Gibbons V Ogden Quotes

Gibbons then sued Ogden in federal court with the help of another lawyer of considerable oratorical skill experienced in such matters: Daniel Webster. Webster’s argument was that the steamboat monopolies granted by the individual states violated the commerce clause of the Constitution. In 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden was decided by the Supreme Court in the aging Gibbons’s favor. Gibbons v. Ogden went on to become the landmark case affirming that only the federal government had the right to regulate interstate commerce. Waterways and roads connecting states all fell within the framework, as ruled by the court: The era of monopoly grants was over. Indeed, it fell upon the native southerner Gibbons, a plantation owner from Savannah, to affirm the superiority of federal rights over the states’ rights in matters of interstate commerce. •

Gibbons v. Ogden went on to become the landmark case affirming that only the federal government had the right to regulate interstate commerce. Waterways and roads connecting states all fell within the framework, as ruled by the court: The era of monopoly grants was over. Indeed, it fell upon the native southerner Gibbons, a plantation owner from Savannah, to affirm the superiority of federal rights over the states’ rights in matters of interstate commerce. •

U.S. Supreme Court challenging the legal basis of the monopoly. Cornelius moved his young family from what is now called Staten Island to New Brunswick, New Jersey, which was a stop on the steamship ferry line that he was now managing. His wife, Sophia, opened an inn and used the rich profits she was able to generate to feed and clothe their growing brood of children. Vanderbilt, meanwhile, went to Washington, DC, and hired attorney Daniel Webster to argue for the overturn of the monopoly. On March 2, 1824, the Supreme Court ruled in Gibbons’s favor in Gibbons v. Ogden, a case still cited frequently today, which marked the turn in America from monopolies to markets. The case doesn’t bear Vanderbilt’s name, and he didn’t appear in the news around it, but it is covered in his fingerprints in its declaring that individual states had no standing to interfere with interstate commerce. The last of the protected Dutch-era monopolies were washed away in the unfettered competitive churn of steamboats plying between New York and New Jersey. That seawater churn would froth higher and higher, heaping up great clouds of profit around the descendants of Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, to a level that a seventeenth-century indentured servant or an eighteenth-century farmer who owed one horse to his militia could never have possibly imagined.