The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874-1888

Paul Kens

Description

A view of the major legal challenges of post–Civil War America as seen from the highest court in the land.

In The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874–1888, Paul Kens provides a history of the Court during a time that began in the shadow of the Civil War and ended with America on the verge of establishing itself as an industrial world power. Morrison R. Waite (1816–1888) led the Court through a period that experienced great racial violence and sectional strife. At the same time, a commercial revolution produced powerful new corporate businesses and, in turn, dissatisfaction among agrarian and labor interests. The nation was also consolidating the territory west of the Mississippi River, an expansion often marred with bloodshed and turmoil. It was an era that strained America's thinking about the purpose, nature, and structure of government and ultimately about the meaning of the constitution.

Some of the landmark events faced by this Court centered on issues of civil rights. These ranged from the Colfax massacre and treatment of blacks in the South to the rights of women, conflicts with Mormons over polygamy and religious freedom, and the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants in the West. Economic concerns also dominated the decisions of the Court. Westward expansion brought conflicts over the distribution of public domain lands. The building and financing of the transcontinental railroad and the web of railroads throughout the nation brought great wealth to some, but that success was accompanied by the Panic of 1873, the first nationwide labor strike, and the Granger movement. Changes in business practices and concerns over concentrated wealth fueled debates over the limits of government regulation of business enterprise and the constitutional status of corporations. In addition to the more dramatic topics of civil rights and economic regulation, this study also covers such important issues of the day as bankruptcy, criminal law, interstate commerce, labor strife, bonds and railroad financing, and land disputes.

Challenging the conventional portrayal of the Waite Court as being merely transitional, Kens observes that the majority of these justices viewed themselves as guardians of tradition. Even while facing legal disputes that grew from the drastic changes in post-Civil War America's social, political, and economic order, the Waite Court tended to look backward for its cues. Its rulings on issues of liberty and equality, federalism and the powers of government, and popular sovereignty and the rights of the community were driven by constitutional traditions established prior to the Civil War. This is an important distinction because the conventional portrayal of this Court as transitional leaves the impression that later changes in legal doctrine were virtually inevitable, especially with respect to the subjects of civil rights and economic regulation. By demonstrating that there was nothing inevitable about the way constitutional doctrine has evolved, Kens provides an original and insightful interpretation that enhances our understanding of American constitutional traditions as well as the development of constitutional doctrine in the late nineteenth century.

Sujets

• Constitutions
• Political Science
• Rutherford B. Hayes
• Katzenbach v. McClung
• Presser v. Illinois
• William Pitt Kellogg
• Interstate Commerce Act of 1887
• Bradwell v. Illinois
• Lochner era
• Yick Wo v. Hopkins
• Civil Rights Act of 1875
• Benjamin Bristow
• Compromise of 1877
• United States v. Cruikshank
• Burlingame Treaty
• Fletcher v. Peck
• Dred Scott v. Sandford
• Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution
• Liste de constitutions nationales
• Charles Sumner
• Thaddeus Stevens
• William P. Kellogg
• Rutherford Birchard Hayes
• Franklin Pierce
• Brown v. Board of Education

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172195
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874-1888
CHIEF JUSTICESHIPS OF THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT
Herbert A. Johnson, Series Editor
The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller, 1888-1910 James W. Ely Jr.
The Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth William R. Casto
The Chief Justiceship of John Marshall, 1801-1835 Herbert A. Johnson
Division and Discord: The Supreme Court under Stone and Vinson, 1941-1953 Melvin I. Urofsky
The Supreme Court under Edward Douglass White, 1910-1921 Walter F. Pratt Jr.
The Chief Justiceship of Warren Burger, 1969-1986 Earl M. Maltz
The Supreme Court under Earl Warren, 1953-1969 Michal R. Belknap
The Chief Justiceship of Charles Evans Hughes, 1930-1941 William G. Ross
The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874-1888 Paul Kens
The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874-1888
Paul Kens
2010 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Kens, Paul.
The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874-1888 / Paul Kens.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-918-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. United States. Supreme Court-History-19th century. 2. Constitutional history-United States. 3. Waite, Morrison R. (Morrison Remick), 1816-1888. I. Title.
KF8742.K46 2010
347.73 26-dc22
2010006341
ISBN 978-1-61117-219-5 (ebook)
For Carla- and in memory of her parents, Floyce Underhill and Kitty Underhill
Contents
List of Illustrations
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Traditional Court, Turbulent Times
1 Waite, Waite, Don t Tell Me
2 Freedom Detoured
3 After the Compromise
4 Romancing the Rails
5 The Last Gasp of the Rights of the Community
6 Too Big to Be Allowed to Fail
7 Sinking Fund
8 A Change Is Gonna Come
9 Interstate Commerce
10 The Big Country
11 Equal Rights: Tales of the Old West
Conclusion: Legacy of the Waite Court
Notes
Index of Cases
Subject Index
Illustrations
Following page 52
Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite
The Waite Court
The Electoral Commission, 1877
The Louisiana Murders
The Disputed Prize
Stanley Matthews-His Narrow Escape
Series Editor s Preface
On the rare occasions when I am awake before sunrise, I have been aware of the dim glow in the sky that heralds the beginning of another day. At the same time it remains a matter of conjecture exactly where over the horizon the sun will actually appear. It is that combination of certainty and uncertainty that rivets attention and creates anticipation concerning what the new day will bring. Paul Kens s perceptive study of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite similarly calls our attention to a critical but little understood period of the Court s history. It was a time when tendencies provided a key to the current work of the justices, but also pointed to future developments as yet but also little understood.
Historiographically, the Waite Court has always been considered to be transitional, reacting but slowly to the revolutionary changes wrought by the post-Civil War amendments to the federal Constitution. However, the sleeping giant of substantive due process earlier disturbed by Wynehamer v. The People (1856) 1 and Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) 2 had gained new birth with the Fourteenth Amendment; the result was a massive alteration in the dynamics of the federal system, which provided a powerful instrumental tool for reshaping American law after 1868. Kens is quite correct in rejecting characterization of the Waite Court as being transitional. In the wake of a massive earthquake, a flood, or a forest fire, one does not make piecemeal or fine-tuned adjustments or transitions ; survival demands intentional rebuilding and redesigning the landscape. No less strenuous exertion faced Waite, his Court, and their successors, as they struggled with the scope and varied implications of nationalized due process and equal protection clauses.
Not surprisingly the legal profession in general, and the Waite Court in particular, was cautious in accepting the full implications of the Fourteenth Amendment. Just a year before Waite became chief justice, the Chase Court upheld a Louisiana monopoly of New Orleans slaughterhouse operations in the face of a novel substantive due process challenge. That decision, in the Slaughterhouse Cases , 3 triggered a forceful dissent from Justice Stephen J. Field that would, over the course of the next quarter century, become ruling case law under Waite s successor, Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller. Early in the Waite chief justiceship, the Court affirmed state authority to regulate both grain elevators and railroads, citing the traditional view that businesses impressed with vital public interests were necessarily subject to legislative regulation. 4 Yet the Waite Court also adopted positions concerning public lands that tended to favor excessive continental railroad claims on the government s largesse and swept aside the ethical, equitable, and humanitarian entitlements of preemptors and other settlers. Suspicious of flamboyant railroad financing practices, the justices protected the federal government s subsidies through validating U.S. government sinking fund arrangements despite powerfully persuasive arguments that the law took property without due process of law. 5 This was thus a time when the Court moved hesitantly and inconsistently toward a new era of constitutional interpretation.
Chief Justice Waite s selection to preside over the Court raised eyebrows in both the political and the legal communities. Without exception, all of his predecessors had been selected from among former members of presidential cabinets. Measured by those standards, Waite represented a marked departure; his principal public office before his nomination to lead the Court was as a commissioner on the U.S. delegation that settled the Alabama claims against Great Britain. This diplomatic service, dealing with damages sustained by the United States through British outfitting Confederate privateers during the Civil War, would have given Waite some limited familiarity with international law. But it was scarcely helpful to a successful private lawyer facing de novo the complex constitutional issues then arising in the Supreme Court. Despite that modest r sum , the new chief justice brought with him more than average familiarity with the world of corporate finance and railroad operations. He also proved to be willing to undertake the authorship of major opinions that might trigger controversy, thus shielding his colleagues from public criticism and emphasizing collegial and institutional support for the Court s decisions. Fortunately for the Court, Chief Justice Waite grew into the stature and skills required by his new position, for the times were difficult for the Court, which was beset with a troubled postwar history as well as widening doctrinal divisions among the justices themselves.
Outside the windowless basement room of the U.S. Capitol that housed the Court until the New Deal era, changes were in embryo that would have a profound impact upon the Court and constitutional law until the present day. Antebellum respect for the dignity of the Constitution and the rule of law had always served as insulation against the heat of political discourse. That custom had been shattered first by the Taney Court s indiscretions in the Dred Scott case, and then by the Chase Court s blunder and penitence in the two legal tender cases. 6 Increasingly, the Waite Court was drawn into the political turmoil of the day. The 1881 confirmation of Justice Stanley Matthews, approved by a majority of one vote in the Senate, graphically illustrated for the first time the potential impact of organized private interest groups on the selection of Supreme Court justices. And the participation of five sitting Supreme Court justices on the commission that resolved the contested issues in the 1876 presidential election only blurred further the distinction between politics and the rule of law.
That tension, between political or practical necessity and traditional rule of law principles, has dominated American constitutionalism during and since the Waite era. Post-Civil War America desperately needed a transcontinental transportation system that was possible only with massive government financial assistance; it also needed strong legal and constitutional protections for private investment capital. These public policy concerns inevitably made an impression upon the Supreme Court and reshaped the justices approaches to the post-Civil War amendments and to the newly reorganized federal system. That adaptive process began in the Waite era, even if very slowly and most reluctantly. Subsequently, in New Deal legislation after 1937, it would also give rise to strong federal restraints upon the excesses of free market economics. In both situations the innovations exposed severe differences of opinion among the Supreme Court justices. Thus this study lends additional insight into the coverage of three earlier volumes published in this series, dealing with the U.S. Supreme Court from 1888 to 1941. 7
Readers will appreciate Kens s analytical skills and broad familiarity with the Court s case law during this time period. He has cast a steady and