Story Case

The Sound Line Navigation Company, a corporation, operated a line of small steamboats between points on the Illinois River, wholly within the state of Illinois. It carried local freight and also commodities destined for points beyond the state line. A Federal officer visited the company's office, and imposed certain rulings, with reference to the boats, which the company refused to obey, on the ground that it was not engaged in interstate commerce, since its boats remained in the state of Illinois.

Ruling Court Case. Ogden Vs. Gibbons, Volume 9 Wheaton Reports, Page 1

The legislature of the state of New York granted to Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton the exclusive navigation of all the waters within the territorial control of that state, with boats moved by fire or steam, for a period of time. Livingston and Fulton assigned to Ogden the exclusive right to navigation by steamboats on the waters between Elizabethtown and the city of New York. Later, the Congress of the United States passed an act for enrolling and licensing ships and vessels to be employed in the coasting trade. Gibbons, who was owner of two steamboats, enrolled them under the federal act, and began to use them in coastwise trade in the waters over which Odgen, by law of New York, had exclusive right to navigate. This was a bill brought by Ogden to have Gibbons restrained from so employing the boats by him owned.

Gibbons insisted that the law of New York was unconstitutional, in that it came into conflict with a law of Congress, to which the power was given by the constitution to regulate commerce.

Mr. Chief Justice Marshall said: "When speaking of the power over navigation, I do not regard it as a power incidental to that of regulating commerce; I consider it as the thing itself - inseparable from it as vital motion is from vital existence. Commerce, in its simplest signification, means an exchange of goods, but in the advancement of society, labor, transportation, intelligence, the various means of exchange become commodities and enter into commerce. The subject, the vehicle, the agent, and their various operations, become the objects of commercial regulations. Shipbuilding, the carrying trade, the propagation of seamen are such vital agents of commercial prosperity, that the nation which could not legislate over these subjects would not possess power to regulate commerce.

"But it is almost laboring to prove a self-evident proposition, since the sense of mankind, the practice of the world, the contemporaneous assumption, have so clearly established the right of Congress over navigation, and the transportation of both men and their goods, as not only incidental to, but actually of the essence of the power to regulate Commerce."

Judgment was held that the law of New York was unconstitutional, and that Gibbons was entitled to engage in coastwise trading under the authority of the United States.

Ruling Law. Story Case Answer

It has already been stated that commerce includes the agencies by which trade intercourse is conducted; therefore, transportation is recognized as a constituent part of commerce itself. This is the reason for the multitude of railway cases coming under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government, which may regulate the rates on passenger traffic as well as on merchandise and commodities which are the subject of sale and exchange.

The power in the Federal Government to construct, or to authorize individuals or corporations to construct national highways and bridges from state to state, is now recognized as essential to the complete control and regulation of commerce.

The Sound Line Navigation Company, in the Story Case, was engaged in interstate commerce. When the articles were destined for interstate points, the entire transportation, or the entire transaction became interstate, and subject to the power conferred by the Constitution upon Congress. The Supreme Court held in a Michigan case similar to the Story Case, that when once the commodity had begun to move as an article of trade from one state to another, commerce in that commodity between the states had commenced. To the extent in which each agency acts in that transportation, it is subject to the regulation of Congress.