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Guest Essayist: Joerg Knipprath

At the Peace of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, the United States (defined, as in the Declaration of Independence, as the individual states) were recognized by the British as free and independent. While the British relinquished to those United States territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, the several states did not thereby relinquish their own, sometimes conflicting, claims to that land. The Articles of Confederation provided procedures for the settlement of boundary disputes between states under the aegis of Congress and also anticipated that there might be disputes between grantees of land from two different states. Yet, no state was to be deprived of land for the benefit of the United States, so the Confederation Congress could not force the states to cede their western land. Still, a number of states released their claims, so that Congress gained de facto control over those lands and organized the Old Northwest under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

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Guest Essayist: Tony Williams

In May, 1818, James William McCulloch was a cashier at the Baltimore branch of the Second Bank of the United States.  McCulloch issued a series of bank notes on which the bank did not pay a Maryland state tax.  The state treasurer quickly sued to recover the money and won a judgment in Maryland’s highest court. The Supreme Court soon accepted the case, which would have a profound impact in defining the principle of federalism, the reading of the Necessary and Proper Clause in the Constitution, and the national vision of the Marshall Court.

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Guest Essayist: Joerg Knipprath

On June 19, 1846, the Rochester, New York, Democrat newspaper reported that over 4,000 people assembled to witness the launch of a new steamship (then often called a “propeller” due to the novel screw propulsion mechanism), the Genesee Chief. She was described as “faultless in her model and appointments.” At 144 feet long, with 20 state rooms, and berths for 75 cabin and 100 steerage passengers, with room for more, she was to be the start of regular steamship service between Rochester and Chicago.

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Guest Essayist: Joerg Knipprath

Over the years, the Supreme Court has addressed several constitutional topics in cases involving lotteries. Perhaps none is as significant as Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Cohens v. Virginia. The case was the third major act in a decades-long contest over the nature of the Union and, more specifically, over the constitutional relationship between federal and state laws and between the federal and state judiciaries. On the last point the contest directly involved repeated clashes between the United States Supreme Court and the Virginia Court of Appeals (the state supreme court), and between two dominant jurists, Marshall and the chief judge of Virginia, Spencer Roane. Cohens v. Virginia is the climax in the story of those two rivals.

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