122.
48. Webster’s argument was recounted in 38 U.S. 519, 549–567 (1839). On the argument, see Charles Grove Haines and Foster H. Sherwood, The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government and Politics, 1835–1864 (1957).
49. On Ingersoll, see Haines and Sherwood, The Role of the Supreme Court, 65; Eric Monkkonen, “Corporate Growth v. States’ Rights: Bank of Augusta v. Earle,” in Historic U.S. Court Cases: An Encyclopedia, ed. John W. Johson (2d ed., 2001), 474, 478.
50. On Taney and his expansive view of the federal courts in the commercial arena, see Gregory A. Mark, “The Court and the Corporation: Jurisprudence, Localism, and Federalism,” 1997 Supreme Court Review 403 (1997), 437; Paul Finkelman, “Roger Brooke Taney,” in The Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky (1994), 465; Frank Otto Gatell, “Roger B. Taney,” in The Justices of the United States Supreme Court, ed. Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel (1997), 1:337.
51. See Bank of Augusta v. Earle, 38 U.S. 519 (1839).
52. See Baxter, Daniel Webster & the Supreme Court, 190–191.
53. See ibid., 192; Haines and Sherwood, The Role of the Supreme Court, 69–72.
54. On Alexander Marshall and the B&O Railroad, see Haines and Sherwood, The Role of the Supreme Court, 83–87; James D. Dilts, The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Nation’s First Railroad, 1828–1853 (1993), 324–352.
55. See Dilts, The Great Road, 335.
56. On railroad development, see John Murrin et al., Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (6th ed., 2013), 1:191–193. On Morse, see Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (2010).
57. See Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), 81 et seq.; H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900 (2011), 24–25; Bowman, The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought, 54.
58. See David H. Gans and Douglas T. Kendall, “A Capitalist Joker: The Strange Origins, Disturbing Past, and Uncertain Future of Corporate Personhood in American Law,” 44 John Marshall Law Review 643 (2010).
59. See Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston Railroad Company v. Letson, 43 U.S. 497 (1844). On the Letson case, see Haines and Sherwood, The Role of the Supreme Court, 76–81; Dudley O. McGovney, “A Supreme Court Fiction: Corporations in the Diverse Citizenship Jurisdiction of the Federal Courts,” 56 Harvard Law Review 853, 875–879 (1943).
60. Marshall v. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company, 57 U.S. 314 (1853).
61. See Austin Allen, Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 (2006), 126–132.
62. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).
CHAPTER 4: THE CONSPIRACY FOR CORPORATE RIGHTS
1. On Waite’s view of Conkling, see Alfred Ronald Conkling, The Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling: Orator, Statesman, Advocate (1889), 3:697. Justice Miller’s view was recounted in David M. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling of New York: Voice of the Senate (1971), 417. These are both excellent sources on Conkling generally.
2. See Conkling, The Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling, 3:451, 462, 676–677.
3. For a thorough account of the controversy, see Howard Jay Graham, Everyman’s Constitution: Historical Essays on the Fourteenth Amendment, the “Conspiracy Theory,” and American Constitutionalism (1968); Malcolm J. Harkins III, “The Uneasy Relationship of Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood, the Affordable Care Act, and the Corporate Person: How a Historical Myth Continues to Bedevil the Legal System,” 7 Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy 201 (2014).
4. On the Supreme Court’s courtroom in the 1880s and the society women who attended oral argument, see Clare Cushman, Courtwatchers: Eyewitness Accounts in Supreme Court History (2011), 20, 105–106.
5. See Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 409–413. See also San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 116 U.S. 138 (1885).
6. On Stanford, Huntington, and their two partners, see Richard Rayner, The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California (2009). See also Norman E. Tutorow et al., The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford (2004). On the Southern Pacific’s taxes, see Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 397–398.
7. See Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 31; “The Railroad Tax Cases,” Daily Alta California, February 10, 1886, 2 (“There were in all some sixty-three of these railroad tax cases pending. . . . The sixty-three cases are for the collection of taxes of 1880, 1881 and 1882”). The docket numbers of these sixty-three cases are listed in California Attorney General’s Office, Special Report on Railroad Tax Cases and Railroad Taxation (1893).
8. See Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 398, 400, 416, 419.
9. See Jordan, Roscoe Conkling of New York, 35–36; Conkling, The Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling, 3:12, 36, 361–363, 370.
10. See Jordan, Roscoe Conkling of New York, 82, 104, 126–127.
11. On the spectators’ galleries in Congress and Conkling’s relationship with Grant, see Conkling, The Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling, 3:95–96, 451.
12. See Jordan, Roscoe Conkling of New York, 394, 413.
13. See Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), 81 et seq.; H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Captialism, 1865–1900 (2011), 24–25; Scott R. Bowman, The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought: Law, Power, and Ideology (1995), 54.
14. See Mark Wahlgren Summers, “To Make the Wheels Revolve We Must Have Grease: Barrel Politics in the Gilded Age,” 14 Journal of Policy History 49 (2002); Richard White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” 90 Journal of American History 19 (2003); Ted Nace, Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (2003), 93; Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America From 1870 to 1976 (1978), 7.
15. On the controversy over the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, see Joseph B. James, The Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment (1984); David Lawrence, “There is No ‘Fourteenth Amendment’!,” U.S. News & World Report, Septempber 27, 1957, 140; Douglas H. Bryant, “Unorthodox and Paradox: Revisiting the Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment,” 53 Alabama Law Review 555 (2002).
16. On Campbell, see Timothy L. Hall, “John Archibald Campbell,” in Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary, 127–131; Robert Saunders Jr., John Archibald Campbell: Southern Moderate, 1811–1889 (1997).
17. On the lawsuits, see Ronald M. Labbe and Jonathan Lurie, The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment (2003); Pamela Brandwein, Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction (2011). See also Michael A. Ross, Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court During the Civil War Era (2003), 189 et seq.
18. On Miller, see Ross, Justice of Shattered Dreams; Lou Falkner Williams, “Samuel Freeman Miller,” in Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary, 317–322.
19. The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872).
20. See United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876); United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1876).
21. On Garfield and Conkling, see Robert C. Byrd, The Senate, 1789–1989: Addresses on the History of the United States Senate (1989), 326.
22. See Conkling, The Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling, 3:24, 680.
23. See ibid., 3:105.
24. See Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, Appendix A.
25. See ibid., 74–75, 383–385; Insurance Company v. New Orleans, 1 Woods 85 (1871).
26. On Beard, see Clyde W. Barrow, More Than A Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard (2000). See Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1935), ix.
27. See Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (1914), 2:112–114; Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 23.
28. On Graham, see Felicia Kornbluh, “Turning Back the Clock: California Constitutionalists, Hearthstone Originalism, and Brown v. Board,” 7 California Legal History: Journal of the California Supreme Court Historical Society 287 (2012).
29. See Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 82–87, 447, 490, 493 n. 211.
30. Ibid., 31, 93.
31. Ibid., 25, 44, 417.
32. On Field, see Carl Brent Swisher, Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law (1930); John Norton Pomeroy, Some Account of the Work of Stephen J. Field (1895); Paul Kens, Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age (1997).
33. See Walker Lewis, “The Supreme Court and a Six-Gun: The Extraordinary Story of In re Neagle,” 43 American Bar Association Journal 415 (1957).
34. See In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1 (1890).
35. See Pomeroy, Some Account of the Work of Stephen J. Field, 7, 18–22.
36. See ibid., 7–8; Swisher, Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law, 22.
37. On Field’s strong personality, see Willard L. King, “Melville Weston Fuller: ‘The Chief’ and the Giants on the Court,” 36 American Bar Association Journal 293 (1950).
38. Ibid.
39. On Field and Stanford, see David C. Frederick, Rugged Justice: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the American West, 1891–1941 (1994), 49–50; Swisher, Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law, 245, 265.
40. On Waite’s letter to Field, see Nace, Gangs of America, 90.
41. On Field’s ideology, see Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 110–119; Swisher, Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law, 77–81; Charles W. McCurdy, “Justice Field and the Jurisprudence of Government-Business Relations: Some Parameters of Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism, 1863–1897,” 61 Journal of American History 970 (1975).