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31 square miles on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River, formerly part of Fairfax County, VA, became Alexandria County, DC. The question of which parochial body held title to parish glebes would become a central issue in disestablishment, and I will return to these properties later on in this story. 122. November 27, 1789, Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Richmond, VA: 1828), 8384, 113. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, January 9, 1785, Founders Online. Although Randolph is simply called Mr. First, he cited the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries during the English Reformation and the colonial assembly's ability to dissolve vestries as proof that such corporations may be dissolved by the authority of the parliament or legislature alone.Footnote 78 Of course, these establishmentarian precedents provided a shaky framework for the post-revolutionary relationship between corporations and the state. Phillip Bruce's work offers the only discussion of the corporate power of Virginia's parishes. In Virginia, customary corporations and irrevocable charters were likewise attacked as an un-republican vestige of legal favoritism. 31 January 1820, Founders Online. The Glebe Act of 1802 would stand.Footnote 81 Within weeks, counties began confiscating parish lands across the state. In 1798, Virginia repealed portions of six acts from the 1770s and 1780s that had allowed the Episcopal Church to retain parochial property, which the legislature now deemed inconsistent with the principles of the constitution, and of religious freedom, and manifestly tend[ed] to the re-establishment of a national church.Footnote 67 Although the 1798 law laid the philosophical groundwork for the legislature to claim all parish property, it was not until 1802 that the legislature authorized a specific plan for confiscation when it passed the Glebe Act. Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia; Begun and Holden in the City of Richmond, in the County of Henrico, on Monday, The Nineteenth Day of October, in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-Nine (Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 1828), 8384, 113. The First Disestablishment: Limits on Church Power and Property Before the Civil War, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 162 (2014): especially 31632. Dartmouth College, like Terrett, distinguished between public and private corporations and insisted on the insulation of private corporations from the legislature.Footnote 125 Marshall declared in Dartmouth that all contracts and rights respecting property, remained unchanged by the revolution, which echoed Story's statement in Terrett that the dissolution of the regal government no more destroyed the right to possess or enjoy this property than it did the right of any other corporation or individual to his or its own property.Footnote 126 The significant difference between these statements, of course, lay in the Marshall's use of the word contract. Marshall expressly grounded his decision in the Contract Clause by framing all corporate charters as contracts.