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Abstract and Keywords
In the competition for steamboat traffic on the Hudson River, Aaron Ogden, under a license from inventor Robert Fulton, obtained an injunction from New York courts barring the rival company that Thomas Gibbons ran. Daniel Webster argued the case for Gibbons that the state of New York was not allowed to do this. In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) a unanimous US Supreme Court, for which Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, struck down a New York State regulation of navigation on the Hudson River as a violation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. In so doing, Marshall claimed exclusive jurisdiction over navigable waters for the federal government and simultaneously promoted the development of steamboat traffic on those waters.
Source: Chief Justice John Marshall, “Majority Opinion Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824,” in The Constitutional Decisions of John Marshall, Volume II, ed. Joseph P. Cotton (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905), pp. 41–43, 49.
Excerpts
Marshall, C.J.: The subject to be regulated is commerce, and our Constitution being, as was aptly said at the bar, one of enumeration, and not of definition, to ascertain the extent of the power, it becomes necessary to settle the meaning of the word. The counsel for the appellee would limit it to traffic, to buying and selling, or the interchange of commodities, and do not admit that it comprehends navigation. This would restrict a general term, applicable to many objects, to one of its significations. Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse. It describes the commercial intercourse between nations, and parts of nations, in all its branches, and is regulated by prescribing rules for carrying on that intercourse. The mind can scarcely conceive a system for regulating commerce between nations which shall exclude all laws concerning navigation, which shall be silent on the admission of the vessels of the one nation into the ports of the other, and be confined to prescribing rules for the conduct of individuals in the actual employment of buying and selling or of barter.
If commerce does not include navigation, the government of the Union has no direct power over that subject, and can make no law prescribing what shall constitute American vessels or requiring that they shall be navigated by American seamen. Yet this power has been exercised from the commencement of the government, has been exercised with the consent of all, and has been understood by all to be a commercial regulation. All America understands, and has uniformly understood, the word “commerce” to comprehend navigation. It was so understood, and must have been so understood, when the Constitution was framed. The power over commerce, including navigation, was one of the primary objects for which the people of America adopted their government, and must have been contemplated in forming it. The convention must have used the word in that sense, because all have understood it in that sense, and the attempt to restrict it comes too late. . . .
It is the power to regulate, that is, to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed. 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. These are expressed in plain terms, and do not affect the questions which arise in this case, or which have been discussed at the bar. If, as has always been understood, the sovereignty of Congress, though limited to specified objects, is plenary as to those objects, the power over commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, is vested in Congress as absolutely as it would be in a single government, having in its Constitution the same restrictions on the exercise of the power as are found in the Constitution of the United States.