Five-minute digest
Gibbons v. Ogden
Summary
After Robert Fulton's steamboat made its run up the Hudson in 1807, the New York legislature confirmed and extended an exclusive right, held by Fulton and Robert R. Livingston, to navigate all state waters with vessels propelled by steam. Anyone else needed their license. Aaron Ogden, a former governor of New Jersey, acquired rights under the monopoly to run a ferry between Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and New York City. His former partner Thomas Gibbons began running rival steamboats on the same route, one of them captained by the young Cornelius Vanderbilt, relying on a federal coasting license issued under an act of Congress of 1793. Ogden obtained an injunction from Chancellor James Kent, the New York Court of Errors affirmed it in 1820, and Gibbons appealed. Daniel Webster and Attorney General William Wirt argued for Gibbons that the power to regulate commerce among the states was given to Congress, that commerce includes navigation, that this power was exclusive, and that in any event the New York grant collided with the federal license. Thomas J. Oakley and Thomas Addis Emmet defended the monopoly for Ogden. The states, they said, had been sovereign before the Constitution and kept every power not surrendered; commerce meant buying and selling goods, not carrying passengers; the states had always regulated their own waters, harbours and pilots; and New York's law, endorsed by its legislature, Council of Revision and judges, was a valid exercise of concurrent power that a mere license did not override. The Court, in Chief Justice Marshall's opinion of 2 March 1824, ruled unanimously for Gibbons. Rejecting a construction that would confine federal powers to the narrowest compass, Marshall held that commerce is not merely traffic but intercourse, including navigation; that commerce among the states is commerce concerning more states than one, which does not stop at state lines but reaches into the interior; and that the power to regulate it is complete in itself, limited only by the Constitution and by the political accountability of Congress. He found great force in the argument that the power was exclusive, but did not rest the decision on it. Inspection, quarantine and similar laws he treated as state police measures. Because the coasting license gave Gibbons's vessels the right to navigate New York waters, the monopoly law conflicted with an act of Congress and had to yield under the Supremacy Clause. The library text gives Marshall's opinion; Justice Johnson's concurrence, the arguments of counsel and footnotes are not reproduced. The decision ended the steamboat monopoly and was followed by rapid growth of steam traffic in New York waters. The Court later held, in Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1851), that states may regulate some local aspects of commerce when Congress is silent. Marshall's definition of commerce among the states became the textual foundation for the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the twentieth-century expansion of federal regulation, including Wickard v. Filburn (1942).
Top Lessons
Defining a single word
Ogden's counsel read commerce as traffic in goods; Marshall read it as intercourse, including navigation and the carrying of passengers. The scope of national power over the economy for the next two centuries flowed from how this one word was defined in 1824.
Where national and state power meet
Marshall drew a line: commerce that concerns more states than one belongs to Congress, while the completely internal commerce of a state is left to it, along with inspection, health and quarantine laws. Much later constitutional history concerns where exactly that line runs.
Deciding no more than necessary
Marshall admitted the strong case for treating the commerce power as exclusive but rested the decision on the narrower ground that New York's law conflicted with an existing act of Congress. He also declined to address the patent clause. Johnson, by contrast, would have decided the larger question.
Monopoly, invention and the public
New York had rewarded Fulton and Livingston with exclusive rights to encourage a risky invention, and other states had answered with retaliatory laws of their own. The case shows how a grant meant to promote progress could become a barrier between states, and why the framers had given Congress power over commerce among them.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse.”
Frequently cited
“This power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution.”
“Commerce among the States cannot stop at the external boundary line of each State, but may be introduced into the interior.”
“The completely internal commerce of a State, then, may be considered as reserved for the State itself.”
“In every such case, the act of Congress or the treaty is supreme, and the law of the State, though enacted in the exercise of powers not controverted, must yield to it.”
“The State of New York maintains the Constitutionality of these laws, and their Legislature, their Council of Revision, and their Judges, have repeatedly concurred in this opinion.”
Medical Lens
Marshall mentions state quarantine and health laws only to classify them as police powers; the opinion has no medical substance.