Morrison Waite
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Morrison Remick Waite | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| In office March 4, 1874 – March 23, 1888 |
|
| Nominated by | Ulysses S. Grant |
| Preceded by | Salmon P. Chase |
| Succeeded by | Melville Fuller |
|
|
|
| Born | November 29, 1816 Lyme, Connecticut |
| Died | March 23, 1888 (aged 71) Washington, DC |
Morrison Remick Waite (November 29, 1816 – March 23, 1888) was the Chief Justice of the United States from 1874 to 1888.
He was born at Lyme, Connecticut, the son of Henry Matson Waite, who was a judge of the Superior Court and associate judge of the Supreme Court of Connecticut in 1834-1854 and chief justice of the latter in 1854-1857.
He graduated from Yale as a member of the Skull and Bones Society in 1837, and soon afterwards moved to Maumee, Ohio, where he studied law in the office of Samuel L. Young and was admitted to the bar in 1839. In 1850, he moved to Toledo, and he soon came to be recognized as a leader of the state bar. In politics, he was first a Whig and later a Republican, and, in 1849-1850, he was a member of the Ohio Senate. Before the Civil War, Waite opposed slavery and the southern slave states withdrawal from the Union. In 1871, with William M. Evarts and Caleb Cushing, he represented the United States as counsel before the Alabama Tribunal at Geneva, and, in 1874, he presided over the Ohio constitutional convention. In the same year he was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to succeed Judge Salmon P. Chase as Chief Justice of the United States, and he held this position until his death at March 23, 1888 in Washington, D.C. The nomination was not well-received. Former Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles remarked of the nomination that "It is a wonder that Grant did not pick up some old acquaintenance, who was a stage driver or bartender, for the place," and the political journal "The Nation" said "Mr Waite stands in the front-rank of second-rank lawyers."
Contents |
[edit] The Waite Court, 1874-1888
In the cases which grew out of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and especially in those which involved the interpretation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, he sympathized with the general tendency of the court to restrict the further extension of the powers of the Federal government. In a particularly notable ruling in United States v. Cruikshank, he struck down the Enforcement Act, ruling that "The very highest duty of the States, when they entered into the Union under the Constitution, was to protect all persons within their boundaries in the enjoyment of these 'unalienable rights with which they were endowed by their Creator.' Sovereignty, for this purpose, rests alone with the States. It is no more the duty or within the power of the United States to punish for a conspiracy to falsely imprison or murder within a State, than it would be to punish for false imprisonment or murder itself." He concluded that "We may suspect that race was the cause of the hostility but is it not so averred" . His belief was that white moderates should set the rules of racial relations in the South which reflected the majority of the Court and the people of the United States which was tired of the bitter racial strife involved with the affairs of Reconstruction. This decisions practically overturned the Fourteenth Amendment. This belief backfired when arch-segregationists in the South regained power and legislated the infamous Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised African-Americans in the South. These laws lasted long into the Twentieth Century.
In his opinion of Munn vs Illinois (1877) which was a one of a group of six Granger cases involving Populist-inspired state legislation to fix maximum rates chargable by grain elevators and railroads he said when a business or private property was "affected with a public interest" it was subject to governmental regulation. Thus he was ruling against charges that Granger laws constituted encroachment of private property without due process of law and conflicted with the Fourteenth Amendment. The ardent New Dealers in the Franklin Roosevelt administration looked to Munn vs Illinois to guide them in matters like due process, commerce and contract clauses .
He concurred with the majority in the Head Money Cases (1884), the Ku-Klux Case (United States v. Harris, 1883), the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and the Legal Tender Case (Juillard v. Greenman) (1883). Among his own most important decisions were those in the Enforcement Act Cases (1875), the Sinking Fund Cases (1878), the Railroad Commission Cases (1886) and the Telephone Cases (1887).
In 1876 when there was talk about a third term for President Grant some Republicans turned to Waite as they believed he was a better presidential nominee for the Republican Party than the scandal-tainted Grant. Waite turned down the idea arguing "my duty was not to make it a stepping stone to someone else but to preserve it's purity and make my own name as honorable as that of any of my predecessors" . In the aftermath of the presidential election of 1876 he refused to sit on the Electoral Commission which decided the electoral votes of Florida because of his close friendship of GOP presidential nominee Rutherford Hayes.
As Chief Justice he swore in Presidents Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur and Grover Cleveland.
There is reason to believe that Justice Waite was not highly regarded by every one. One quote, attributed to one of his brother Justices, call him "an experiment no President has a right to make with our Court"
[edit] Black education and administration of the Court
He was one of the Peabody Trustees of Southern Education and was a vocal advocate to aiding schools for the education of blacks in the south.
Like his successor Melville Fuller, he is regarded as a capable and competent administrator of the Supreme Court. While his Court was sceptical of the women vote he himself sympathized with the women's rights movement and supported admission of women to the Supreme Court bar.
[edit] Frankfurters view of Waite
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said of him - "he did not confine the constitution within the limits of his own experience...The disciplined and disinterested lawyer in him transcended the bounds of the environment within which he moved and the views of the client whom he served at the bar" .
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
| Preceded by Salmon P. Chase |
Chief Justice of the United States March 4, 1874 – March 23, 1888 |
Succeeded by Melville Fuller |
| Chief Justices of the United States of America |  |
|---|---|
| Jay • Rutledge • Ellsworth • Marshall • Taney • Chase • Waite • Fuller • White • Taft • Hughes • Stone • Vinson • Warren • Burger • Rehnquist • Roberts |
| The Waite Court |  |
|
|---|---|---|
| 1874–1877: | N. Clifford | N.H. Swayne | S.F. Miller | D. Davis | S.J. Field | Wm. Strong | J.P. Bradley | W. Hunt | |
| 1877–1880: | N. Clifford | N.H. Swayne | S.F. Miller | S.J. Field | Wm. Strong | J.P. Bradley | W. Hunt | J.M. Harlan | |
| 1881: | N. Clifford | S.F. Miller | S.J. Field | J.P. Bradley | W. Hunt | J.M. Harlan | Wm. B. Woods | Th. S. Matthews | |
| 1882–1887: | S.F. Miller | S.J. Field | J.P. Bradley | J.M. Harlan | Wm. B. Woods | Th. S. Matthews | H. Gray | S. Blatchford | |
| 1888: | S.F. Miller | S.J. Field | J.P. Bradley | J.M. Harlan | Th. S. Matthews | H. Gray | S. Blatchford | L.Q.C. Lamar II | |
