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First of all you ALL need to read this:
http://athenwood.com/uphistory.shtml

it concerns the origins of Corporate "Personhood".
it concerns one JC Bancroft Davis, former president of Newburgh and New York Railway Company
In 1883 he'd become Reporter of Decisions for the Supreme Court....
Acting as court reporter in the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case,

"Below is the letter from Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite to court reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis informing Davis that it didn't much matter whether or not he included a comment about the arguments before the court that corporations were persons "as we avoided meeting the constitutional questions in the decision."

The decision did not rule that corporations are persons: Davis added it in the headnotes (commentary) on his own, and subsequent courts have incorrectly based decisions since 1886 on the headnotes and not the case. (Thanks to Michael Kinder, who found this in the J.C. Bancroft Davis collection of personal papers in the National Archives in Washington, DC, where they had been sitting, unnoticed, for over a century.)

The letter from Davis to Waite asking if he got the comments right precedes Waite's response. Davis writes, after quoting language stating that corporations are persons, "please let me know whether I correctly caught your comments and oblige [reply]."

In his reply to Davis, Waite writes: "I think your mem. in the California Rail Road tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the arguments began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report inasmuch as we avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision."

Official photo of Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, 1886, falsely accused by history of giving human rights to corporations.

This may be the only photo in existence of John Chandler Bancroft Davis (1822-1907), son of Massachusetts Governor John Davis (1787-1804), and former president of the Newburgh & New York Railroad, Assistant Secretary of State, Minister to Germany, and Reporter of the U.S. Supreme Court (in which capacity he authored the headnotes to the Southern Pacific Railroad vs. Santa Clara County case which defined corporate personhood, and the Plessey vs. Ferguson case which defined the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation).