Courting commerce: Gibbons v. Ogden and the transformation of commerce regulation in the Early Republic

This dissertation examines the origins, events, and outcomes of the Supreme Court case Gibbons v. Ogden (1824). The case arose from litigation between rival steamboat owners Aaron Ogden and Thomas Gibbons. In 1824 Chief Justice John Marshall upheld national control of interstate trade by ruling that Gibbon's federal coasting license trumped a state grant issued to Ogden by the Fulton-Livingston Steamboat Monopoly that controlled steam travel in New York State. This study examines Gibbons v. Ogden as a landmark decision that provides a lens to view the transformation of an agrarian, hierarchical society into a more commercial, egalitarian state.; Classic works such as Charles Warren's The Supreme Court in United States History (1922) and Maurice Baxter's The Steamboat Monopoly (1972) address the constitutional dimensions of the case, but not its social or cultural implications. My study draws from such diverse works as J. Willard Hurst's Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (1956), Morton Horwitz's The Transformation of American Law (1977) and Charles Sellers's The Market Revolution (1991) to reveal how legal elites used Gibbons to encourage economic development and social change.; Both state and federal Judges involved with the case bought into widely accepted notions of social "progress" through technological innovation but differed sharply over how to regulate this development. When the case appeared before the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall dismissed states rights arguments by asserting that congressional control of interstate trade would protect steam travel from local rivalries. The Gibbons decision proved a rare instance in which the market oriented nationalism of the Marshall Court meshed with popular desires to embrace a new technology that seemed to promise economic growth with minimal social upheaval. Yet as a popular but broad decision, Gibbons outlived the worldview of its framers. Over time the case gained new life as a point of contention for prohibitionists, New Dealers, civil rights activists, and conservatives in debates over the federal regulation of social issues ranging from labor standards to gun control.