John McLean was an American jurist and politician who served in the United States Congress, as U.S. Postmaster General, and as a justice on the Ohio and U.S. Supreme Courts. He was often discussed for the Whig and Republican nominations for President.
Background
Mr. McLean was born in Morris County, New Jersey, United States on March 11, 1785. He was the son of Fergus McLean and Sophia Blackford McLean. A decade before his birth, his father, originally Fergus McLain, immigrated to New Jersey and married his mother, Sophia. During John McLean’s early years his family migrated from New Jersey to Western Virginia, then to Kentucky and finally in 1797 to Warren County, Ohio, some 40 miles from Cincinnati.
Education
John McLean began his study of law in 1804 at the age of 19, after attending a local school and receiving instruction from two local Presbyterian ministers who served as schoolmasters. He received his legal instruction from John S. Gano and Arthur St. Clair, Jr. By 1807 he had been admitted to the bar.
Career
After Mr. McLean married, he settled with his wife in Lebanon, Ohio, where the future justice labored to establish a law practice and briefly pursued a career as a printer and a newspaper owner. The newspaper John McLean established, the Lebanon Western Star, displayed the partisan spirit customary for newspapers of the time, lending its journalistic voice to the cause of Jeffersonian politics. His newspaper days did not last long, however, and by 1810 he had turned the paper and his printing business over to his brother Nathaniel in order to concentrate full-time on the practice of law. The following year he experienced two conversions: the one from a young man of Presbyterian background and skeptical temper to an ardent Methodist, the second from private practice of law to politics, through his appointment as examiner of the U.S. Land Office in Cincinnati. Both conversions affected the rest of his life.
His appointment to the Land Office post whetted a political appetite that remained virtually undiminished until his death a half century later. The Land Office could not satisfy his capacious political ambition for long. By 1812 he had been elected to Congress, and he served two terms in the House of Representatives before resigning in 1816, only to be elected immediately to the Ohio Supreme Court. Before he left: Congress, John McLean campaigned vigorously for James Monroe’s nomination to the presidency, securing a gratitude that would produce important fruit six years later. For the time being, though, Mr. McLean undertook the arduous circuit-riding responsibilities that went with being a justice on the Ohio Supreme Court. He also wrote one judicial opinion that would foreshadow the most famous opinion of his career, written 40 years later. In Ohio v. Carneal (1817), he considered the case of a Kentucky slave whose master caused him to work in Cincinnati each day and then return to Kentucky - a slave state - at night.
Though John McLean decided the case on other grounds, he expressed his own belief that slavery was inconsistent with "immutable principles of natural justice." While he did not deem it appropriate to free slaves based purely on his own moral opposition to slavery and was not prepared to say that merely bringing a slave into free territory should result in his emancipation, he did suggest that a master who used slave labor in a free state "forfeits rite right of property in slaves."
A year after James Monroe’s inauguration as president, he returned the favor of John McLean’s earlier support in Congress by appointing the Ohio judge commissioner of the General Land Office in 1822 and postmaster general in 1823. The latter post especially gave Mr. McLean ample scope to demonstrate his managerial skill and his political adroitness. Under his direction, the postal service expanded radically, increasing service routes and swelling the number of employees of the postal service until it became the largest executive department. John McLean not only proved himself an able and vigorous administrator but also a skillful political operative. He held onto his position as postmaster after John Quincy Adams won the presidential election in 1824, even though he had initially thrown such influence as he possessed in the direction of Mr. Adams’s opponent, John C. Calhoun. In the face of pressure from John Adams’s administration to use postal positions for political patronage, John McLean preached the necessity of being above partisan politics even as he covertly made friends with Andrew Jackson, Mr. Adams’s newest political rival.
President Adams sensed that Mr. McLean was engaged in double-dealing, but he could not lay his finger on any overt evidence of political treachery. John McLean, the president declared, "plays his game with so much cunning and duplicity that I can fix upon no positive act that would justify the removal of him." Secure within a web of cordial ties to many of Mr. Adams’s allies and reputed to have significant influence with Methodist voters, John McLean managed to hold onto his position throughout John Adams’s administration.
When Andrew Jackson became president in 1829, Mr. McLean immediately reaped the harvest of his shrewd dealings during the John Adams administration. The Kentuckian Robert Trimble had died suddenly and tragically in September 1828, leaving the so-called western seat on the Supreme Court vacant. John Adams had failed to find a replacement before leaving office, and Mr. Jackson had scarcely taken up the reins of the presidency before he nominated John McLean for the seat. The Senate promptly confirmed the nomination in March 1829. Mr. McLean took the oath of office and began service in the first part of 1830.
In spite of his appointment by Mr. Jackson, John McLean proved to be closer in judicial philosophy to Chief Justice John Marshall and Associate Justice Joseph Story than he was to Marshall’s successor, another Mr. Jackson appointee, Roger B. Taney. John McLean sided frequently, though not inevitably, with claims of national power over those of state authority.
Mr. McLean became an enthusiastic Methodist through conversion by a circuit rider in 1811 and remained active in the faith throughout his life, contributing Bible studies to church magazines, being named honorary president of the American Sunday School Union in 1849, and becoming one of the leading Methodist laymen of his day.
Politics
On the court, John McLean became known as an opponent of slavery, and he was frequently mentioned as a presidential candidate for various parties, as at different periods of his life he was changing his party affiliation. Initially, he was a Democratic-Republican before 1825, from 1825 to 1828 member of National Republican, from 1828 to 1831 Democratic, between 1831 and 1838 Anti-Masonic, during 1838-1848 Whig, from 1848 till 1854 Free Soil, and finally, he became a Republican between 1854 and 1861. Generally, Mr. McLean’s name was floated as a potential candidate in party conventions and then withdrawn before the voting began. In 1854, though, he received 196 votes on the first ballot of the newly created Republican party convention but withdrew in the face of John C. Fremont’s 359 first-ballot votes. John McLean’s dissent in the Dred Scott case generated renewed support for his possible Republican candidacy in 1860, even though he was 75 years old at the time.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates: "I had not the honor of his intimacy, but I have known him personally for more than thirty years, and under circumstances which attracted and enforced my observation. I did not consider him a man of brilliant genius, but a man of great talents, with a mind able to comprehend the greatest subject, and not afraid to encounter the minuest analysis. He was eminently practical, always in pursuit of the truth, and always able to control and utilize any idea that he had once fully conceived. In short, he was a sincere, earnest, diligent man."
Connections
McLean was married to Rebecca Edwards. They had four daughters and three sons.