The Great Incorporation Panic of 1878
When a legal technicality threatened to render Seattle’s entire municipal government illegitimate, a frantic scramble to re-incorporate revealed the fragile foundations of early frontier law.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A few days ago we made mention of a petition which had been circulated, quite numerously signed, and subsequently presented to the District Judge for his action under the Act of the legislature of last winter, entitled 'An Act to provide for the incorporation of cities.' The city of Seattle was incorporated by an act of the legislature of 1875, and vested with the usual powers of such corporations. Last year the Judge of this District declared the act invalid, thus leaving Seattle without any legal form of government. In order to rectify this uncertainty, petitioners sought to use the new law to reorganize. However, the sections quoted only provide for cases where no city government previously existed—so that had the Judge issued his proclamation, all the liabilities contracted by the present city government would of necessity be invalid, as such actions would show that it was illegal and without authority to contract debts or exercise municipal powers of any kind whatsoever. While no serious objection can be raised against a compliance with the legitimate provisions of the law, the proceedings in this case, involving as they did such vital interests, personal and pecuniary, deserved the reprehension of every citizen who had respect for the integrity of the city in which he lived.
“The proceedings in this case, involving as they did such vital interests, personal and pecuniary, deserved the reprehension of every citizen who had respect for the integrity of the city in which he lived.”
The 1878 anxiety over whether Seattle's government was 'legal' or 'de facto' echoes the perennial modern friction between civic administration, municipal debt, and the legal frameworks that authorize urban development. Just as in 1878, when the paper feared that a administrative error would wipe out local liabilities, modern Seattle remains caught in a cycle where municipal legitimacy and the validity of public contracts are constantly tested against bureaucratic hurdles.
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