Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,099

This is the grave of William Johnson.

Born in 1771 in St. James Goose Creek Parish (quite a name) South Carolina, Johnson didn’t grow up rich. His father was a blacksmith who had moved from New York. But Johnson Sr. was a major supporter of the Revolution, to the point that capturing his was an important target for the British military in 1775 and 1776. Finally captured, the rest of the family fled to New York. Johnson Sr. was eventually released and became a state legislator. Johnson ended up at Princeton, graduating in 1790. A rising star, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney mentored him and Johnson passed the bar shortly after.

Johnson was a big Jeffersonian and became a state legislator in 1794 and was there for three terms, serving as Speaker of the House for the last. Of course as he was rising in power he was buying slaves left and right, nothing like forced labor for the men proclaiming their liberty from the English.

Johnson was a locally respected guy with a good law practice and an interest in broader organization of the nation’s judiciary system when an opening appeared on the Supreme Court in 1804. Alfred Moore had retired after doing approximately nothing on the Court. So Thomas Jefferson nominated Johnson to replace him. Johnson was only 32, but this was an advantage. That’s not for the reasons it is today, which is presidents stacking the Court with young people to ensure their ideological legacy for a long time. It’s that these judges spent most of their time riding circuit around their district. Moore’s health was terrible and he couldn’t do what was then a really important part of the job, Johnson could. Johnson was also the first member of the Supreme Court who was not a member of the Federalist Party.

Now, Jefferson and his allies were really angry at the Supreme Court because of the last second judicial appointments by John Adams that led to the pioneering case of Marbury v. Madison. So having Johnson on the Court and then other allies would lead, they hoped to a better outcome for Jeffersonian politics. But it didn’t really work that way. Now, Johnson would be willing to dissent from John Marshall’s domination of the Court much more than the other justices. He was on the Court for a long time and he wrote a lot of dissents.

But in the end, Johnson turned out to be not that different from Marshall anyway. He usually did concur with Marshall on major cases. He also became the Court’s go-to person on smaller cases that we don’t really remember today, but which were important at the time, such as on land and insurance cases. What he was not was an opinion writer on major cases. He basically wrote almost no major opinions in three decades on the Court. The biggest exception was U.S. v. Hudson and Goodwin in 1812, which was a rare win for Jeffersonian principles, when the Court agreed with Johnson that courts didn’t have the constitutional power to develop common law crimes. The other major case was a disappointment for the Jeffersonians, when he wrote in Mechanics Bank of Alexandria v. Bank of Columbia in 1820 that gave judges some common law space to consider evidence if the contracts were unclear. This is kind of arcane stuff these days (in fact, if I am misunderstanding these cases, please feel free to correct me in the comments), but was important then.

What infuriated Jeffersonians is that Johnson sided with Marshall as often as he did, though in truth, Jefferson and then Madison’s appointees tended to fall into the same lane. Jefferson was furious when Johnson agreed with Marshall in Gilchrist v. Collector of Charleston, which was a rebuke of the Embargo Act, the stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by a president in American history. Jefferson stopped communicating with Johnson after that. He then joined the majority in Fletcher v. Peck, the critically important 1810 case that set the precedent that the Supreme Court could rule a state law unconstitutional, which again angered Jeffersonians. It was only a partial concurrence, but his voted mattered. Plus Johnson liked to issue partial concurrences. He didn’t even bother with that though in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, where the Court applied the Contract Clause to private corporations.

In fact, as time went on, Johnson wanted more forceful asserations of federal authority. What was really happening is that he was moving away from his youthful ideas and really becoming a Federalist, or a proto-Whig perhaps. Interestingly, Johnson also spoke out against the railroading of Denmark Vesey to death after his supposedly planned slave revolt in 1822. He stated in public documents that the South Carolina planters routinely believed there were slave revolts being planned without evidence and the evidence against Vesey was too weak for conviction. This did not make him friends back home. Among those furious with him for taking Vesey’s side was his own family. South Carolina whites were almost completely united except for Johnson. And when the state then overturned its law allowing for Black seamen to walk the streets of Charleston, Johnson invalidated the law as unconstitutional. He then joined the Marshall Court in Worcester v. Georgia that sided with the Cherokee in their fight to retain their homeland in Georgia. So yeah, southerners were questioning Johnson’s commitment to white supremacy.

As South Carolina moved toward its intensive hatred of the federal government and embrace of so-called state’s rights, which was purportedly around tariff issues but was really around slavery, its leaders saw Johnson as a total sellout. By the 1820s, he was basically an old school Federalist as much as anything. Because he was the circuit justice for the state, he had an enormous amount of power to stop much of what he didn’t like bubbling over there. Then came Nullification, which Johnson firmly and strongly opposed and did everything in his power to fight. Finally, in 1834, he left South Carolina, deciding to live in New York.

Alas, Johnson did not last long in New York. He had a bad infection in his jaw. Against the advice of people who told him that surgery would probably kill him, he had the surgery. Who knows, maybe it was actually cancer and he knew he would likely die anyway. But despite the lack of any way to relieve the pain of surgery, he did it and it indeed killed him. He was 62 years old.

William Johnson is buried in Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina. Though I guess there’s some question about whether he’s really there. Who knows.

If you would like this series to visit other Supreme Court justices from the early 19th century, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Bushrod Washington is in Mount Vernon, Virginia and Gabriel Duvall is in Glenn Dale, Maryland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.