Sketches of the Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene: Major General of the Armies of the United States, in the War of the Revolution; Volume 1
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. A comprehensive work about the major general in the Continental Army who played a vital role in the defeat of the British during the American Revolution.
William Johnson was a state legislator and judge in South Carolina, and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1804 to his death in 1834. He forged the tradition of dissent on the Supreme Court.
Background
Mr. Johnson was born in Charleston, South Carolina, United, on December 27, 1771, on the eve of the Revolutionary War. His father was a blacksmith, a longtime state lawmaker, and a Revolutionary patriot. Through William Johnson’s mother, Sarah Nightingale Johnson, the Johnson family would eventually inherit substantial wealth. But the elder Mr. Johnson’s patriotic activities made him an enemy of the British, and after their capture of Charleston, he became a prisoner of war, held for a time in Florida and only united with his family after two and a half years.
Education
The Revolutionary War seems not to have gready William Johnson’s educational opportunities. He graduated in 1790 from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) first in his class. Thereafter he studied law with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the prominent South Carolina Federalist who had himself studied law at the Inns of Court in England. He was admitted to the bar in 1793.
In 1794 Mr. Johnson was elected to serve the first of three two-year terms in the South Carolina House of Representatives. While serving as a state legislator, William Johnson fell under the sway of Jeffersonian principles. By 1798 he had been made speaker of the House of Representatives. The following year he earned an appointment to the newly created South Carolina Court of Common Pleas.
When Associate Justice Alfred Moore resigned his scat on the Supreme Court in 1804, Mr. Jefferson quickly moved to fill the vacant seat with a jurist more inclined to the president’s political philosophy. William Johnson seemed well suited to penetrate the Federalist citadel with Jeffersonian principles. He was nominated by the president on March 22, 1804, and confirmed by the Senate within two days.
Though William Johnson reported to Mr. Jefferson that he had "bent with the current" on the issue of writing separate opinions, he nevertheless amassed an impressive record of dissent. Not only was he quick to announce his disagreement with the majority’s result in particular cases, but he was ready to distance himself from the others’ reasoning in a case, even when he agreed with the particular result; thus, he frequently authored concurring opinions. Between 1805 and 1822, William Johnson authored roughly half of both dissenting and concurring opinions filed by justices of the Court.
The fierce independence that made William Johnson the first great dissenter also made him willing to frustrate the administration that had appointed him. In the first decade of his service on the Court, Mr. Johnson earned the ire of President Jefferson in a decision he rendered while acting as a circuit court judge. President Jefferson had successfully obtained legislation imposing a trade embargo against France and England as a means of avoiding American entanglement in the Napoleonic Wars. His administration interpreted the embargo as allowing U.S. authorities to detain any ships at port suspected of attempting to violate the embargo. Adam Gilchrist found his ship detained in Charleston, South Carolina, after port authorities suspected that his stated plan for transporting cotton and rice to Baltimore was nothing more than a ruse to evade the trade embargo. Mr. Gilchrist petitioned William Johnson, acting as a circuit judge, to free his ship from the grasp of Jeffersonian policy and Mr. Johnson, after reportedly boarding the vessel himself and inspecting its cargo, issued orders to the captain of the ship allowing him to depart from Charleston Harbor.
In Gilchrist v. Collector of Charleston (1808), Mr. Johnson argued that Congress had not meant to interfere with normal trade on the mere suspicion that a vessel was seeking to violate the embargo with England and France. President Jefferson’s administration, he concluded, had exceeded its authority in its adoption of the policy by which Gilchrist’s vessel had been detained; and the principle of judicial review established in Marhury v. Madison authorized William Johnson to exercise judicial power to overturn Mr. Jefferson’s executive action. An irate Mr. Jefferson instructed his attorney general, Caesar A. Rodney, to launch a public attack on William Johnson’s Gilchrist opinion, about which Caesar A. Rodney had complained that William Johnson had contracted a fatal case of "leprosy of the bench." Mr. Johnson himself felt compelled to justify his decision in a published letter.
The independence that William Johnson exhibited in the Gilchrist case would feature prominently throughout much of his judicial career. The willingness to tread a solitary course applied not only to disagreements with his brethren on the high court but also to disagreements with other southerners. By the last years of his service on the Court, William Johnson had become an exile from his home state of South Carolina, residing permanently in New York City. While riding circuit in Charleston in 1823, Mr. Johnson authored the opinion in Elkison v. Deliesseline (1823), which involved a South Carolina law that required black sailors to be jailed until claimed by a captain or else sold into slavery. William Johnson, a slave owner himself, nevertheless thought that the South Carolina law intruded on matters of interstate and foreign commerce over which Congress had exclusive power.
Mr. Johnson arrived at the Supreme Court a young man of 32 years, and his tenure there would occupy the remainder of his life. He managed, though, to pursue several other interests beyond the scope of his judicial responsibilities.
Toward the middle of his service on the Supreme Court, William Johnson sought some other political appointment that would allow him to leave the Court, but none was forthcoming, and in 1819 the justices received an increase in salary that apparendy steeled Mr. Johnson to another decade and a half of work on the Court. At the end of that period Justice Johnson had serious problems with his health and resigned from the position.
Besides, in 1822 William Johnson authored the two-volume Sketches of the Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene, a comprehensive work about the major general in the Continental Army who played a vital role in the defeat of the British during the American Revolution.
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
Politics
William Johnson was an adherent of the Democratic-Republican Party.
Connections
In 1794 he married Sarah Bennett. His wife gave birth to eight children, but only two of these - Anna Hayes and Margaret Bennett - survived to adulthood. The couple later adopted two children who were refugees from Santo Domingo, John and Madeleine L’Engle.