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Preface
- Ohio University Press
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PREFACE “T with which a few lordly monopolists have, for some years past, contrived to fetter our navigation and intercourse with our sister state, have been at length broken by the Ithuriel spear, whose-all-powerful touch makes every unrighteous decision to crumble into dust,” exclaimed an article in the Elizabethtown Gazette of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, on March , . Borrowing imagery from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the article compared the appellate power of the U.S. Supreme Court to a holy weapon that, in the hands of the angel Ithuriel, had uncovered Satan’s deceptions with a single touch. In spring , the justices of the High Court had used their powers of discernment to strike down a New York steamboat monopoly law as a violation of interstate commerce in the landmark case of Gibbons v. Ogden. Created by Chancellor Robert R. Livingston in and used to defend a steamboat empire built by his partner, Robert Fulton, the monopoly had dominated local steam travel along the Hudson River and across New York Harbor for over twenty years. Long beset by stifled competition and exorbitant fares, citizens of both New York and New Jersey applauded the Gibbons decision. The Gazette article captured the popular sentiment, condemning the monopolists for “their appalling system of monopoly injunctions, penalties, and imprisonments against all who should dare, without their purchased leave, use the two most common elements of nature, in facilitating the intercourse between neighboring ports.” The origins of Gibbons v. Ogden, popularly known as the great “steamboat monopoly case,” lay in a dispute between rival Elizabethtown steamboat operators Aaron Ogden and Thomas Gibbons. In , Chief Justice John Marshall upheld the congressional control of interstate trade by asserting that Gibbons’s federal license trumped a state grant issued to Ogden by the Fulton-Livingston steamboat monopoly. Legal scholars have consistently ranked Gibbons—the first Supreme Court case to confirm Congress’s power over interstate commerce— among other landmark Marshall Court cases such as Marbury v. Madison () and McCulloch v. Maryland (), which promoted federal authority over states’ rights. In , U.S. senator and constitutional scholar Albert J. Beveridge stated in his foundational Life of John Marshall that Gibbons v. Ogden “has done more to knit the American people into an indivisible Nation than any other one force in our history, excepting only war.” Pathbreaking works such as Charles Warren’s ix Supreme Court in United States History (), and Charles Haines’s Role of the Supreme Court in American Government and Politics, – () likewise depicted Gibbons as a bold statement of nationalist principles in an era dominated by states’ rights. Even Maurice Baxter’s Steamboat Monopoly (), the only full-length treatment of the case, discussed primarily the constitutional and political rather than the economic and social dimensions of Gibbons v. Ogden. As Baxter acknowledged, “Though I have undertaken the first lengthy study of the case, there is naturally much more that could be said if one were to be ‘exhaustive.’” This book examines Gibbons v. Ogden as a legal conflict in which three different groups—steamboat entrepreneurs, local elites (including state officials), and federal judges—sought to control the development of steam power in the young nation. In the late s and early s, working-class inventors with dreams of continental steamboat empires sought alliances with landholders eager to develop steam power on the local level through state-granted monopolies. Yet in , steamboat entrepreneur Thomas Gibbons and Supreme Court justices John Marshall and William Johnson, already disliked by many among the American gentry, adopted a nationalistic view of commerce that resulted in a popular Supreme Court decision with long-term implications not only for the regulation of interstate commerce but also for wide-ranging social issues such as the sale of alcohol or the desegregation of busing across state lines. Scholars have long sought to link the shifting alliances of business elites to the larger economic and social transformations of the United States in the early s. In , Charles Sellers’s influential work, The Market Revolution, posited that encroaching commercialism, with its emphasis on economic individualization , displaced a traditional agrarian world of subsistence farmers in Jacksonian America. Daniel Fellers and Daniel Walker Howe, however, have persuasively argued that Americans across class lines rushed to embrace the economic opportunities created by the transportation and communications revolutions. Perhaps nothing symbolized the economic growth of the young nation more than the spectacle of steam power, a scientific marvel that promised economic progress through technological innovation...