John Catron was an American jurist who served as a US Supreme Court justice from 1837 to 1865. He served alongside Chief Justice Roger B. Taney on the Supreme Court for almost 30 years.
Background
Ethnicity:
John Catron was born to a German immigrant family on his father’s side.
Mr. Catron was born in Pennsylvania, United States, on January 7, 1786. His father, Peter (Catron) Kettering, had immigrated as a child with his parents from Mittelbrun in the German Palatinate and settled in Montgomery County (later Wyeth County). His mother was Maria Elizabetha Houck, whose parents had settled in Virginia after emigrating from the Palatinate by way of Pennsylvania. His only sibling, Mary, later married Thomas Swift and moved to Missouri and, ultimately, Oregon. John Catron was a second cousin to Thomas Benton Catron, who later became one of the first senators to represent the state of New Mexico. Mr. Catron's father had served in Captain William Doack's militia company from Montgomery County during the Revolutionary War.
Education
John Catron studied law briefly before undertaking military service for Tennessee and eventually serving under General Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812. After this military career he resumed legal studies and was admitted to the practice of law in 1815.
Career
For his first few years of work as an attorney, Mr. Catron engaged in a general practice, supplemented by part-time work as a prosecuting attorney. In 1818 he moved to Nashville. Legal practice in Tennessee during this period typically involved substantial attention to the land disputes that plagued a state in which early land grants had been documented only casually and in which land values had climbed precipitously. John Catron quickly became an expert in this area of the law, and by 1824 his increasing political connections and acknowledged expertise in the area of land titles had contributed to his being elected to Tennessee’s highest court, the Court of Errors and Appeals.
After seven years of service on the court, he was appointed its chief justice in 1831. During the same period, John Catron became part owner of a profitable iron works; the eventual sale of his share in this business in 1833 earned him $20,000. While on the Court of Errors and Appeals, he demonstrated his political affinity with General Andrew Jackson, under whom he had served during the War of 1812, by publishing a series of attacks on the Bank of the United States that would presage Mr. Jackson’s own subsequent war against the Bank after he became president.
Amendments to the Tennessee constitution abolished John Catron’s judicial seat in 1834, sending him back to the private practice of law. Mr. Catron kept his hand in political affairs, though, by managing the 1836 election campaign of Martin Van Buren, President Andrew Jackson’s vice president and Mr. Jackson’s choice as his successor. When Van Buren won the election, Mr. Jackson did not neglect to demonstrate gratitude for John Catron’s political service and for his sound Jacksonian views. Early in 1837, Congress amended the Judiciary Act to create a new circuit for the federal court of appeals - the Ninth - and increased the number of seats on the Supreme Court from seven to nine. As one of his last official acts before the inauguration of his successor, President Jackson nominated John Catron to fill one of the newly created seats on the Court. The Senate confirmed Mr. Catron’s appointment to the high court on March 8, 1837, and he took the oath of office on May 1, 1837. Thus, at the age of 51, Associate Justice John Catron began a career on the Court that would last until his death in 1865, just over 28 years later.
As a member of the Court led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Mr. Catron contributed to the new majority’s modest revision of the strong nationalism characteristic of decisions during the John Marshall era of the Court. This revision emphasized the legitimate power of states to regulate some matters affecting interstate commerce, especially in cases involving the protection of public health and welfare. The power over health and welfare - often referred to as the "police power" of a state - was, according to John Catron, "not touched by the Constitution, but left to the States as the Constitution found it." Thus, he joined a majority of the Court in the Licence Cases (1847), upholding the power of a state to limit the importation of liquor into that state from foreign countries and other states. John Catron’s deference to state police power in the Licence Cases did not represent an unthinking states’ rights absolutism, however; two years later, in the Passenger Cases (1849), he joined a majority of the Court in holding invalid certain state laws taxing immigrants when these laws conflicted with federal statutes on this subject.
The most famous case decided by the Taney court was Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), one in winch Associate Justice Catron played a significant role behind the scenes. As the Court deliberated the case internally, John Catron served as a conduit of information to James Buchanan on the eve of his inauguration, advising him of the likely result in the case. Mr. Catron even suggested that Mr. Buchanan encourage Justice Robert Grier to use the case as an opportunity to make some substantive resolution of the slavery issue rather than decide it on narrow, technical grounds. With John Catron’s inside information, James Buchanan was able to promise at his inauguration that he would uphold the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, "whatever this may be."
The Supreme Court ultimately ruled against Dred Scott’s claim that his travels into free territory had made him free, but the justices announced their respective decisions in a variety of opinions. Chief Justice Taney argued that Mr. Scott had no right to present a claim in federal court, because he was - by reason of his race - disqualified from holding U.S. citizenship. In addition, Mr. Taney ruled that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional. John Catron, though his early state court opinion in Fisher’s Negroes v. Dabbs (1834) suggested a clear affinity with Mr. Taney’s conclusion about Dred Scott’s citizenship, nevertheless declined to address this issue. Instead, he based his conclusion chiefly on the observation that the original terms of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty protected the property rights of slaveholders and thus superseded any contrary provisions of the Missouri Compromise. Furthermore, slaveholders’ rights were also protected constitutionally by the privileges and immunities clause, which guaranteed to the citizens of each state the privileges and immunities possessed by citizens of other states.
The members of the majority in the Dred Scott case hoped to settle the slavery issue by lending the weight of the Court’s authority to a resolution of the question. This hope proved illusory, however. With the onset of the Civil War, John Catron found himself at odds with his home state, which ultimately joined the Confederacy. Even before Tennessee formally asserted its decision to depart the Union, Mr. Catron was forced to leave the state when he attempted to hold circuit court there. Stripped of property in Tennessee worth $100,000 and exiled for a time from his wife, John Catron supported Union military authority by declining to grant writs of habeas corpus to release Confederate sympathizers. His view of the emergency powers of Union authorities during wartime was limited, though; he dissented in the Prize Cases (1863), which upheld President Abraham Lincoln’s blockade of Southern ports shortly after the Civil War began. John Catron lived just long enough to see the Union preserved by the South’s surrender.
John Catron was an outspoken critic of the national bank, an advocate for federal power over corporate power, and a pro-Union, pro-slavery supporter. Many of his beliefs stemmed from the beliefs of his friend and battlefield leader, Andrew Jackson. Mr. Catron fought against corporations of accumulated wealth and privilege and for the rights of citizens. He remained true to his pro-slavery stance in the most important case the Supreme Court had ever seen until that point, Dred Scott v. Sandford. Despite his pro-slavery stance, John Catron was a strong advocate for the Union and remained steadfast to this view, even leaving his wife and friends to help in the preservation of the United States. Ultimately, John Catron's most important contribution to the Supreme Court of the United States was his loyalty to the Constitution and his undying support of the Federal Union, despite the political costs.
Connections
Sometime during this period, Mr. Catron married Maltida Childress. The union produced no children. A slaveholder all his adult life, John Catron had a relationship with Sally, a Tennessee slave in her 30s who had a laundry in Nashville and was held by the Thomas family. He fathered her third mixed-race son, whom she named James P. Thomas. In his lifetime, Mr. Catron gave his son 25 cents. James Thomas was born into slavery but when he was six, his mother effectively bought his freedom. She was unable to gain full manumission for him then, but he gained an education and successfully built a business as a barber in Nashville. Because of his achievements, in 1851 he gained manumission as well as permission from the Tennessee legislature to stay in the state. Later he owned property in St. Louis, Missouri valued at $250,000. James Thomas was Mr. Catron's only known child.