Throughout June, The Economist released Tocqueville Road Trip, a six-part podcast marking America’s 250th anniversary. The series retraces French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1831 journey through the United States, which he later chronicled in his book “Democracy in America.”
I knew Tocqueville through familiar quotations about democracy and the American character. What I had not realized was that the thriving civil society he marveled at depended, in part, on the legal protections for private institutions that emerged from a battle fought right here at Dartmouth.
Most Dartmouth students likely recognize the famous line associated with alumnus Daniel Webster: “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it.” I suspect that far fewer know the legal origins of those words.
In 1816, New Hampshire state legislators, believing Dartmouth should serve broader public purposes, attempted to convert the private college into a state university. The College challenged the move, and the dispute eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1819, the Court ruled in Dartmouth’s favor, holding that the College’s charter was a contract protected from state interference.
The decision in The Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward would become one of the early republic’s most consequential constitutional rulings.
For Dartmouth, the decision preserved the College’s independence. For the nation, it established precedent for an important principle: Institutions created by private citizens enjoy constitutional protection from political interference.
The Dartmouth decision did more than settle a dispute in New Hampshire; it helped establish legal space for private institutions to exist independently of government control. Just over a decade later, Tocqueville arrived in the United States and encountered a society built around them.
Traveling from New England to the frontier and down the Mississippi River before concluding his journey in Washington, D.C., Tocqueville found Americans forming committees, churches, newspapers and civic organizations almost everywhere he traveled. Rather than relying exclusively on government to solve problems, Americans regularly gathered together and built institutions of their own.
To Tocqueville, this was one of the defining characteristics of American democracy. Elections and constitutions mattered, but they were not sufficient on their own. A free society required places where citizens learned to cooperate, deliberate and pursue common purposes.
In aristocratic Europe, powerful individuals and institutions often organized public life. In America, Tocqueville found citizens creating voluntary associations to accomplish that work themselves.
This insight is easy to overlook because we Americans often tell our national story through the language of individualism: Franklin flying kites, Edison inventing the light bulb, entrepreneurs building companies from garages. Tocqueville admired individual initiative, too. Yet he concluded that the country’s unusual strength lay elsewhere as well. Americans rarely acted alone for long; they built organizations that outlasted any single person.
The Dartmouth College Case is significant precisely for that reason.
At its core, the dispute was not merely about a charter or a college in rural New Hampshire. It was a test of whether an institution created by citizens could maintain its independence when confronted by political power. The Supreme Court’s answer was yes.
The associations that fascinated Tocqueville could flourish only if citizens had confidence that the institutions they built would not be easily altered or dissolved by government. The Dartmouth decision helped reinforce that confidence.
That constitutional protection, however, has never meant private institutions deserve unquestioning respect. Universities can become insular, newspapers make mistakes and churches fail their own ideals. Independence is not the same thing as virtue.
But Tocqueville never argued that institutions were flawless. Instead, he believed that free citizens must remain free to build, reform and sustain them without every disagreement becoming a contest for political control.
Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, that lesson feels worth revisiting.
Americans today spend considerable time arguing about institutions. We debate universities, newspapers, churches, corporations and nonprofits. Trust in many of them fluctuates, and some deserve criticism; none are perfect.
Yet as Tocqueville observed in the young republic, a free society depends upon institutions capable of existing between the individual and the state. Such institutions provide places where citizens learn to work with people they did not necessarily choose, encounter unexpected ideas and pursue goals larger than themselves.
When those institutions weaken, public life becomes more confrontational, citizens become more isolated and democracy becomes less a shared practice than a struggle for control.
Dartmouth occupies a distinctive place within that larger story. Walking across the Green, it’s easy to think the College has always been here, that it simply grew out of the hillside along with everything else. The Dartmouth College Case is a reminder that it wasn’t.
Dartmouth became, like the churches, newspapers and associations that fascinated Tocqueville, one of the institutions through which generations of Americans learned to participate in civic life.
More than two and a half centuries after the College was founded, students still come here expecting to leave with more than a degree. They expect to become part of something that existed before they arrived and will remain after they leave.
Tocqueville believed that the habit of building and preserving such independent institutions was one of America’s great democratic strengths. As the nation enters its next 250 years, preserving the institutions that connect citizens to one another may matter as much as celebrating the ideals that founded it.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
