Neptune's Needle

Planter, lawyer, and steamship owner.

In 1817 Gibbons formed a steamboat partnership with Aaron Ogden, a former New Jersey governor, to transport passengers from New York to New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was an uneasy union at best. Both members sought profit in any obtainable form, and both had personal histories of quarrelsome behavior. After one year of operation, Ogden took Gibbons to court for trying to bypass the partnership and run a steamship on his own.

When Gibbons and Ogden had first joined forces, the heirs of Robert R. Livingston and Robert Fulton possessed a state monopoly to operate a steamboat line in New York. The families and the New York courts claimed that the monopoly extended to the shores of New Jersey. In 1819 Gibbons and Ogden ran afoul of that agreement and were sued by a member of the Livingston family. Gibbons and Ogden denied their partnership and insisted that the waters on which they operated lay well within New Jersey. Gibbons further protested that he purchased a U.S. coastal license, which gave him an overriding permit to use any waterways bordering the Atlantic. The case went to the New York Court of Chancery, where Judge James Kent ruled that only Ogden could sail between New York and Elizabethtown Point because he had earlier yielded to the Livingston monopoly in 1815. Gibbons took his case to the New York Court of Errors and to the U.S. Supreme Court. He worked with Cornelius Vanderbilt, master of Gibbons's steamboat, the Bellona, and Daniel D. Tompkins, another Livingston-Fulton rival, to interfere with the monopoly whenever possible.

When Gibbons v. Ogden came before the Supreme Court in 1824, Gibbons obtained Daniel Webster, Attorney General William Wirt, and David B. Ogden as lawyers. They challenged the right of a state to interfere with the authority of Congress. At the time of the case, the concept of nationalism had become increasingly popular in America. The Livingston-Fulton monopoly caused alarm among Americans who desired free enterprise upon the nation's waterways. The Court decided in favor of Gibbons. Chief Justice John Marshall presented a landmark statement, claiming that the commerce clause in the Constitution empowered Congress to regulate navigation within states when such action concerned foreign and interstate trade. The Court's decision broke the Livingston-Fulton monopoly and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enabled Congress to regulate companies that dealt in communication or transportation that crossed state borders.

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Compiler

Peter Richards