With these words, Daniel Webster concluded his
successful defense of the inviolability of the royal charter of Dartmouth College which was originally obtained on December 13, 1769. "In his landmark Dartmouth College v. Woodward decision (1819)," Gerard W. Gawalt and Marvin W. Kranz of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress write of the case:
Chief Justice John Marshall (1755-1835) supported the inviolability of the charter as a contract and ruled that the college, under the charter, was a private and not a public entity. As such, the school was protected from the state's regulatory power through the contract clause of the United States Constitution. By interpreting the contract clause as a way of protecting corporate charters from state intervention, Marshall established the Constitution as a powerful tool for safeguarding property rights and limiting state authority. Gerard W. Gawalt and Marvin W. Kranz,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
writing on the
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to William Plumer regarding the Dartmouth College case,
July 21, 1816.
Words and Deeds in American History The ninth oldest college in the United States, Dartmouth was established through the efforts of Reverend Eleazar Wheelock. A Congregationalist minister, Wheelock had been trying since 1754 to sustain a Charity School for Native Americans. After relocating his mission from Connecticut to the province of New Hampshire, Wheelock succeeded, with the help of Royal Governor Thomas Wentworth, in obtaining a charter for a college for the "education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land . . . and also of English Youth and any others."The college was named in honor of William Legge, the Earl of Dartmouth, a friend of Wentworth and an important benefactor. Its first class, consisting of just four students, began attending classes in a single log hut in Hanover in 1770.
- Search across the American Memory collections on Dartmouth, or another historic institution of your choice, to find more materials such as a panoramic photograph showing the Earl of Dartmouth laying the corner stone of new building at Dartmouth College on October 26, 1904.
- Search on the term college in Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920 collection for a wide variety of images, primarily of East Coast colleges.
- Search the Today in History Archive on the terms Howard, Columbia, Fisk, Princeton, University of Chicago, University of Iowa, Yale, Vassar, Cornell or Georgetown for features on these institutions.
