McGinty Brian. Lincoln and the Court
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blockade, or their governments, any just cause of complaint.” And, Lothrop
said, Judge Grier’s opinion closely followed Dana’s argument in the case. “His
work in these causes was Mr. Dana’s great contribution to the successful prose-
cution of the war, and its importance at that time can hardly be overesti-
mated.”
58
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Prize Cases was, as Charles Francis
Adams wrote, “a great issue before a great tribunal.”
59
It was the most impor-
tant decision rendered by the high tribunal during the war. Had Justice Nel-
son’s dissenting views commanded a majority of the justices, the result could
have been disastrous. That Grier’s views prevailed, however, indicated to the
nation and the world that a majority of the justices were prepared to sustain
the government’s war efforts. There is no reason to suggest that they would
ever have sustained a clearly unconstitutional grab for power by either the
executive or the legislative branch of the government. They were, however,
prepared to “stretch” constitutional doctrine to meet the extraordinary exigen-
cies of the crisis, to see issues in a light in which they had never previously
seen them, and to judge challenges to government action by standards they
had never previously applied. In the words of the Supreme Court historian
Charles Warren, the Prize Cases “were far more momentous in the issue in-
volved than any other war case; and their final determination favorable to the
Government’s contention was almost a necessary factor in the suppression of
the war.”
60
though richard henry dana, jr., had made a powerful argument in
support of one of Lincoln’s most controversial war measures, and though he
owed his appointment as U.S. district attorney in Boston to Lincoln, he never
really warmed to the wartime president. Letters he wrote during the war, and
even after, reveal a patronizing, sometimes dismissive attitude toward the chief
executive. He acknowledged that Lincoln had “a kind of shrewdness and
commonsense,” and what he called a “slipshod, low levelled honesty, that
made him a good western jury lawyer.” But, in Dana’s view, Lincoln was an
“unutterable calamity” as president.
61
A year after the Prize Cases were decided,
Dana went to the White House and spent a half hour with Mrs. Lincoln and,
after that, a half hour with the president. After the visit, he wrote his im-
pressions:
Lincoln and the Court
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142
I cannot describe the President; it is impossible. He was sobered in his
talk, told no extreme stories, said some good things and some help-
lessly natural and naive things. You can’t help feeling an interest in
him, a sympathy and a kind of pity; feeling, too, that he has some
qualities of great value, yet fearing that his weak points may wreck
him or wreck something. His life seems a series of wise, sound con-
clusions, slowly reached, oddly worked out, on great questions, with
constant failures in administration of details and dealings with indi-
viduals.
62
At this same meeting, Lincoln and the Boston attorney talked about the
Prize Cases. Dana’s argument had by this time been published in pamphlet
form. The president had read the pamphlet, and he complimented him on it.
He said that “it had cleared up his mind on the subject entirely; that it rea-
soned out and put into scientific statement what he had all along felt in his
bones must be the truth of the matter, and was not able to find anywhere in the
books, or to reason out satisfactorily to himself.”
63
Thus ended the last recorded meeting between the president of the United
States and a brilliant lawyer from Boston—the one “a good western jury law-
yer,” the other an expert in admiralty law and the victor in a great Supreme
Court case; the one a humble Illinoisan, the other a Northeastern patrician
and the author of best-selling books; the one a man of enormous responsibility
and humanity who was willing to credit the other with a job well done. In one
there was a generous spirit, in the other condescension. But one was to lead a
great nation to a new birth of freedom; the other was to retire to a study in
Boston to edit a treatise on international law.
64
Through such little stories of
men caught up in a fearful conflict was the great history of a great struggle to be
truly remembered.
The Prizes
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143
A Gallery of Justices
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The Old Supreme Court Chamber in the U.S. Capitol (1860–1935).
(Photo credit: Theodor Horydczak, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.)
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
John McLean
ﱟﱟﱗﱟﱟ
John McLean of Ohio was a large man, both physically and in-
tellectually, with a handsome face, a high forehead, and a pres-
ence and manner that reminded many of George Washington.
The first of Andrew Jackson’s four appointments to the Supreme
Court (he began his service in 1829), McLean was seventy-five
years old and in his thirty-second year as a justice when Lincoln
became president in March 1861. Despite his judicial longevity,
McLean was less known for his judicial decisions than for the
fact, as Daniel Webster put it, that he had always had “his head
turned too much by politics.” From Jackson’s time through Bu-
chanan’s administration, McLean had almost continuously as-
pired to the presidency, first as a Democrat, later as a Whig and a
Free-Soiler, and finally as a Republican. Lincoln was an admirer
of McLean, who was one of only two dissenters from the notori-
ous Dred Scott decision of 1857. Formal and courteous, McLean
often gave the impression of being cold and unfeeling. Salmon
Chase, also an Ohioan, once commented of McLean: “It is a
thousand pities that a man of such real benevolence of heart as
the Judge possesses, should not allow more of it to flow out into
his manners.” Though in generally good health, McLean was
suffering from a severe cold when he left Washington on March
22, 1861, for his home in the hills above Cincinnati where, on
April 4, he succumbed to pneumonia. A contemporary noted
that there was always about McLean “a suggestion of greatness
never quite attained.”
(Photo credit: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.)
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
James M. Wayne
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James M. Wayne of Georgia was one of two Southern justices
(Tennessee’s John Catron was the other) who refused to resign
their Supreme Court seats during the war. Born in Savannah in
1790, educated at the College of New Jersey at Princeton,
Wayne was a veteran of Georgia politics, having served succes-
sively as a state legislator, mayor of Savannah, judge of the city’s
Court of Common Pleas, and judge of the Superior Court for the
Eastern District. He was a member of the federal House of Rep-
resentatives from 1829 until President Jackson appointed him to
the Supreme Court in 1835. Standing about five feet ten inches
tall, with a ruddy complexion, brown, wavy hair, and regular fea-
tures, Wayne was much admired by the ladies, especially as a
young man. Fond of good food, good whiskey, and well-aged
Madeira wine, he was likened during Buchanan’s administration
to “a portrait of St. Jerome by the tender pencil of Guido.”
Though a defender of slavery, Wayne was a loyal defender of the
Union during the war. His vote to sustain the blockade in the
Prize Cases (1863) made the difference between victory and a
crushing defeat for the administration. Wayne was in his sev-
enty-seventh year of life when he died in Washington on July 5,
1867, having completed thirty-two years, five months, and
twenty-one days of Supreme Court service, a record exceeded up
to that time only by the great Chief Justice John Marshall.
(Photo credit: Matthew Brady, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.)
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Roger Brooke Taney
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The octogenarian chief justice from Maryland was the
personification of judicial opposition to Lincoln. Andrew Jack-
son’s chief lieutenant in the controversy over the Bank of the
United States in the early 1830s, Taney had achieved a respect-
able record as a jurist before issuing his inflammatory opinion in
the Dred Scott case in 1857. Arguably the worst decision ever
made by the Supreme Court, Dred Scott excited antislavery
opinion throughout the country and, by inspiring much of the
Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, helped to elevate Abraham
Lincoln to the presidency. Dred Scott revealed Taney’s pervasive
pro-Southern bias, a bias that animated almost every judicial
thought he expressed during the war. His sharpest challenge to
Lincoln came in Ex parte Merryman in early 1861, in which he
held that the president’s suspension of habeas corpus was uncon-
stitutional. But the range of his disagreements with the presi-
dent was wide enough to cover the blockade, conscription, legal
tender, the federal income tax, and the imposition of martial
law. Although Taney agreed that secession was unconstitu-
tional, he also believed that the government had no power to
coerce secessionist states back into the Union. Tall, thin, and
stooped, with a mane of unruly hair, a pinched face, and to-
bacco-stained teeth, Taney had a quiet yet authoritative manner
that adversaries found difficult to deal with. When he died in
October 1864 at the age of eighty-seven, many believed that he
had outlived the spirit of his age.
(Photo credit: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.)
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]