Gibbons v. Ogden: A Spiteful Steamboat Feud and the Commerce Clause

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In 1798, New York gave Robert R. Livingston and Robert Fulton a 20 year exclusive monopoly on all boats moved by fire or steam in state waters. Their bid to repeat the deal nationwide succeeded only in the Orleans Territory, which gave them the lower Mississippi. Former New Jersey governor and U.S. senator Aaron Ogden fought the monopoly in court, then gave up in 1815 and bought a license for the Elizabethtown to New York City route. He partnered with Georgia lawyer and planter Thomas Gibbons, but after a bitter breakup Gibbons ran his own boats on the same route under a federal coasting license issued under a 1793 law. New York's courts sided with Ogden and in 1820 issued a permanent injunction against Gibbons.

At the Supreme Court in 1824, Ogden's lawyers Thomas J. Oakley and Irish exile Thomas Addis Emmet argued that states shared power over commerce, while Attorney General William Wirt and Daniel Webster argued Congress held exclusive power. Southern states watched closely, fearing a broad commerce power could reach the interstate slave trade, a fear sharpened by the 1822 Denmark Vesey plot and South Carolina's Negro Seamen Act. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled for Gibbons, defining commerce to include navigation and reading among the several states to mean intermingled with them, so the federal license defeated New York's monopoly.

• Wirt argued that federal patent law preempted the monopoly, but Marshall declined to decide the point, leaving it open until Sears, Roebuck v. Stiffel in 1964.
• The Negro Seamen Act jailed free Black sailors for the length of their ships' stay in port.
• Justice William Johnson, riding circuit, struck down that act as a violation of a commercial treaty with Britain, and South Carolina refused to accept the ruling.
• Marshall's opinion was among the longest the court had issued up to that point.
• The episode traces the same commerce power to federal regulation of railroads, the interstate highway system and the Federal Communications Commission.