Background
Mr. Duvall was born on December 6, 1752, at Marietta, a 3,000-acre family plantation in Prince George's County, Maryland, United States. He was the sixth child of Benjamin Duvall and Susannah Tyler Duvall.
GabrielDuvall.jpgGabriel Duvall (1811-1835), Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court, The Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Judge Gabriel Duvall.
Mr. Duvall was born on December 6, 1752, at Marietta, a 3,000-acre family plantation in Prince George's County, Maryland, United States. He was the sixth child of Benjamin Duvall and Susannah Tyler Duvall.
The history of Gabriel Duvall's early years, including his education, remains obscure, but he embarked on the study of law in Annapolis, Maryland, before the start of the Revolutionary War. The war intruded on a prospective legal career, but Gabriel Duvall plunged into its turmoil with vigor.
Mr. Duvall was admitted to the bar in 1778, and like many lawyers of his day he labored to establish a legal practice while also participating in political affairs. He won election to the Maryland State Council in 1782 and to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1787. In the latter year he was also chosen to represent Maryland at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, though he and the other delegates declined to serve - they for reasons that can only be the subject of conjecture, apparently because of his marriage while the Convention was still under way.
In 1794 Gabriel Duvall entered the arena of national politics after being elected to serve out the term of a Maryland congressman who had resigned. Mr. Duvall himself resigned this position in 1796 to accept a position as chief justice of the Maryland General Court, the seat previously occupied by Samuel Chase, who had himself been appointed as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. That year, and in 1800, he also served as an elector in the presidential elections. After six years on the Maryland General Court, he accepted an appointment to serve in President Jefferson’s administration as the first comptroller of the U.S. Treasury. He continued in this post after James Madison had assumed the presidency.
In 1810 President Madison had his first opportunity to make appointments to the Supreme Court when Justice William Cushing of Massachusetts died. Before he could find a successor for Mr. Cushing, Justice Samuel Chase of Maryland also died, leaving two seats on the Court vacant. The president’s early attempts to fill William Cushing’s position produced no success. Levi Lincoln, former attorney general, declined to accept the post; Alexander Wolcott failed to be confirmed by the Senate; and John Quincy Adams, minister to Russia at the time, also refused the nomination. Mr. Madison eventually nominated Joseph Story and Gabriel Duvall to fill the two vacancies on November 15, 1811. The Senate promptly confirmed the nominations, and Mr. Story and Mr. Duvall joined the Court of Chief Justice John Marshall.
During his quarter century on the Court, he wrote only 17 opinions, these generally in minor commercial and maritime cases. He was loyal to the chief justice, even when Mr. Marshall failed to secure a majority of the Court to support his view of the case in Ogden v. Saunders (1827); the triumvirate of John Marshall, Joseph Story, and Gabriel Duvall joined in a dissent written by Mr. Marshall. In Ogden, the only important constitutional case in which John Marshall dissented, the majority rejected the chief justice’s contention that a New York insolvency law violated the contracts clause of the Constitution, even as applied to contracts entered into after the enactment of the statute.
When Gabriel Duvall took the seat as an associate justice on the Supreme Court, he was nearly 60 years old. He served on the Court into his 80s, and the latter half of his tenure on the Court found him increasingly debilitated by illness and deafness.
He therefore clung to his seat, until he was assured in the mid-1830s that President Andrew Jackson wished to replace him with a fellow Maryland lawyer, Roger Brook Taney. Only then did Mr. Duvall resign, on January 14, 1835. Chief Justice John Marshall died, however, in the summer of 1835, and President Jackson appointed Mr. Taney to assume this seat instead of Gabriel Duvall’s. The Virginian Philip Barbour would ultimately replace Justice Duvall in 1836. After he retired from the Supreme Court, Gabriel Duvall returned to Marietta, his family plantation in Maryland.
Mr. Duvall was an adherent of the Anti-Federalist (Democratic-Republican) Party.
Physical Characteristics: As he grew older, his appearance became strikingly venerable. One observer described him as having a head as "white as a snow-bank, with a long white cue hanging down to his waist." As Gabriel Duvall aged, his hearing declined to the point of near deafness.
Gabriel Duvall get married to Mary Brice on July 24, 1787. This union proved tragically short, for his wife died in 1790 following the birth of their first and only child. His subsequent marriage to Jane Gibbon in 1795 lasted until she died nearly 40 years later.