Chief Justice Morrison Waite.
1893
Engraving Chief Justice Morrison Waite.
Photo of Morrison Waite, taken during the 1880s.
Morrison Remick Waite.
1893
Engraving Chief Justice Morrison Waite.
Photo of Morrison Waite, taken during the 1880s.
Morrison Remick Waite.
Morrison Remick “Mott” Waite.
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Mr. Waite was born in 1816 at Lyme, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of Henry Matson Waite, an attorney, and his wife Maria Selden. His father later was appointed as a judge of the Superior Court and associate judge of the Supreme Court of Connecticut, serving between 1834 and 1854 and appointed as chief justice of the latter from 1854 to 1857. Morrison Waite had a brother Richard, with whom he later practiced law.
Morrison Waite graduated from Yale in 1837, studied law briefly in his father’s office, and then escaped the elder Waite’s long shadow by moving to Maumee City, Ohio, near Toledo, in 1838. There he studied law with Samuel D. Young, was eventually admitted to the bar, and formed a partnership with Mr. Young. Mr. Waite supplemented this partnership with another by his marriage to Amelia C. Warner, a second cousin from his hometown, in 1840.
Over the three decades Mr. Waite practiced law and intermittently ran for political office. He earned a modest measure of material success as a lawyer, though his practice was far from lucrative, in spite of his earning a reputation as a railroad lawyer. Morrison Waite’s political aspirations met with mixed success, however. He ran for Congress as a Whig in 1846 and as Republican nearly 20 years later, in 1862, but lost on both occasions. He did serve a single term in the Ohio legislature after winning election in 1849. The following year he moved his family to Toledo, where he established a law practice with his brother, Richard Waite. Although he had the chance to follow in his father’s footsteps by serving on the Ohio Supreme Court in the early 1860s, Mr. Waite declined this appointment in favor of an advisory role to Ohio governor John Brough.
In the following decade, national prominence unexpectedly presented itself to Morrison Waite. When the United States prepared to arbitrate claims against Great Britain arising out of Britain’s role in the outfitting of Confederate ships, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Mr. Waite - in spite of his lack of national prominence - as one of three representatives for the United States sent to Geneva in 1871. Morrison Waite acquitted himself well in this service to his country, and the arbitration award of $15 million to the United States placed him on the national political map - at least for the moment. With his newfound prominence, Mr. Waite won a seat as a delegate to the Ohio Constitutional Convention of 1873 and, in fact, became the Convention’s president.
While Mr. Waite presided over the Ohio Convention, a weightier drama was being played out in Washington. Earlier, in spring 1873, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase died, leaving to President Grant the task of finding a suitable candidate to fill the chief justice’s seat. Mr. Grant, though, had a peculiar talent for elevating incompetent or corrupt individuals to important federal posts. Thus, his initial attempts to replace Salmon Chase produced a string of political embarrassments as the president made one improvident choice after another to find a candidate suitable for Congress’s approval. Finally, as Morrison Waite tended to his duties as president of the Ohio Constitutional Convention, Morrison Grant telegraphed him to announce that he had been nominated chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Although Mr. Waite lacked judicial experience and had never even practiced before the Supreme Court as a lawyer, the Senate, recognizing that he was an improvement over normal Ulysses Grant appointments, unanimously approved Morrison Waite’s appointment on January 21, 1874.
Unlike several of his colleagues on the Court, Chief Justice Waite had no aspiration to use his position as a springboard to a higher government post. For a man who had been catapulted from obscurity into a place of national prominence, being chief justice was an honor worthy of an entire life’s career. In 1876 several members of the Court were chosen by Congress to participate on a commission to decide the contested presidential election between Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Flayes. Mr. Waite refused to serve on the commission, however, partially out of his personal acquaintance with both candidates but also because participation in the commission threatened, in Morrison Waite’s mind, the separation between the Court and political disputes that was necessary to preserve the Court’s institutional authority.
So Mr. Waite remained on the Court, overseeing its affairs with diligence and competence, even though he brought no particular judicial brilliance to his post. "I can’t make a great chief justice out of a small man," Justice Samuel Miller - who wished to be chief justice himself - once said of Waite.
Chief Justice Morrison Waite served 14 years on the Court before death plucked him out of his seat as suddenly as he had arrived on it. In March 1888 Mr. Waite contracted pneumonia. He attended Court in a weakened state because he feared that his wife - away on vacation - would read of his absence from Court and become unduly alarmed. But the pneumonia suddenly worsened, and Mr. Waite died on March 23, 1888, in Washington, D.C. The modest income he earned as chief justice and the expensive entertaining obligations thrust on him by his position left Morrison Waite nearly bankrupt at the time of his death. Friends had to create a fund to see that Mr. Waite’s wife could live out her life comfortably.
Morrison Waite is best known as a chief justice of the United States, who frequently spoke for the Supreme Court in interpreting the post-Civil War constitutional amendments and in redefining governmental jurisdiction over commerce in view of the great expansion of American business.
Mr. Waite oversaw more than 3,000 cases during his tenure as Chief Justice and was responsible for interpreting Reconstruction Amendments and the rights of African Americans following the Civil War. Among his own most important decisions were those in the Enforcement Act Cases, the Sinking Fund Case (1878), the Railroad Commission Cases (1886) and the Telephone Cases (1887). Waite High School (Toledo, Ohio) is named in his honor.
Mr. Waite started his political and judicial career as an adherent of the Whig Party of the United States, and in 1854 he changed his party affiliation, joining the Republican Party. During his tenure, the Supreme Court took a narrow interpretation of federal authority related to laws and amendments that were passed during the Reconstruction Era to expand the rights of freedmen and protect them from attacks by vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Waite was able to muster a solid majority of the Court to his approval of judicial restraint in the review of state economic regulations.
He sought a balance between federal and state power and joined with most other Justices in narrowly interpreting the Reconstruction Amendments. Mr. Waite tried to establish a nonpolitical conception of the chief justiceship. In 1876 he might have had the Republican Party’s nomination for president, but he rejected it because, in his view, his candidacy would detract from the court’s prestige.
Quotations: "For protection against abusers by legislatures the people must resort to the polls, not to the courts."
Mr. Waite was a well-liked if not always deeply respected, hardworking jurist.
Quotes from others about the person
Felix Frankfurter: "He did not confine the constitution within the limits of his own experience.... The disciplined and disinterested lawyer in him transcended the bounds of the environment within which he moved and the views of the client whom he served at the bar."
Waite married Amelia Champlin Warner on September 21, 1840 in Hartford, Connecticut. They had three sons together: Henry Seldon, Christopher Champlin, and Edward Tinker; and a daughter Mary Frances Waite.
