Philip P. Barbour
Philip Pendleton Barbour (May 25, 1783 – February 25, 1841) was the tenth speaker of the United States House of Representatives and an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He is the only individual to serve in both positions.
Philip P. Barbour
Robert Taylor
May 25, 1783
Gordonsville, Virginia, U.S.
February 25, 1841 (aged 57)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
Democratic-Republican (Before 1825)
Democratic (1828–1841)
Born in Gordonsville, Virginia, Barbour established a legal career in Gordonsville after studying at the College of William & Mary. Several members of Barbour's family, including his brother, James Barbour, went on to hold prominent political office. Barbour won election to the House of Representatives in 1814 as a member of the Democratic-Republican Party. He served a single term as Speaker from 1821 to 1823 and declined to seek re-election to Congress in 1824. Barbour returned to Congress in 1827 as an ally of Andrew Jackson.
Barbour served in Congress until 1830, when he accepted appointment as a judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. President Jackson appointed Barbour to the Supreme Court in 1835 to fill a vacancy caused by the resignation in 1835 of Gabriel Duvall. Barbour served on the Court until his death in 1841. On the Court, Barbour generally supported Jacksonian principles and states' rights.
Early and family life[edit]
Barbour was born near Gordonsville, Orange County, Virginia, as the son of a planter, Thomas Barbour, who was a legislator, neighbor and early political sponsor of James Madison. He was named for his ancestor Philip Pendleton, through whom he was related to Edmund Pendleton, a politician and judge. The family was one of the First Families of Virginia, descended from a Scottish merchant who married a Miss Taliaferro and made his home in nearby Culpeper County, Virginia.[1]
Like his brother James Barbour, Philip attended common and private schools before beginning formal legal studies under jurist St. George Tucker in Williamsburg, Virginia, but financial circumstances forced Tucker to end this arrangement in 1799.
He soon moved to Kentucky to make his fortune, where after a year reading law, he was admitted to the bar, and began practicing law in Bardstown. After another year, friends persuaded him to return to Virginia and resume his studies at the College of William & Mary, so in 1802, he began practicing law near his family home in Gordonsville.[2]
In 1804, Barbour married a local planter's daughter, Frances Johnson, with whom he had one son named Sextus Barbour. Barbour was a slave owner.[3]
United States Supreme Court[edit]
Appointment[edit]
In 1835, Chief Justice Marshall's death and Justice Gabriel Duvall's resignation created two vacancies on the Supreme Court. President Jackson, at the end of his second Presidential term, nominated Judge Barbour to fill Duvall's vacancy. Nationalists feared Jackson's appointment of Barbour because Barbour's anti-administration Congressional legacy and Democratic beliefs suggested that he would attempt to undermine the federal supremacy achieved during the Marshall Court. This fear made the finalization of the decision an arduous process with two attempts at delaying the Senate's decision. On March 15, 1836, the Senate approved the appointment of Barbour by a vote of 30-11.
Tenure[edit]
Barbour served on the Supreme Court for five years. He heard 155 cases, for which he authored one major opinion and two dissents. His passion for states' rights, strict constructionism, and limits on federal power helped shape the legacy of the Taney Court.
During Barbour's first term (1837), he heard three cases that mitigated Marshall's accomplishment of judicial nationalism, Briscoe v. Bank of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, and New York v. Miln. Justice Barbour authored the majority opinion in New York v. Miln. In 1824, the state of New York passed a law that required all ship masters to provide a report delineating personal information of passengers in order to prevent smuggling and immigration of the impoverished for whom the state could not provide. Ship master Miln refused to comply with the law and was therefore jailed and fined. The case went to the Court on the issue of whether the statute violated the Commerce Clause, U.S. Const., Art. 1, § 8. Barbour held that the New York statute did not violate the Commerce Clause, because it was an exercise of the power granted to the state to "regulate their internal police and to take care that no detriment comes to the commonwealth."[9] People were "not the subject of commerce, and not being imported goods, cannot fall within a train of reasoning founded upon the construction of a power given to Congress to regulate commerce and the prohibition to the states from imposing a duty on imported goods."[10] Justice Barbour argued that the statute was valid as an act of police power to protect the health and welfare of the community. Because it is within the powers of the state to have jurisdiction over its people and things within its territorial boundaries, then "the authority of a state is complete, unqualified, and exclusive."[11]
Justice Barbour's holding in Miln was supported by Taney's opinion in Charles River Bridge that the people have rights and it is the duty of both the state and the nation to preserve those rights in order to ensure the happiness and welfare of every citizen. Miln helped Barbour develop a states' rights constitutional vision for the Supreme Court, by narrowing the scope of federal commerce power while expanding state policing power. For both Briscoe v. Bank of the Commonwealth of Kentucky and Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, Barbour voted with the majority, simultaneously gaining more power for states and weakening Marshall Court nationalism.
While Barbour did not spend enough time on the court to amass a large body of judicial opinions, he authored dissents in Kendall v. United States ex rel. Stokes (1838) and Holmes v. Jennison (1840). These two dissents sought to diminish federal authority by supporting Jacksonian political aspirations and opposing restrictions to state sovereignty. Kendall dealt with judicial supervision of executive acts. In 1835, President Jackson appointed Amos Kendall the Postmaster General for the United States. A firm, Stockton and Stokes, had had a contract with the previous Postmaster General, and demanded payment of outstanding debts thereunder, which Kendall declined, in favor of the debt-ridden U.S. Postal Service's other creditors.
The Court viewed Kendall as a proceeding against an Executive Branch official who acted within the scope of his powers. The Court dealt with the issues of whether it had jurisdiction to hear the case under Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and whether it had the power to issue a writ of mandamus under Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 to an official of the Executive Branch. The majority held that the Supreme Court could issue a writ of mandamus to "compel the Postmaster General to perform any ministerial duty devolved on him by law."[12] This issue and holding is similar to that in Marbury v. Madison (1803), which also involved writs of mandamus to an executive officer and held that the Supremacy Clause in Article VI and the notion of popular sovereignty granted the Court jurisdiction over state court cases and the power of judicial review to make legitimate and final rulings on constitutional questions.
Justices Taney and Catron concurred with Barbour's opinion that it was never within the scope of judicial power to control executive actions. Although Barbour believed that "Congress has the constitutional power to give to the federal judiciary …authority to issue the writ of mandamus,"[13] Barbour did not believe that the lower court had the "power to issue the writ in question".[14] Even though the Postmaster General was subject to direction and control of the President with respect of the duties imposed by law, when the law is 'ministerial,' Congress can limit and regulate the executive officials.[15] Because Congress created the executive office, then Congress could monitor executive decisions, but the President is not controlled by the federal courts. While the majority opinion served to further define separation of powers by holding acts of the executive branch as subject to the rulings of the Supreme Court, Barbour's dissenting opinion sought to discourage judicial supervision of executive acts by applying President Jackson's departmental theory, the notion that the executive branch has the right to interpret the Constitution for itself. Barbour's opinion in Kendall demonstrated his loyalty to President Jackson's political agenda.
Barbour made his most powerful argument in favor of states' rights in Holmes v. Jennison (1840), which focused on the extradition of a fugitive from Vermont to Canada. In 1838, George Holmes, a resident of Quebec, was convicted of murdering Louis Paschal Achille Tache in Canada. Holmes escaped to the United States where he was detained under issue of warrant in Vermont. Silas H. Jennison, the governor of Vermont, issued the warrant stating that Holmes, being a citizen of the lower province of Canada, would be arrested and returned to suffer prosecution according to the Canadian justice system, even though the United States had no extradition treaty with Canada. Because the Vermont Supreme Court refused to issue a writ of habeas corpus, Holmes petitioned to the Supreme Court on grounds that he was unlawfully imprisoned and deprived of his personal liberties.
The case became a contentious debate further polarizing the Court between nationalists and states' rights Justices. Holmes focused on whether the Court had the authority to review the case based on Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and whether the governor's warrant violated the Extradition Clause of Article IV, section 2 of the Constitution, which gave the federal government power to surrender a fugitive to a foreign government. Chief Justice Taney believed that the case fell within the Court's jurisdiction and that the federal government had the exclusive power to engage in foreign relations and so believed that the governor had violated the Extradition Clause.
However, as the Court divided 4-4 over the issue of jurisdiction, the Court dismissed the petition. The Vermont Supreme Court subsequently ordered Holmes released in light of the fact that five of the eight Justices expressed the opinion that the governor had violated the Extradition Clause, an expression of the principle that the Constitution gives state officers no power to take independent actions concerned with foreign governments. Barbour was one of the four Justices who disagreed with the Chief Justice. Barbour believed that, because "there is no treaty on the subject of surrendering fugitives,"[16] between Vermont and Canada, then the returning of fugitives to Canada did not violate a power granted to the federal government by the Constitution, and therefore the "authority, exercised by the Governor of Vermont, is not repugnant to the power of making treaties in its dormant state, because, in the language of the Chief Justice before cited, it is not the mere existence of the power but its exercise which is incompatible with the exercise of the same power by the states."[17] Barbour opined that, because the Constitution did not explicitly define the affairs of states with foreign countries, Governor Jennison was completely within his rights to order the extradition.
Barbour's opinion in Holmes accorded with his opinion in New York v. Miln that the state has the duty to maintain the welfare of its people. Holmes v. Jennison provides an example of Barbour's strict reading of the Constitution, which allowed him to read a more pronounced states' rights view into the text.
Note(s)