Gibbons v. Ogden

The U.S. Supreme Court case Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), often referred to as the Steamboat Monopoly Case, represented the first Supreme Court case to tackle the thorny issue of interstate commerce and upheld the right of Congress to regulate travel between state lines. Gibbons v. Ogden is consistently ranked by historians as one of the most important landmark decisions in American jurisprudence. The case originated with the development of steam travel in New York. In 1798 the state chancellor Robert R. Livingston secured a legislative monopoly on steam travel in New York waters. In 1807 Livingston and his partner, the famous inventor Robert Fulton, successfully launched their prototype North River Steam Boat on the Hudson River.

In 1815 Fulton and the Livingston family granted the former New Jersey governor Aaron Ogden a license under the monopoly to run steamboats from Elizabethtown, New Jersey, to New York City. In 1819 Ogden sued his former partner, the Georgia businessman Thomas Gibbons, in the New York Court of Chancery for operating steamboats in New York harbor. Gibbons countered that he possessed a federal coasting license that gave him the right to conduct business in any American port, but the New York chancellor James Kent repeatedly upheld Ogden's monopoly license. Gibbons then hired the U.S. senator Daniel Webster and the U.S. attorney general William Wirt to appeal his case to the Supreme Court. Ogden secured the services of the former New York attorneys general Thomas Addis Emmet and Thomas Oakley. After extensive deliberations, on March 2, 1824, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Gibbons's federal coasting license invalidated Ogden's monopoly permit. The associate justice William Johnson argued in a concurring opinion that Congress's commerce powers alone defeated the New York monopoly.

The Gibbons v. Ogden case interested many Americans because it involved the widely popular issue of steam travel. Gibbons, Ogden, and the legal elites involved in the case believed that steam power was vital to the commercial and social development of the young nation. Working-class Americans likewise eagerly followed stories of the case in local newspapers. Although Marshall's broad decision was found favorable by the public, it ultimately failed to fully outline federal commerce powers. Gibbons became a legal precedent invoked by temperance supporters, labor leaders, civil rights demonstrators, and gun-control supporters.