Noah Haynes Swayne was an American jurist and politician. Despite his best efforts, Noah H. Swayne never became chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He did, however, serve almost 20 years as an associate justice on the Court, having pursued this post with the same measure of zeal and political resourcefulness as he would later apply to his attempt to capture the chief seat.
Background
Mr. Swayne was born on December 7, 1804, to parents who migrated from Pennsylvania to Frederick County, Virginia, United States, the place of his birth. Noah Swayne was the last of nine children born to Joshua and Rebecca Smith Swayne. The death of his father when he was four years old cast the care of a large family on his mother.
Education
Noah Swayne gained his education first from a local school and then at the Quaker academy operated by Jacob Mendenhall in Waterford, Virginia. Following two years at Mr. Mendenhall’s school, the young Hoah Swayne embarked on the study of medicine with George A. Thornton in Alexandria. His prospects for a medical career were cut short by Mr. Thornton’s death a year later, though, and he turned next to preparing himself for college by studying classics at an academy in Alexandria. But news that his guardian would not be able to pay for the cost of a college education caused him to prepare instead for a career in the law. He therefore apprenticed himself to the law office of John Scott and Francis Brooks in Warrenton, Virginia, and gained admission to the bar in 1823.
Career
Not yet 20 years of age, Mr. Swayne possessed such a fierce hatred of slavery that he chose to leave his home state and strike out on horseback for Ohio. He settled first in Zanesville, then migrated north to Coshocton, where he established a successful law practice in 1825. Within a year he had been appointed prosecuting attorney for Coshocton County.
The next decade saw Noah Swayne immerse himself in the legal and political affairs of his adopted state. In 1829 he won election to the Ohio legislature as a Jacksonian Democrat. When he contemplated accepting the nomination for a scat in the U.S. Congress the following year, President Andrew Jackson persuaded him to accept instead the post of U.S. attorney for Ohio, a position Mr. Swayne held until 1841. Service as U.S. attorney required Noah Swayne to move to Columbus, Ohio, and promptly freed the slaves his wife brought to their union. As if life were not already full enough for the young man, he served on the Columbus city council in 1834 and won election to another term in the Ohio legislature in 1836.
Noah Swayne also continued to practice law during this period, and in 1839 he formed a partnership with James Bates. Alter this partnership disbanded in 1852, Mr. Swayne formed another practice with Llewellyn Taber that lasted until the end of the 1850s. Throughout these years, Noah Swayne earned a statewide reputation as an outstanding trial lawyer. He also contributed considerable time and energy to a variety of civic causes, serving as a delegate from Ohio sent to Washington to resolve a boundary dispute, as a member of a commission appointed to reduce Ohio’s public debt, and as a member of another commission charged with surveying the condition of the blind in the state.
In April 1861 the death of Justice John McLean of Ohio, a friend of Noah Swayne, created a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Justice McLean had made it known that he hoped Mr. Swayne might succeed him. Following Mr. McLean’s death, therefore, he wasted no time in launching a vigorous campaign to have President Lincoln appoint him to the Court. He had the support of the entire Ohio congressional delegation and immediately solicited the aid of Salmon Chase, Abraham Lincoln’s treasury secretary, also from Ohio, and Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Noah Swayne even hurried to Washington himself to investigate his prospects. Mr. Lincoln ultimately nominated him on January 21, 1862, and three days later the Senate confirmed the appointment with only a single dissent.
The years following the Civil War saw the Constitution amended to include the Reconstruction Amendments: the Thirteenth, which abolished slavery; the Fourteenth, which guaranteed the equal protection and due process of the law against infringement by state government; and the Fifteenth, which prohibited racial discrimination in connection with voting. Soon after ratification of these amendments, the Supreme Court was called on to interpret their sweeping terms. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), for example, the Court considered the applicability of the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment to a challenge brought against a monopoly granted by the state of Louisiana to a particular New Orleans slaughterhouse. Competitors of the favored company challenged the monopoly, arguing in part that it deprived them of rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment - in particular, the protection of their "privileges and immunities." Justice Swayne agreed that deprivation of the chance to engage in a business enterprise might well present a claim under the privileges and immunities clause. He found himself on the losing side of this constitutional issue, though. Justice Samuel Miller wrote the opinion for the majority of the Court, concluding that the Fifteenth Amendment had no application to the case. He interpreted the privileges and immunities clause narrowly and doubted whether any of the other provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment would have an expansive application. For Mr. Swayne, however, the amendment’s guarantees were plain and not to be whittled away by the cleverness of Supreme Court justices. The future would at least partially vindicate Mr. Swayne’s views. Although the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment would never rebound from the cramped construction given it by the Court, the other provisions of the amendment - the equal protection and due process clauses in particular - would become important guarantors of civil rights and civil liberties in the 20th century.
Justice Swayne’s most significant opportunity to speak on behalf of the Court came in Springer v. United States (1881). The case involved a challenge to the federal income tax that had been levied during the Civil War. He concluded for the Court that the income tax did not amount to a "direct tax" and therefore did not have to be apportioned among the states according to population, as required by the Constitution, since it did not tall directly on individuals but on their profits and other income. Fourteen years later, a new majority on the Court would reopen the issue in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1895) by invalidating the 1894 income tax as a direct tax not apportioned among the states. Ultimately the nation would have to adopt the Sixteenth Amendment to obtain the result that Noah Swayne had originally approved.
In 1864, two years after Noah Swayne joined the Supreme Court as an associate justice, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney died. Though President Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, was widely expected to replace Mr. Taney in the chief seat, Mr. Swayne lobbied vigorously to receive the appointment himself. But President Lincoln proceeded as expected and appointed Mr. Chase chief justice in December 1864. Less than 10 years later, though, Mr. Chase himself was dead and the chief seat on the Court vacant again. Noah Swayne was a little more than a year away from being 70 years old, but zeal to be chief justice once again inspired him to maneuver for the position. His old antagonist on the Court, Justice Samuel Miller, observed caustically that Mr. Swayne had "artfully beslobbered the President" for the nomination. But President Ulysses S. Grant chose Morrison Waite instead, thus ending for all practical purposes Mr. Swayne’s long campaign to become chief justice. Within a few years it was abundantly clear that President Grant had made the right decision because of Noah Swayne's illness. Nevertheless, he clung doggedly to his seat until President Rutherford B. Hayes persuaded him to step down in 1881 in return for the president’s commitment to replace him with his close friend Stanley Matthews.
Achievements
Religion
Mr. Swayne was a son of devout Quaker parents.
Politics
The 1850s saw the creation of the Republican party. Mr. Swayne, a Jacksonian Democrat until this time, soon joined the new party, whose views on slavery more closely paralleled his own. He supported Republican presidential candidate John C. Fremont in the election of 1856 and cheered with other Republicans when their candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidential election of 1860.
Noah Swayne was Abraham Lincoln’s first appointment to the Supreme Court and generally considered to be his weakest. From Mr. Lincoln’s perspective, though, Justice Swayne proved at least to be a loyal supporter of the administration’s war effort. He joined a majority in the Court both in upholding President Lincoln’s blockade of Southern ports prior to a congressional declaration of war in the Prize Car. Even after the war ended and most of the Court became less receptive to the kind of extraordinary measures necessary, perhaps, to preserve the Union but not - in the minds of the justices - necessary to the postwar era, Mr. Swayne continued to support vigorous actions to suppress disloyalty.
Connections
Noah Swayne married Sarah Ann Wager of Virginia in 1832.