Charles River Bridge Case, 11 Peters 420 (1837). In 1785, Massachusetts chartered a bridge over the Charles River, linking Boston and Charlestown. The Charles River Bridge proprietors completed the project the next year, and the bridge significantly enhanced commerce between the two areas.
The enterprise proved financially lucrative. The original charter provided the right to charge tolls for forty years, which later was extended to seventy. In the 1820s, political controversies, such as a fight over the Bank of the United States, focused on increasing opportunities in a market economy against the power of entrenched privilege. After extensive public criticism decrying the proprietors' "privileged monopoly," the Massachusetts legislature in 1828 chartered a new company to build a competing bridge, paralleling the existing one. The new Warren Bridge was to become toll-free after six years.
The proprietors of the first bridge, which included Harvard College, contended that the new bridge charter violated the Contract Clause (Article I, Section 10) of the United States Constitution as it unconstitutionally impaired the obligations of the original contract. The Massachusetts high court split on the issue in 1828, and the case went to the United States Supreme Court in 1831. Chief Justice John Marshall, in a significant deviation from his usual broad construction of the Contract Clause, favored sustaining the new charter, but the Court was sharply divided and lacked a full bench for a decisive ruling.
In 1837, however, recently appointed Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and his new colleagues sustained the Warren Bridge charter, with only one dissenting vote. Taney followed Marshall's formulation, strictly construing corporate charters in favor of "the rights of the community." The state, he determined, had never explicitly promised the Charles River Bridge proprietors the right to an exclusive bridge and toll.
Taney's opinion particularly emphasized the role of science and technology to promote material progress. The law, he insisted, must spur, not impede, such improvements. If the Charles River Bridge proprietors prevailed, Taney feared that turnpike corporations would make extravagant claims and jeopardize new innovations such as railroads. Taney cast the law with new entrepreneurs as the preferred agents for progress. "[T]he object and end of all government," he said, "is to promote the happiness and prosperity of the community which it established, and it can never be assumed, that the government intended to diminish the power of accomplishing the end for which it was created." Taney's opinion fit his times and reflected the American premium on the release of creative human energy to propel "progress" against the expansive claims of privilege by older, vested interests.
Bibliography
Hurst, James Willard. Law and the Conditions of Freedom. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956.
Kutler, Stanley I. Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971. Reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
—Stanley I. Kutler
