This dissertation examines the development of the constitutional law of corporate personhood in the nineteenth-century United States. A socio-legal history, it illuminates local conflicts over the control of corporations that resulted in foundational constitutional cases. In so doing, it exposes previously unknown connections, including the intersection of corporate constitutional rights and race. This dissertation reveals that corporations were instrumental players in both broadening and limiting the scope of the constitutional rights available to all persons, helping establish constitutional doctrine that continues to undergird civil rights claims today. As such, it contributes substantially to literature on the transformation of legal personhood, citizenship, and constitutional rights in the nineteenth century. Notably, the history of corporate personhood has never yet been integrated into the history of constitutional rights-claiming, a conversation this dissertation seeks to initiate. The project also provides a needed corrective to legal studies of corporate personhood by examining nodes of conflict in which competing visions of the corporate “person” were debated. It exposes a previously unstudied aspect of corporate personhood, the popular view of the corporation as embedded in an affective, familial hierarchy, the “child” or “servant” of the public. The dissertation traces how this alternative view percolated up the legal system, from social movements for corporate regulation, to the arguments of corporate lawyers, all the way to Supreme Court opinions. By claiming constitutional rights, corporate lawyers attempted to extricate corporations from this familial relationship and recast corporate shareholders as akin to other subordinated groups, namely persecuted racial minorities. In so doing, corporate lawyers and federal judges transformed corporations from subordinate members of the household to private, rights-bearing, profit-seeking market actors. Yet the popular vision of corporations as servants or children of the public, with distinct duties and limited rights, continued to inform legal arguments throughout the nineteenth century. By exposing the connections between corporate personhood and race and adopting the lens of the household to examine corporate-public relationships, this dissertation sheds new light on a canon of cases that we thought we knew, and puts the history of constitutional rights-claiming in conversation with the history of corporate personhood for the first time.