Spencer Roane was a Virginia lawyer, politician and jurist.
Background
Spencer Roane was born on April 4, 1762 in Essex County, Virginia, about fifty miles northeast of Richmond. His parents were of good stock, widely connected and locally important: his mother was the daughter of Col. Spencer Ball, though apparently not Judith Ball, as sometimes stated; and his father, William Roane (the son of William Roane, who came to America in 1741, one of four sterling Scotch immigrant brothers), was a burgess and a Revolutionary volunteer.
Education
From Scotch tutors at home and academic courses at the College of William and Mary, where he was active in the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Spencer Roane gained a broadened outlook and an abiding liking for good literature. Simultaneously, devotion to personal liberty and hostility to special privileges were being fixed in his mind as first principles of good government by his father's admiring talk of Patrick Henry and the reading of current political writings, especially George Mason's Declaration of Rights and Jefferson's bill for establishing religious freedom, which he later often called "sublime. "
Career
The lectures of George Wythe, some instruction in Philadelphia, and much reading at home, especially of Coke, fitted him for the bar, to which he was admitted in 1782. While in the House of Delegates he roomed with Richard Henry Lee, served on committees with John Marshall and Patrick Henry, and voted rather independently though oftenest with Henry. Elected by the legislature to the Council of State at twenty-two, he was for two years an advisor to Governor Henry.
He preferred amendment of the Articles of Confederation to the proposed federal Constitution and as "A Plain Dealer" attacked Governor Edmund Randolph for wavering in the matter; but when the Constitution had been ratified and clarified by amendment he strongly supported it.
After two sessions in the state Senate, in 1788 and 1789, he became in 1789 a judge of the General Court. Having tried cases for five years, in all parts of the state and before an able bar, he was elected by the legislature in 1794, at thirty-two, to the supreme court of appeals, whose other members were elderly and distinguished men.
Of his twenty-seven years' service here the report of competent observers and scholars is: that he read widely; that he attacked each case eagerly and penetratingly and, insisting upon individual judgment and responsibility, wrote clear and vigorous opinions on most of them; that his opinions were generally sound, strongest in constitutional law, inclining (though not unfairly) to the side of liberty rather than property, mindful of precedent and the law as a science but also keenly alert to the public policies of his own progressive age.
In 1793 he had upheld the right of the General Court to declare void an unconstitutional act of the legislature; he supported the legislature's right to deprive the clergy of their glebes notwithstanding his belief in the political value of religion; he approved the manumission of slaves according to "the policy of the country". Simultaneously, Roane was becoming politically important.
Though Federalist tactics prevented his becoming federal chief justice, as Jefferson desired, he founded the Richmond Enquirer (1804) and with its editor, his cousin Thomas Ritchie, and President Brockenbrough of the Virginia State Bank, supported Madison and union in 1808 and Madison and war in 1812.
Support of the Union against foreign powers, however, by no means implied acceptance of internal consolidation - especially when it came through the devices, which he regarded as insidious and usurping, of the federal Supreme Court under John Marshall. In the Fairfax case his court flatly refused (1815) to execute the federal court's order. Less dramatic but more important because he led a reaction now becoming nation-wide were his articles signed "Amphictyon, " "Hampden, " and "Algernon Sidney" in the Enquirer of May and June 1819, and May 1821.
Being opinion-building in intent, these articles were lengthy and not without extreme and sometimes abusive language. As any one but "a deplorable idiot" could see, he said, "there is no earthly difference between an unlimited grant of power and a grant limited in its terms, but accompanied with unlimited means of carrying it into execution".
The federal Supreme Court, being not "master" but "subordinate agent, " should be corrected by the sovereign people through the interposition of the states - though, of course, only on occasions "deeply and essentially affecting the vital principles of their political system". Heartily approved by many Republican leaders, including Jefferson, these articles estranged certain others; they frightened without converting John Marshall; they led to fruitless legislative resolutions seeking constitutional amendment; they reinvigorated the extreme state-rights theory.
Though some have deemed Roane a disunionist and a father of secession, he himself described his position as "entirely federal"; he had in mind, no doubt, a Union of dignified and powerful states, each able to protect individual freedom and initiative against mere numbers or wealth.
Roane maintained at "Spring Garden" in Hanover County a good-sized estate which he supervised with interest and practical intelligence; here he lived after moving from Essex about 1802 until he went to Richmond, where about 1815 he built a substantial residence close by John Marshall's. Continually interested in the details of state government, he has sometimes been pictured as a state boss. None, however, has accused him of seeking personal profit therefrom; and undue interference awaits printed proof.
Keen-minded and self-possessed to the end, he died at the Virginia Warm Springs of a "lingering indisposition" from which he had long suffered.
Achievements
Religion
Roane was a Presbyterian, not a member of the formally established Episcopal Church, and religious freedom for Baptists and Presbyterians was a hot topic during legislative sessions of the new Commonwealth.
Politics
A strict constructionist, like most of Henry's old following, he had damned the Alien and Sedition Acts and supported positively the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and Report of 1799. He felt that the latter contained "the renewed sense of the people of Virginia", and regarded Jefferson's election as a ratification of their doctrines.
Personality
Though his warm temper and the energy of his character sometimes brought discord into the court, he was admitted to be its ablest member and the stoutest defender of its independence against legislative imposition as well as the federal Supreme Court's assertion of superiority.
Connections
He married Anne Henry on September 7, 1786. After his first wife's death in 1799 he married Elizabeth Hoskins but without any lessening of affectionate and practical interest in his nine living children by the former, one of whom, William H. Roane, he rejoiced to see seated in Congress.