Gibbons v. Ogden

Impact

Public reaction to Gibbons v. Ogden was overwhelmingly positive. Within a month of Marshall's decision, twenty steamboats were operating in New York waters, many from other states. Middling Americans such as businessmen, merchants, artisans, and farmers quickly took advantage of the cheaper fares and better service brought by the destruction of the monopoly. Northern and western newspapers cheered the Gibbons decision as a victory for free trade over special interests, for social progress over provincialism. Many southerners likewise reacted favorably to the decision, although some worried that the case could prove a dangerous precedent regarding federal regulation of the interstate slave trade.

Marshall's decision in Gibbons v. Ogden left many issues unclear, and the particular issue of state versus federal control of commerce continued to appear before the Supreme Court. By the 1830s and 1840s, as public attention shifted from economic matters to social reform, popular perceptions of the Gibbons case began to change. Both social elites and ordinary citizens increasingly discussed the possibility of regulating commerce to protect public “morals” as well as public safety and property rights. Legal documents and newspaper accounts show that in the Court of Chief Justice Roger Taney, in cases such as Mayor of New York v. Miln (1837), Groves v. Slaughter (1841), the License Cases (1847), and the Passenger Cases (1849), state lawyers cited Gibbons v. Ogden to make the case for regulation in controversial issues as disparate as immigration, alcohol, and slavery within their states. In these and other cases, Gibbons v. Ogden, originally a decision designed to limit state authority, ironically helped mold society at the local level with the tacit approval of the federal court system. By the eve of the Civil War, Gibbons v. Ogden had thus helped to stimulate a national economy but had also been used as a model for a culture of social regulation.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gibbons v. Ogden continued to play a pivotal role in the ongoing controversy over commerce regulation. For instance, during the Gilded Age, the Supreme Court preserved a system of dual federalism by repeatedly citing Gibbons v. Ogden both to expand federal commerce power, such as in Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railroad Co. v. Illinois (1886), and to limit that authority, such as in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895). In Northern Securities Co. v. United States (1904), the associate justice Harlan Stone took tentative steps to consider the motives behind state and federal trade regulation rather than simply the actual movement of goods and individuals. Following the Supreme Court decisions in A.  L.  A. Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States (1935) and United States v. Butler (1936), President Franklin D. Roosevelt's court-packing scheme prompted the Court to retreat from the aspect of dual federalism limiting the national government. In language reminiscent of the state-based regulation movements of the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court increasingly broadened congressional commerce powers to encourage social reform.

Over the next sixty years the Gibbons decision became a precedent for cases involving segregation, such as Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), and labor issues, such as Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985). The Rehnquist Court rejected a broad interpretation of Gibbons v. Ogden beginning with United States v. Lopez (1995), in which a federal commerce law banning handguns from school zones was struck down. This ruling sparked a renewed public interest in Gibbons v. Ogden and how the memory of that case had changed over time. Above all, Lopez demonstrated the continuing relevance of the steamboat monopoly case to the ongoing debate over commerce regulation as an instrument both of economic development and of social change within a federalist framework.