Melville Weston Fuller was a politician, lawyer and judge. He was the Chief Justice of the United States between 1888 and 1910. Chief Justice Melville Fuller occupied the nation’s highest judicial post during a period of conservative ascendancy.
Background
Mr. Fuller was born on February 11, 1833 in Augusta, Maine, United States. He was the second son born to Frederick Augustus Fuller and Catherine Martin Weston Fuller. The marriage of his parents did not, however, survive long after Fuller’s birth. Three months after his birth, his mother filed suit for divorce from his father, alleging that he had committed adultery with certain unidentified persons beginning two months after their wedding date and continuing thereafter. The subsequent decree of divorce severed Mr. Fuller’s relationship with his father. His mother returned home to live with her parents, taking her two sons with her.
Thereafter, Melville Fuller grew up in the home of his maternal grandfather, Nathan Weston, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Maine. When his mother remarried a little more than a decade after her divorce from his father, Melville Fuller continued to live with his grandparents.
Education
At the age of 16, Melville Fuller entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. For a time, at least, it appeared that a college education might be beyond his financial reach. His father had made no provision for his education, his mother’s second husband had suffered business failures that left no possibility of sending Fuller to college, and his grandfather refused to undertake the expense. In the end, Mr. Fuller’s mother provided half of his educational expenses from her earnings as a piano teacher, and Melville Fuller’s grandmother provided the other half. He graduated in 1853, was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and turned at once to the pursuit of a legal career. He studied law first with an uncle who practiced in Bangor, Maine, before attending Harvard Law School for six months. This time at Harvard Law School would eventually make Mr. Fuller the first chief justice to receive a law school education.
Mr. Fuller subsequently returned to Bangor, where he was admitted to the bar in 1855 and worked briefly in his uncle’s law office before returning to Augusta and accepting an editorial position on The Augusta Age, a Democratic newspaper run by another uncle. The following year, the 22-year-old Melville Fuller was elected as an alderman of Augusta and appointed city solicitor and president of the city’s common council. He did not remain long in these positions, however.
Like many New Englanders of his day, Melville Fuller found his attention directed westward. Two months after his success in the Augusta elections, Mr. Fuller, suffering the pangs of a broken marriage engagement, set out for Chicago. He arrived there in May 1856. He devoted his early years in Chicago to the practice of law, though a succession of law partnerships provided him with only modest financial and professional success. He played an increasingly prominent role in Illinois politics, winning election to the Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1861 and to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1863. Within a few years Mr. Fuller had a prestigious legal practice that included regular appearances before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of his clients. By the 1880s Melville Fuller was malting close to $30,000 per year (an excellent income at the time), profiting from astute real estate dealings.
During the 1880s, Melville Fuller formed a close relationship with Grover Cleveland, elected president in 1884. Mr. Cleveland looked to him for advice about various political appointments and received Mr. Fuller’s complaints that the Seventh Circuit - the federal judicial district covering Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin had lacked a representative on the U.S. Supreme Court since the resignation of Associate Justice David Davis of Illinois in 1877. Toward the end of the 1880s, Chief Justice Morrison Waite died, and Illinois Democrats renewed their case for an appointment from the Seventh Circuit to fill the vacancy on the Court. After President Cleveland’s first choice, Illinois Supreme Court Judge John Sholfield, declined to accept the appointment, Mr. Cleveland turned to his friend Melville Fuller. Melville Fuller had turned down earlier offers from President Cleveland to chair the Civil Service Commission and to serve as solicitor general of the United States, but he did not refuse the offer to become chief justice of the Supreme Court. After some protests by Republicans, who criticized Mr. Fuller’s failure to serve in the military during the Civil War, the Senate confirmed his nomination as chief justice on July 20, 1888, by a vote of 41-20.
Chief Justice Melville Fuller presided over the Court for nearly 22 years and earned praise less for his intellectual leadership of the Court than for his administration of the Court’s affairs. He cultivated collegiality on the Court, hosting conferences of the justices frequently at his home and inaugurating the practice of having the justices shake hands before they formally conferred about cases and before they entered the courtroom. He earned the abiding gratitude of his colleagues and of future justices by helping to convince Congress to pass the Circuit Court of Appeals Act of 1891, which finally relieved Supreme Court justices of the onerous circuit riding responsibilities that had burdened the members of the Court for more than a century. The first decade of the 20th century brought Melville Fuller personal loss and declining health.
Mr. Fuller was a supporter of the Democratic Party of the United States. The years during which Melville Fuller served as chief justice witnessed a strengthening conservativism on the Court, which used the Constitution to defend property and other commercial interests from government regulation. Mr. Fuller did not lead this conservative movement on the Court, but he was generally a loyal ally of those who did.
He made more of a mark in the tumultuous politics of the time, lending his energy to the Democratic cause in Illinois and campaigning successfully for Stephen Douglas against the Republican Abraham Lincoln for U.S. Senate in 1858 but less successfully in the presidential election of 1860, which Mr. Lincoln won. After the outbreak of the Civil War, Mr. Fuller supported the Union but castigated President Lincoln’s administration for its conduct of the war, heaping special blame on Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and his Emancipation Proclamation. He leveled these criticisms from the safety of civilian life, since he did not undertake military service on behalf of the Union.
Views
Quotations:
"Without continuity, men would become like flies in summer."
"No convention on God's foot-stool can, or has a right to, run me and make anything but a Democrat out of me."
"Nothing can be clearer than that what the Constitution intended to guard against was the exercise by the general government of the power of directly taxing persons and property within any State through a majority made up from the other States."
"The Emancipation Proclamation is predicated upon the idea that the President may so annul the constitutions and laws of sovereign states, overthrow their domestic relations, deprive loyal men of their property, and disloyal as well, without trial or condemnation."
Membership
Phi Beta Kappa
,
United States
Chicago Literary Club
,
United States
Connections
Fuller married Calista Ophelia Reynolds. The couple had two daughters before their six-year marriage ended with his wife's death of tuberculosis in 1864. Mr. Fuller might have remained a minor Illinois politician and a lawyer of modest means had he remarried in 1866 to Mary Ellen Coolbaugh. His second wife’s father was the president of Chicago’s largest bank, the Union National, and Melville Fuller’s marriage soon brought him legal work from his father-in-law and Union National Bank, as well as an increasingly prominent clientele.