Vanderbilt, meanwhile, went to Washington, DC, and hired attorney Daniel Webster to argue for the overturn of the monopoly. On March 2, 1824, the Supreme Court ruled in Gibbons’s favor in Gibbons v. Ogden, a case still cited frequently today, which marked the turn in America from monopolies to markets. The case doesn’t bear Vanderbilt’s name, and he didn’t appear in the news around it, but it is covered in his fingerprints in its declaring that individual states had no standing to interfere with interstate commerce. The last of the protected Dutch-era monopolies were washed away
