Robert Trimble was an attorney, judge, and a justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Background
Born on November 17, 1776, in Berkeley County, West Virginia, United States, to William and Mary McMillan Trimble, Mr. Trimble migrated with his family to Kentucky when he was about three years of age. The Trimble family settled on Howard’s Creek in Clark County, Kentucky, where farming and hunting brought its members a modest living.
Education
The details of the future justice’s early education remain unclear, but he eventually studied law at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, under George Nicholas, Kentucky’s first attorney general, and, after his death, under James Brown, who would later become U.S. minister to France.
The beginning of the 19th century saw Mr. Trimble admitted to the bar, and he was elected to the Kentucky legislature in 1802. Political activity seems not to have appealed to Trimble, and over the following decade he turned down a string of political opportunities, including further service in the Kentucky legislature and, most significantly, the chance to become a U.S. senator. Instead he accepted an appointment to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, on which he was commissioned in April 1807. Mr. Trimble’s growing family necessitated an income more substantial than the $1,000 salary paid for his judicial position. He therefore resigned from the court in 1808 and concentrated instead on expanding his legal practice while continuing to turn aside most proffered appointments to public positions. When nominated to serve as chief justice of Kentucky in 1810, he declined to serve. He did the same in 1813 when he was approached to resume service on the Kentucky Court of Appeals. In 1813, though, he did accept a part appointment as Kentucky district attorney, since this position still allowed him to pursue his law practice.
Finally, in 1817 President James Madison was able to coax Robert Trimble into federal service by appointing him a federal district judge for Kentucky. Mr. Trimble promptly accepted the position and held it until his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1826. Though he was nominally a Democratic-Republican, his judicial instincts, which strongly supported national political and judicial power, aligned themselves closely with those of Chief Justice Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The impeachment proceedings launched against Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase could as easily be targeted at the lesser lights of the federal bench, including upstarts such as Robert Trimble due to his nationalistic views. Robert Trimble’s dedication to a strong national government and his imperturbability in the face of criticism by champions of states’ rights no doubt contributed to his 1826 appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Upon the death of Associate Justice Thomas Todd, another Kentuckian, on February 7, 1826, President John Quincy Adams made his only appointment to the Court when he nominated Mr. Trimble to the seat vacated by Thomas Todd. After relatively lengthy confirmation proceedings in which Senator John Rowan of Kentucky opposed the nomination, the Senate finally confirmed his appointment on May 9, 1826, by a vote of 25-5.
Associate Justice Robert Trimble arrived on a Court still clearly dominated by Chief Justice John Marshall. Upon his appointment two decades earlier, the chief justice had bent his colleagues on the Court to his desire to present a unified face as much as possible, through the issuance of a single opinion for the Court in many cases and through the reduction of the number of separate opinions authored by the justices. Mr. Marshall had taken on himself the work of writing most of the Court’s opinions, and when Ribert Trimble joined the Court the chief justice still maintained this practice. Of the other justices on the Court, Joseph Story - Marshall’s most dedicated ally - authored the most opinions after the chief justice. Justice Trimble, though, immediately plunged into work on the Court, in two years writing more opinions than any other justice on the Court save Mr. Marshall himself. The 50-year-old Kentuckian wrote nine opinions for the Court out of 48 decided in his first term on the Supreme Court, and seven out of the 55 decided the following term.
Mr. Trimble was a supporter of the Democratic-Republican Party of the United States. Justice Trimble generally found himself in harmony with John Marshall’s federalism. Mr. Trimble’s tendency to support the legitimacy of national power earned him enemies within his home state of Kentucky. When he declared a state insolvency law ineffective to bind a federal court, one Kentucky newspaper reminded him publicly of the fate tempted by judges who displayed their nationalistic sympathies too aggressively.
Connections
In 1803 Robert Trimble married Nancy Timberlake, with whom he produced a sizable family, though several of their numerous children failed to survive to adulthood.