Friday’s A Nearer Look is often a judicial biography. This week we cowl Justice John Catron, who served on the court docket from 1837 to 1865.
Justice John Catron was a person of contradictions – for instance, a southern slaveholder, he additionally opposed the secession of Tennessee whereas on the court docket and sought to protect the Union. On the identical time, Catron stays to this present day a considerably “obscure figure,” with not one full-length biography to his identify.
Catron’s birthplace and date are unsure, with some sources placing it in Pennsylvania around 1786, and others in Virginia between 1781 and 1792. What is thought is that he was born right into a poor German household, had minimal education, married in 1807, and, by 1812, settled in Sparta, Tennessee. Not lengthy after, Catron served as a non-public beneath then-Normal Andrew Jackson within the Alabama campaigns towards the Creek Indians and the Warfare of 1812, reportedly changing into so ailing that he needed to be introduced again to Tennessee in a wagon. (Some sources say he additionally fought within the Battle of New Orleans.)
Catron was licensed to apply regulation in 1815 after which served as a prosecutor on a Tennessee “mountain circuit.” He relocated to Nashville in 1818, and shortly had a thriving apply centered on land law and disputes. In 1824, the Tennessee Legislature elected Catron to the state’s Supreme Court docket of Errors and Appeals, then Tennessee’s highest court, the place he served for seven years. His best-known ruling there was reportedly one in 1829 that disbarred a lawyer for combating a duel in Kentucky. Catron rejected the argument {that a} duel amounted to an “honorable murder” and wrote that the regulation handled it as “a depraved and wilful [sic] homicide.” In 1831, he turned the court docket’s first chief justice and served for three extra years. As chief justice, Catron upheld the releasing of a gaggle of enslaved folks in an 1834 case, however solely on the situation that they go away the US. The next year, he upheld Tennessee’s extension of its legal legal guidelines over Cherokee land contained in the state.
Catron’s involvement in politics reportedly led to his chief justiceship ending; one scholar writes that then-presidential-candidate Hugh Lawson White’s allies compelled Catron off the bench after he backed Martin Van Buren over White within the 1836 election, whereas another account says the legislature retaliated for his backing of Van Buren by abolishing the Court docket of Errors and Appeals altogether. Catron then went on to handle Van Buren’s Tennessee marketing campaign.
Catron’s help for Van Buren and “align[ment] with Jacksonian democracy” led to Jackson nominating Catron to the Supreme Court docket on his last full day as president on March 3, 1837, the same day that Congress added two seats to the Supreme Court docket (bringing it to nine). 5 days after Jackson’s nomination, with Van Buren now within the White Home, the Senate confirmed Catron by a vote of 28 to 15.
Catron “never sought to take a leading part in the great public questions before the Supreme Court,” as a substitute choosing opining on “complex technical matters” and the frequent regulation. Averaging 7.5 opinions per time period (a decrease charge than any Taney Court docket colleague besides Justice James Wayne), Catron usually sided with Chief Justice Roger Taney and sometimes took circumstances over Spanish land grant disputes. Catron did clarify a few of his personal views; within the 1853 case of Ohio Life Insurance & Trust Co. v. Debolt, he warned towards the speedy progress of firms, writing that “these quite a few our bodies of related wealth” risked “stand[ing] above the state authorities creating them.”
Catron’s most vital second on the court docket got here within the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the place he agreed in his concurrence that Congress lacked the facility to forestall slavery within the western territories and that Scott remained enslaved. Whereas the case was pending, he additionally wrote privately to then-president-elect James Buchanan, asking him to steer Justice Robert Grier to affix the bulk (Grier finally did so).
Catron enslaved folks throughout his life, and in 1827 he reportedly fathered a son whom he by no means acknowledged with Sally, an enslaved lady. Nonetheless, Catron didn’t comply with Tennessee out of the Union and in 1861 returned to Nashville to attempt to persuade the state’s leaders to not secede. After they declined, he left for Kentucky and his property in Tennessee was confiscated. He stored using circuit in Kentucky and Missouri, and when the military locked up civilians who sympathized with the Confederacy, Catron turned away their requests for habeas corpus, effectively supporting the detentions. As soon as federal forces took management of Nashville, he went again and opened the U.S. district court docket there in June 1862. Catron dissented within the 1863 Prize Cases, arguing that President Abraham Lincoln couldn’t blockade Southern ports with out Congress’ approval.
Catron died in his Nashville house in Might 1865, shortly after the Accomplice give up. Henry Stanbery was nominated by President Andrew Johnson to fill his seat, however the Senate didn’t act earlier than Congress eradicated the seat in 1866 to keep Johnson from appointing justices.