Samuel Freeman Miller

“ If it be a regulation of commerce under the power conferred on Congress by the Constitution, that body has signally failed to provide any such regulation. It belongs also, manifestly, to that class of rules which, like pilotage and some others, can be most wisely exercised by local authorities, and in regard to which no general rules, applicable alike to all ports and landing-places, can be properly made. If a regulation of commerce at all, it comes within that class in which the States may prescribe rules until Congress assumes to do so. ”

“ There is probably not a city or large town in the United States, situated on a navigable water, where ordinances, rules, and regulations like those of the town of Catlettsburg are not made and imposed by authority derived from State legislation, and the long acquiescence in this exercise of the power, and its, absolute necessity, are arguments almost conclusive in favor of its rightful existence. ”

“ There is, it is true, a prayer to restrain them from the collection of all excessive taxes while their boats are landing within the corporate limits; but what is excessive or what is reasonable is not shown, and, as we have already said, the money collected is not taxes in any sense whatever.
In the next place, the bill does not show how or why the sums paid for the use of the wharf, or for landing at other places, is excessive. ”