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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. None of these works explore how Marshall's experience as a legislator during Virginia's disestablishment shaped his decision in Dartmouth College. 122. 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. Dartmouth College, so often framed as a landmark case because it enabled the rapid transformation of the American economy, was itself the byproduct of another sweeping transformation, the disestablishment of religion. 56. He offered an uncompromising defense of the vested rights of parishes to their property.Footnote 90 Washington's prior connection to the case has gone unnoticed by constitutional scholars, and he did not recuse himself from Terrett despite his earlier involvement. He wrote that in Terrett and Dartmouth College, it is most obvious, that the effect of [the states'] laws is to abolish the old corporation, and to create a new one in its stead. He asked rhetorically, In what respects do [these cases] differ? None at all, he concluded. 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. The battle over the glebes swiftly moved from Virginia's legislature to the courts as Episcopalians around the state sought injunctions to avert the seizure of their property. The state could not rescind grants made to individuals in their natural capacity, but where the legislature creates an artificial person, and endows that artificial person with certain rights and privileges, either in respect to property, or otherwise, this must be intended as having some relation to the community at large.Footnote 79 Tucker contended that the basis for the legislature to grant rights and property to a corporation was fundamentally public; accordingly, the legislature retained the power to modify the relationship between the corporation and the community. 99. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 43, 47. What is the significance of Dartmouth v Woodward? 31 January 1820, Founders Online. 13. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819), 650. for this article. 5. The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. Instead, Story saw this case as an opportunity to articulate the power of private corporations and therefore chose not to address the jurisdictional question until he had laid out a detailed critique of Virginia's disestablishmentarian program. The state had vested an indefeasible and irrevocable title to the church to all parish property in 1776.Footnote 96 Then, it expressly conferred incorporation to the minister and vestry, and, in case of a vacancy, the vestry of each parish respectively and their successors forever and affirmed their title to all the property of the late Episcopal church when it chartered the Episcopal Church.Footnote 97 The legislature retained some power over public corporations such as a town, city, or the parish of the established church but only abuse could jeopardize the rights of a private corporation and then only after a judicial judgment.Footnote 98 Story staked out a significant distinction between public and private corporations by insulating private corporations from legislative intrusion.Footnote 99 Once the state had conferred incorporation on the Episcopal Church in 1784, parishes were undoubtedly private corporations and beyond the reach of the legislature. Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) (1815), 50. Madison explained that the law, which incorporated the church and laid out rules for the ecclesiastical corporation's government, exceeds the rightful authority to which governments are limited by the essential distinction between civil and religious functions and violates in particular the article of the Constitution of the United States which declares that Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.Footnote 86 Madison had been convinced by Virginia's evangelicals that incorporation was a form of religious establishment.Footnote 87 After leaving office, he would elaborate on the threat posed by propertied religious corporations in his Detatched Memoranda. 43. Bushrod's Washington's 1797 opinion about the glebe lands is quoted in Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:404n14. 92. From James Madison to the House of Representatives, 21 February 1811, Founders Online, National Archives. Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) has long been hailed as a landmark Supreme Court decision and a significant step in the rise of the American commercial Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of Corporations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 6, 7980. Several of the same issues that Tucker had answered in Turpin re-emerged: was the vestry of Christ Church a corporation and, if so, did it hold legal title to the glebe lands? 54. 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.