126
Opinion of the Court
tise on the Law of Corporations 13 (1793) ("A corporation then, or a body politic, or body incorporate, is a collection of many individuals, united into one body, . . . and vested, by the policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual, particularly of taking and granting property, of contracting obligations, and of suing and being sued . . ."). While it is true that Chief Justice Marshall's opinion in Bank of United States v. Deveaux, 5 Cranch 61, 86-87 (1809), declined to rely on the presumption when it decided the separate issue whether a corporation was a "citizen" for purposes of federal diversity jurisdiction, by 1844 the Deveaux position had been abandoned and a corporation was understood to have citizenship independent of its constituent members by virtue of its status as "a person, although an artificial person." Louisville, C. & C. R. Co. v. Letson, 2 How. 497, 558 (1844); see 1 A. Burrill, A Law Dictionary and Glossary 383 (2d ed. 1859) ("A corporation has been declared to be not only a person, . . . but to be capable of being considered an inhabitant of a state, and even of being treated as a citizen, for all purposes of suing and being sued").
Essentially conceding that private corporations were taken to be persons when the FCA was passed in 1863, the County argues that municipal corporations were not so understood until six years later, when Cowles v. Mercer County, 7 Wall. 118 (1869), applied the Letson rule to them. Cowles, however, was not an extension of principle but a natural recognition of an understanding going back at least to Coke, supra, that municipal corporations and private ones were simply two species of "body politic and corporate," treated alike in terms of their legal status as persons capable of suing and being sued. See, e. g., W. Glover, A Practical Treatise on the Law of Municipal Corporations 41 (1837) (Municipal corporations have, as an attribute "necessarily and inseparably incident to every corporation," the ability "[t]o sue or be sued, . . . and do all other acts as natural
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