Benjamin Curtis.
Judge Benjamin Curtis.
Portrait of Benjamin R. Curtis.
Portrait of Benjamin Robbins Curtis. Reproduction courtesy of the Supreme Court Historical Society.
Benjamin Curtis.
Judge Benjamin Curtis.
Portrait of Benjamin R. Curtis.
Portrait of Benjamin Robbins Curtis. Reproduction courtesy of the Supreme Court Historical Society.
(Excerpt from Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in th...)
Excerpt from Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Circuit Court of the United States, for the First Circuit: Containing the Cases Determined in the Districts of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode-Island, in the Years 1812 and 1813 All the cases, which appear in this Volume, were decided before the Subscriber assumed the oflce of Reporter.
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Mr. Curtis was born to Lois Curtis and Benjamin Curtis III on November 4, 1809, in Watertown, Massachusetts, United States. His father, a ship’s captain, died on a voyage to Chile when Benjamin was five years old, leaving his mother with the responsibility of earning a livelihood to care for herself and two sons. She managed to provide for her family by running a dry-goods store and a library.
Benjamin Curtis attended common school in Newton and beginning in 1825 Harvard College, where he won an essay writing contest in his junior year. With his mother’s support, Benjamin Curtis graduated from Harvard in 1829 with highest honors. He enrolled at once in Harvard Law School and was fortunate to be a student there after Associate Justice Joseph Story had been appointed to a newly created chair in law. Mr. Story was one of the finest legal minds of the 19th century and brought his prodigious intellectual talents to legal education at Harvard. From his law school lectures, he would ultimately pen some of the foremost legal commentaries of the century.
He arrived at Harvard Law School the same year that Mr. Story commenced his professorship, but he did not initially complete the course of studies. In March 1831 he interrupted his legal education to begin practice in Northfield, Massachusetts. He returned to Harvard the following spring, however, to complete his law degree, and he was admitted to the bar that summer.
Mr. Curtis built a thriving legal practice. In 1834 he moved to Boston to join the law firm of a distant cousin, Charles Pelham Curtis. Benjamin Curtis specialized in commercial matters and quickly established himself as a talented and hardworking lawyer. He argued numerous cases before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and before the federal circuit court of appeals in Boston.
In 1845, when he was 36 years old, he was appointed to replace Justice Joseph Story, his old law school professor, as a fellow of the Harvard Corporation; this appointment testified to the esteem he had earned through his decade of practice in Boston. To his work as a lawyer, Benjamin Curtis eventually added a brief but significant term of service as a state legislator. He served in the legislature from 1849 through 1851 and further enhanced his growing legal reputation by sponsoring legislation to reform legal procedure in Massachusetts. Appointed to chair a commission to study judicial improvements that he had proposed, Mr. Curtis managed to produce a plan of reform and see it enacted as the Massachusetts Practice Act of 1851. This legislation placed Massachusetts, together with New York, at the forefront of national legal development in the area of procedural reform. Combined with Curtis’s reputation as an outstanding Massachusetts lawyer and an outspoken, it made him an attractive candidate for the federal bench.
When Justice Leri Woodbury died in 1851, Benjamin Curtis figured immediately in President Millard Fillmore’s search to identify Mr. Woodbury’s successor. On September 10, 1851, Millard Fillmore wrote to Daniel Webster, his secretary of state, indicating his interest in Mr. Curtis. He was, the president informed Mr. Webster, "desirous of obtaining as long a lease and as much moral and judicial power as possible from this appointment." With these goals in mind, the qualifications for a potential appointee to the Court were clear: "I would therefore like to combine a vigorous constitution with high moral and intellectual qualifications, a good judicial mind, and such age as gives a prospect of long service." Neither for the first or the last time, the Whig president sought a like minded appointment to counter the hold Southern Democrats had on the Mr. Taney court. Benjamin Curtis was a natural for the position, and President Fillmore indicated as much to Mr. Webster: "I have formed a very high opinion of Mr. B. R. Curtis. What do you say of him? What is his age? Constitution? Legal attainments? Does he fill the measure of my wishes?" Daniel Webster had no information to blunt the president’s initial enthusiasm for Benjamin Curtis. Subsequendy, Mr. Curtis, then 41 years of age, found himself nominated to the Court and promptly confirmed as an associate justice on December 20, 1851.
After the Court announced the decision in the Dred Scott case, Mr. Curtis delivered a copy of his dissent to the clerk of the Court and also forwarded a copy to a Boston newspaper. In the normal course of events, it takes some time for opinions to be officially printed and distributed. Benjamin Curtis’s action in sending his dissent to a newspaper meant that it would be widely disseminated prior to publication of the opinions of the other justices in the case. Chief Justice Taney was outraged by his action and appears to have revised his opinion in the case to respond to points made in Mr. Curtis’s dissent. But when Benjamin Curtis asked to receive a copy of the revised opinion, Mr. Taney sharply rebuffed his request. The antagonism between Benjamin Curtis and Justice Taney soon prompted Mr. Curtis to resign from the Court. On September 1, 1857, Mr. Curtis informed President James Buchanan by letter of his resignation.
Once he left the Supreme Court, Benjamin Curtis returned to a prosperous law practice. His reputation as a superior lawyer had only been enhanced by his six-year sojourn on the Court, and over the following years he would return frequently to argue cases before the same high bench on which he had sat as a justice of the Supreme Court. In 1868 he appeared before another tribunal, this time as one of the lawyers who successfully defended President Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial before the U.S. Senate. Within a few years, though, the health of this great advocate had begun to decline, while near the end of his life, in 1874, he almost won election to the Senate.
Benjamin Curtis was the first and only Whig justice of the Supreme Court. He was also the first Supreme Court justice to have a formal legal degree and is the only justice to have resigned from the court over a matter of principle. He successfully acted as chief counsel for President Andrew Johnson during the first presidential impeachment trial and is notable as one of the two dissenters in the Dred Scott decision.
(Excerpt from Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in th...)
Mr. Curtis came from a politically-connected family. He was a Whig (before 1854) and in tune with their politics, and Whigs were in power. In 1854 he changed his party affiliation, joining the ranks of the Republican Party of the United States.
He went on to serve in the Massachusetts legislature and was best remembered there by his period of reforming codes of legal procedure from 1849 to 1851. He worked to make trial more efficient and expedite just results. His push for reform made Massachusetts the model for other states and their reform efforts.
After being disenchanted with the court around 1855, Benjamin Curtis decided to consistently uphold the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, legislation that allowed runaway slaves to be captured and returned to their owners and imposed hefty penalties on individuals who interfered with their capture, even though he found the act itself abhorrent. This made him very unpopular among the Northern population. Even though Mr. Curtis started his career by defending Congress’ right to pass slave laws, he is remembered for ending his career as a justice on the right side of history.
Quotations:
"No government can be strong and flourishing while the national character is weak and degraded. A government must flourish and decay with its subjects; and, when a prince makes a law or performs an action which has a tendency to injure the character or prosperity of the nation, he injures himself."
"There are many causes why a people politically ignorant cannot be roused to action. Perfect political ignorance must be accompanied by indifference to the general interests of society, and thus one of the most powerful motives which can act on the human mind is totally destroyed."
"No nation can answer for the equity of proceedings in all its inferior courts. It suffices to provide a supreme judicature by which error and partiality may be corrected."
"The mind as well as the body must be not only strong but well disciplined in order to act with promptness and vigor in new and untried situations. It is hard to turn men's minds from the old and deeply worn channels in which they have long been flowing."
"He who is unconscious of the ties which connect him with every individual of his species feels no obligation to make sacrifices for their welfare or happiness."
"Whatever may be the merits of a religious system, its effects upon the mass of mankind must depend in an important degree upon its teachers. All instruction and all truth, except simple mathematical truth, is modified by the medium through which it is conveyed."
Benjamin Curtis was an excellent orator, his legal arguments were thought to be well-reasoned and persuasive.
In 1833 the young lawyer embarked on a career as a husband and a father by marrying Eliza Maria Woodward, a cousin. This union produced five children before Eliza Woodward’s death of tuberculosis in 1844. Within a year and a half, Mr. Curtis remarried, this time to another, more distant cousin, Ann Wroc, his law partner’s daughter. This marriage lasted 14 years and produced three children before she also died. A year later Benjamin Curtis married his third wife, Maria Mallcville Allen; their union eventually added four more children to his large family.
