Bushrod Washington was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. He was a man of significant ability whose historical reputation suffers the misfortune of his having dwelled within the long shadows cast by his uncle and by a famous friend, Chief Justice John Marshall.
Background
Mr. Washington was born on June 5, 1762 in Mount Holly, Virginia, United States. His parents were John Augustine and Hannah Bushrod Washington. Bushrod Washington's father was a member of the Virginia legislature and a county magistrate. His uncle, George Washington, had no children, and he, his favorite nephew, became the object of considerable attention from the man who would eventually be the first president of the United States.
Education
Bushrod Washington’s education included private tutoring at the home of Richard Henry Lee, followed by attendance at the College of William and Mary, beginning in 1775. After graduating from William and Mary in 1778, he returned home for a short period, but in 1780 he joined with other aspiring law students at his alma mater to study with the first American professor of law, George Wythe. Among his fellow students during this period was John Marshall, future chief justice of the Supreme Court.
British general Cornwallis’s invasion of Virginia in the first part of 1781 inspired him to join the Continental Army. He served in the cavalry under John Mercer, seeing action at Green Spring and witnessing Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. Subsequently, Mr. Washington studied law in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, under James Wilson, an eminent lawyer. Bushrod Washington’s uncle, George Washington, appears to have paid the necessary fee for this study with Mr. Wilson, who would play a leading role in the 1787 Constitutional Convention and would later be one of President George Washington’s first appointments to the Supreme Court.
In 1784 Bushrod Washington established a law practice, first in Westmoreland County, then in Alexandria, and finally, around 1790, in Richmond, Virginia. In 1787, the year that the luminaries of American politics met in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, Bushrod Washington inaugurated his own political career by winning a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. He served there with John Marshall, and the two also participated in the Virginia convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution. During the following decade, Mr. Washington developed a thriving legal practice in Richmond, Virginia. His reputation grew to the point that students clamored to apprentice with him to study law.
Mr. Washington’s old legal mentor, James Wilson, died in August 1798. He had served almost a decade as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, having been appointed to that position by President Washington upon the initial creation of the Court. Following Mr. Wilson’s death, President Adams decided to find a Virginian to fill the vacant seat on the Court. He therefore focused his attention on John Marshall and Bushrod Washington, both of whom had followed the urging of George Washington and announced candidacies for the U.S. Congress. When President Adams offered the seat first to Mr. Marshall, he declined in favor of pursuing his congressional election campaign. Bushrod Washington, however, ever more the student of law than of politics, happily abandoned his own campaign when Mr. Adams approached him about the vacant position on the Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed his nomination on December 20, 1798, and Bushrod Washington thereupon began a judicial career that would span for more than three decades.
Two years after he joined the Court, its chief justice, Oliver Ellsworth, resigned while serving the United States on a diplomatic mission to Europe. To fill tills chief seat, President Adams nominated John Marshall, who, once confirmed, would serve until his death in 1835. The tenure of the two Virginians, Chief Justice Mr. Marshall and Associate Justice Mr. Washington, would thus roughly coincide; and John Marshall, by reason of his dominance on the Court over the decades, would eclipse Bushrod Washington’s own presence there.
John Marshall was able to eliminate, for the most part, the practice of having the members of the Court publish seriatim opinions, in which the various justices explained their reasons for reaching a particular decision in separate opinions. In place of this practice, the chief justice began a new one of announcing Court decisions largely by means of joint opinions expressing the majority view.
Moreover, Mr. Marshall generally chose to write the opinions of the Court himself. These innovations had the effect of diminishing the public role played by other justices on the Court. Bushrod Washington, for instance, wrote relatively few opinions over the course of his three decades as a justice - 81 in all - and only rarely dissented from a decision by the Court. Mr. Washington’s chief distinction during his long tenure on the Court was unflattering, though not concerning his work as a justice but rather his attitudes and practices concerning slaveholding.
Like other justices on the Court, Bushrod Washington not only attended sessions of the full Court but also participated in circuit court proceedings. He began initially on the southern circuit, but beginning in 1802 and for the rest of his life, he rode the third circuit, which included Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
As George Washington’s heir, Bushrod Washington inherited Mount Vernon with instructions to free the slaves who worked there upon the death of the former president’s wife, Martha Washington. Though he did so, he later brought more slaves to Mount Vernon in an attempt to rescue the estate from dilapidation. This attempt failed, and Mr. Washington ultimately sold many of the Mount Vernon slaves in 1821 under circumstances that separated some families at the auction block. On hearing of this abolitionists clamored that he should have freed the slaves, but he insisted that they were his property and that he had every right to dispose of them as he saw fit. As president of the American Colonization Society, Mr. Washington favored the emancipation of slaves and their recolonization in Africa, but only on terms that protected the rights of present slaveholders.
While serving on the Marshall Court, Bushrod Washington authored the opinion of Corfield v. Coryell, 6 Fed. Cas. 546 (C.C.E.D. Penn. 1823), while riding circuit as an Associate Justice. In Corfield, Mr. Washington listed several rights that he deemed were fundamental "privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States."
Membership
American Colonization Society
,
United States
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Justice Joseph Story: "He was a learned judge. Not that every-day learning which may be gathered up by a hasty reading of books and case; but that which is the result of long-continued laborious services, and comprehensive studies. He read to learn, and not to quote; to digest and master, and not merely to display. He was not easily satisfied. If he was not as profound as some, he was more exact than most men. But the value of his learning was, that it was the keystone of all his judgments. He indulged not the rash desire to fashion the law to his own views; but to follow out its precepts, with a sincere good faith and simplicity. Hence, he possessed the happy faculty of yielding just the proper weight to authority; neither, on the one hand, surrendering himself to the dictates of other judges, nor, on the other hand, overruling settled doctrines upon his own private notions of policy or justice."
Connections
In 1785 Bushrod Washington married Julia Ann Blackburn, whose father, Thomas Blackburn, had been aide-de-camp to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. Like his famous uncle, Mr. Bushrod and his wife were childless.