Which constitutional provision was used by chief justice marshall to reach this conclusion?

Introduction

McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) is one of the first and most important Supreme Court cases on federal power. In this case, the Supreme Court held that Congress has implied powers derived from those listed in Article I, Section 8. The “Necessary and Proper” Clause gave Congress the power to establish a national bank.

On this page you will find two different tools for teaching McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). There is a short eLesson activity featuring the case, as well as a more robust document-based question (DBQ) unit that includes classroom-friendly excerpts of the following documents:

• United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 18
• Letter from An Old Whig, 1787
• Brutus No. 1, 1787
• Federalist No. 33, 1788
• Federalist No. 39, 1788
• Thomas Jefferson, Opinion on the Constitutionality of the Bill for Establishing a National Bank, 1791
• Memorandum No. 1, Edmund Randolph to George Washington, 1791
• Alexander Hamilton’s Opinion on the National Bank, 1791
• McCulloch v. Maryland Unanimous Decision, 1819
• President Andrew Jackson’s Veto Message, 1832
• King Andrew the First Cartoon, 1833
• U.S. v. Comstock Majority Opinion, 2010
• U.S. v. Comstock Dissent, 2010

Download the McCulloch v. Maryland DBQ

Resources

• McCulloch v. Maryland at the Oyez Project

Summary

It was 1819 and the United States had been a nation under the Constitution for barely a generation when an important case about federal power reached the Court. After a first attempt in 1791, Congress established the second National Bank of the United States in 1816. Many states opposed branches of the National Bank within their borders. They did not want the National Bank competing with their own banks, and objected to the establishment of a National Bank as an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s power.

The state of Maryland imposed a tax on the bank of $15,000/year, which cashier James McCulloch of the Baltimore branch refused to pay. The case went to the Supreme Court. Maryland argued that as a sovereign state, it had the power to tax any business within its borders. McCulloch’s attorneys argued that a national bank was “necessary and proper” for Congress to establish in order to carry out its enumerated powers.

Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, “Although, among the enumerated powers of government, we do not find the word ‘bank,’ we find the great powers to lay and collect taxes; to borrow money; to regulate commerce Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.”

Further, the Court ruled that Maryland could not tax the national bank: “That the power to tax involves the power to destroy.  If the states may tax one instrument, employed by the [federal] government in the execution of its powers, they may tax any and every other instrument This was not intended by the American people. They did not design to make their government dependent on the states.”

Marshall also noted an important difference between the Constitution and the Articles of Confederation (the United States’ first governing document that had been replaced by the Constitution). The Articles said that the states retained all powers not “expressly” given to the federal government. The Tenth Amendment, Marshall noted, did not include the word “expressly.” This was further evidence, he argued, that the Constitution did not limit Congress to doing only those things specifically listed in Article I.

Questions

1. What happened to bring McCulloch v. Maryland to the Supreme Court?
2. Read Article I, Section 8 (link above) and underline the express powers of Congress that might be dependent on the operation of a bank. Can Congress effectively carry out its powers without establishing a national bank?
3. How did the Supreme Court rule?
4. To what extent did the ruling in McCulloch v. Maryland expand federal power?

Introduction

This month we spotlight one of the earliest cases exploring the division between state and federal power: Gibbons v. Ogden (1824). In this Commerce Clause case, the Supreme Court affirmed Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, and held that by virtue of the Supremacy Clause, state laws “must yield” to constitutional acts of Congress.

Resources

• Gibbons v. Ogden at Oyez U.S. Supreme Court Media
• Gibbons v. Ogden at Legal Information Institute
• Gibbons v. Ogden at OurDocuments.gov

Summary

On one side of the river was New York: on the other, New Jersey. Aaron Ogden stood on the New York side and smiled. Ogden had a license from New York to operate on the state’s waterways. Since New York required all out-of-state operators to get expensive permits (protecting Ogden from competition), Ogden figured he would be doing good business. But Gibbons, Ogden’s former business partner, was also a steamboat operator. And Gibbons had a license from the federal government to operate a steamboat through interstate waterways. Ogden and Gibbons each thought his own license should outweigh the other man’s. The case went to the Supreme Court.

The Court had to decide-who had the power to regulate navigation on interstate waterways: Congress, or the individual states? The Court ruled in Gibbons’s favor, holding that the Constitution gave this power to Congress. The opinion, written by Chief Justice John Marshall, focused on the meaning of the Commerce Clause in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which states that Congress has the power “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States…” The word “among,” the Court ruled, “may very properly be restricted to that commerce which concerns more States than one.”

The Court acknowledged that the Constitution did not expressly grant Congress the power to regulate navigation on interstate waterways. But Marshall pointed out that all the states were connected by waterways and commerce would be impossible without navigating them. Therefore, the power to regulate transporting goods on waterways was “necessary and proper” for Congress to carry out its enumerated power to “regulate commerce…among the several states.”

If individual states had their own rules about commerce with other states, trade would be next to impossible. In fact, one important purpose of replacing the Articles of Confederation had been to “rescue [the United States] from the embarrassing and destructive consequences, resulting from the legislation of so many different States, and to place it under the protection of a uniform law.” States could not set their own rules for commerce in ways would interfere with the national government’s ability to carry out its power to establish uniform rules.

Finally, the decision affirmed that state laws that contradict constitutional acts of Congress “must yield” to the supremacy of the Constitution, as stated in Article VI: “This Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof … shall be the supreme law of the land.”

Questions

1. What was the constitutional question in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)?
2. How did the Court rule?
3. List some ways this ruling affected your life. For example, do you ever buy things that were made in other states? If you had a successful invention and wanted to sell it around the country, would you face different sets of trade requirements in each state?
4. The Court held that “the word used in the Constitution [“commerce”]… has been always understood to comprehend navigation within its meaning, and a power to regulate navigation is as expressly granted as if that term had been added to the word “commerce”?  Do you agree with the Court on the meaning of this particular word? Why or why not?  What are the advantages of interpreting the Constitution this way? What are the dangers?
5. The Supremacy Clause (Article VI) of the Constitution states, “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof…shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” Does this clause mean that a state law that contradicts any act of Congress is void? How do you know?
6. Chief Justice Marshall wrote, “As men whose intentions require no concealment generally employ the words which most directly and aptly express the ideas they intend to convey, the enlightened patriots who framed our Constitution, and the people who adopted it, must be understood to have employed words in their natural sense, and to have intended what they have said.”  How would you put this in your own words? Does this idea reflect the way the Constitution is taught today? Why or why not?

How did John Marshall interpret the Constitution?

Which clause of the US Constitution did the Supreme Court interpret in McCulloch v. Maryland?

How did chief justice John Marshall expand the power of the federal government?

What constitutional principle was established in the McCulloch case?