While Naomi Lamoreaux and Bill Novak are giving an important and extended lesson the history of the corporations and the Constitution over at Slate I want to focus on the role of cemetery corporations in promoting religious and other civic values in the Pre-Civil War era. Bill and Naomi point out that in our history corporations have largely been treated as artificial beings with public obligations. This made me think of the corporations founded largely from the 1830s to the 1860s to promote rural cemeteries. Those corporations -- chartered individually by legislatures until some states like New York passed general cemetery incoproration statutes (around the same time as they passed general incorporation statutes) -- were promoted because they were going to support a series of values, from the propagtion of Protesent religious ideas to amporhous ideas of economic progress and Union. That is, as a bunch of scholars from Johann Neem to Jason Mazone have written, civic organizations and corporations were seen as supporters of public, constitutional values. Civil organizations and cemetery corporations (and other corporations, too) were part of assisting the state. And orators who spoke at the dedication of cemeteries often commented on the role that the cemetery corporations (often but not always charitable corporations) played in the propagation of constitutional and religious values.
Cribbing now a little from my paper on the constitutional significance of antebellum cemeteries....
Occasionally orators also explained in some depth the importance of the cemetery charters in promoting the purposes of the cemeteries – in preserving them free from taxes, protecting the assets, so that the cemetery could continue forever, and in protecting the lots of individual owners from their debts. “It is to be rejoiced over that in opening this, our Rural Cemetery,” said Edward North, who taught Greek at Hamilton College, at the dedication of the Clinton, New York cemetery in 1857, that “we are able to embody in its organic regulations ideas of permanence and sacred use.” North went on to explain how the cemetery’s charter reflected the purposes of its founders in preserving the cemetery.
No mercenary or speculative views can ever thwart the sacred purpose of our Cemetery Association, by controlling the action of those who serve as its Trustees. The law under which the Association is formed, requires that after the payments for purchase money are made, all its revenues shall be expended in improving and keeping the grounds, and for no other purpose. By a wise provision of statute the title to this soil once made perfect, becomes inalienable. The property of the Association is exempt from all public taxes, rates and assessments. It is not liable to be sold on execution, or for the payment of debts due from individual proprietors. After the title of a plat has been transferred to an individual and an interment made therein, the plat becomes his inalienable property, descending to his heirs and their heirs forever, or so long as they choose to retain it. No sheriff's writ can ever deny our right to sleep here after death, with our fathers and descendants, unmolested. ...
Professor Mason's 1852 dedication address praised the proprietors for taking action for public benefit, "we come to celebrate the opening to the public of an enterprise set in motion, for purposes of private gain as well as public benefit. These two features are desirable in every public enterprise."
The dedication address that most explicitly linked the cemetery to the promotion of constitutional and religious values was Amory Dwight Mayo’s 1858 address at Green Hill Cemetery in Amsterdam, northwest of Albany in the Hudson River Valley. Mayo provided a detailed sense of the connections of the cemetery to the United States as a nation and to constitutionalism. At the cemetery, it was easy to recall how much civilization had progressed in the generations since the beginning of the eighteenth century. The land was no longer inhabited by Native Americans (who were buried with their faces “turned to the east, in prophetic foresight of the coming civilization”). Through “patient fortitude” the valley’s settlers had “subdued the wilderness” and with “patriotic devotion saved” the valley “for the heritage of freemen.” Mayo then looked to the future to “behold in vision the scene that shall gladden the eyes of your descendants a century and a half from today.” Mayo predicted those far-off generations would find “a garden valley more enchanting that any Eden of the past, peopled by a race that in power and opportunity shall surpass our largest prophecy.” The cemetery was the best act citizens of the town had ever undertaken, which promised to grow in beauty over the generations and appeal “to the holiest and calmest sentiments of our being, through the spectacle of enchanting natural scenery, and the associations of the beloved on earth....”
Mayo explained that the cemetery was part of establishing the principles of democracy and republicanism because it brought people together in death. The cemetery was – again – a symbol of republicanism and a creator of it:
All things are tending, at least in the more advanced portions of our country, to a broad and pure republicanism, founded on the Christian law of love; and what emblem can be more significant of this happy tendency than the American Cemetery, constructed by the money, taste and sentiment of the whole people; containing the dust of the earliest generations removed thither with pious care; receiving the body of every citizen when his earthly work is done, and he steps down from his little eminence of worldly distinction, to mingle with the great democracy of death.
Mayo’s praise for the cemetery was extreme – it was, like American society in general, “a powerful aid in teaching the people the Christian view of life and death; as a perpetual preacher on the relations of those who live in this world, and in the world of souls." For Mayo, the cemetery was an important piece part of a larger mission of what he called “a true Christian civilization.” All of that was made possible because of the charitable corporation.
While corporations and other forms of property have been subject to regulation throughout our history -- as Bill Novak has demonstrated -- a related principle is that corporations have often been seen as working in conjunction with the state to promote civic values, including religious sentiments. This is yet another lesson of the obscure and often overlooked cemetery dedication addresses that preceded Lincoln's Gettysburg address.
I have substantially more detail about this in my paper on the constitutional significance of pre-Civil War cemeteries, "The Road to the Gettysburg Address," which appeared in the Florida State University Law Review.
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