Barbour, Philip Pendleton.
Philip Pendleton Barbour.
Mr. Barbour was born on March 25, 1783, in Gordonsville, Virginia, United States, to the family of a planter whose financial fortunes had suffered decline. His father, Thomas Barbour, served in the Virginia House of Burgesses before the American Revolution, and afterward in the Virginia General Assembly. His mother, Mary Pendleton Thomas Barbour, was herself a member of an influential Virginia family.
The family’s financial circumstances did not permit the kind of private education for Philip Pendleton Barbour that was customary for Virginia gentry. Instead, he attended a local public school, where he demonstrated himself an exceptional student.
In 1812 the 29-year-old Philip Barbour followed family tradition when he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, where he rapidly obtained influential assignments to the judiciary and finance committees. Two years later, in 1814, he leapt from state politics onto the national stage by winning election to Congress. His service in the House was mirrored by that of his older brother James, who was a U.S. senator from Virginia. The two brothers followed different political trajectories in spite of their kinship, however. In the Senate, James Barbour leaned toward a nationalistic view that would ultimately make him at home as a member of President John Quincy Adams’s cabinet. Mr. Barbour, in the House, lost no opportunity to trumpet the rights of states and the perils of excessive federal power.
Mr. Barbour’s position on the Bonus Bill of 1817 was in accord with his general attitude. The bill proposed to subsidize the construction of roads and canals, including a road from New York to Washington, District of Columbia, and on to New Orleans. Indignant at the prospect of such governmental overreaching, Mr. Barbour lambasted the proposed law as “a bill to construct a road from the liberties of the country by way of Washington to despotism.” Though his protests did not prevent the proposed legislation from vanning passage in the House and the Senate, Philip Barbour’s fellow Virginian, President James Madison, shared the congressman’s constitutional scruples concerning the bill and vetoed it.
During his tenure in the House, Philip Barbour participated in debates concerning the proposed censure of General Andrew Jackson for his conduct of the Florida campaign against the Seminole Indians, especially his summary execution of two British subjects accused of having incited the Seminole against the United States. When the House debated the censure motion at the beginning of 1819, Mr. Barbour proved himself one of President Jackson’s more vigorous defenders. His defense of the general foreshadowed his subsequent political alignment with Jacksonian Democrats. In February that same year, Barbour also participated in debates concerning the admission of Missouri to the Union. A states’ rights conservative and a fierce supporter of slave owners’ rights, Philip Barbour had no doubt that attempts to limit slavery in Missouri were unconstitutional. In 1821 his reputation among Southern members of the House earned him the post of Speaker. He held the position for two years, until Henry Clay returned to the position.
With Mr. Clay’s return as Speaker of the House, Philip Barbour declined to run for another congressional term in 1824, choosing instead to return to the private practice of law. Thomas Jefferson failed to lure his fellow Virginian into a teaching post at the University of Virginia soon thereafter, though Mr. Barbour did agree to an appointment as a judge for the Virginia General Court. Two years later, however, he won election again to his old seat in Congress and resigned his judicial appointment to return to the House of Representatives in December 1827. Over the next three years he gained increasing national stature as a leader of southern conservatives. In an action prescient of later Jacksonian policy, Philip Barbour launched an aborted attempt to have the federal government rid itself of an ownership interest in the Bank of the United States, firing the first salvo in a battle that would ultimately overthrow the financial institution. During this period he also served as president of the Virginia Constitutional Convention, where he lent his conservative voice to a voting scheme that would have included slaves in apportionment ratios and restricted voting rights to males who owned land.
When Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, Philip Barbour might have expected to receive some significant appointment in the new administration. But Jackson disappointed him, offering him no other post than a position as federal district judge for Eastern District of Virginia. Though it was less than Mr. Barbour might have hoped for, he nevertheless accepted the judicial seat and held it from 1830 to 1836. He briefly toyed with a possible candidacy for vice president under Mr. Jackson at the time of the 1832 election. Many southerners distrusted Andrew Jackson’s personal choice for the position - the "Little Magician" from New York, Martin Van Buren - and proposed instead a Jackson-Barbour ticket. But Democratic party leaders ultimately dissuaded Barbour from pursuing this course, and the Virginian decided to bide his time for the future.
Throughout the first half of the 1830s, speculation abounded concerning the likely retirement of John Marshall, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. More than one observer feared that Philip Barbour might have poised himself to win the nomination as chief justice if John Marshall’s seat came open. John Quincy Adams viewed Mr. Marshall’s retirement with dread: "if [Marshall] should be now withdrawn, some shallow-pated wild-cat like Philip P. Barbour, fit for nothing but to tear the Union to rags and tatters, would be appointed in his place." In 1835 Associate Justice Gabriel Duvall resigned from the Court, after being assured that President Jackson planned to nominate Roger B. Taney to fill the vacant seat. In the summer of the same year, Chief Justice Marshall died, leaving President Jackson with two seats on the Court. With Mr. Marshall’s seat now open, Andrew Jackson nominated Mr. Taney to become the new chief justice and Philip P. Barbour as an associate justice. The Senate eventually confirmed both nominations.
Philip Barbour participated in the "revolution" in constitutional law accomplished by the Roger Taney court. From a vantage point more than a century and a half later, though, the "revolution" appears more akin to a relatively minor adjustment in constitutional trajectory than a wholesale repudiation of the foundation established by the Court of Chief Justice John Marshall. Roger Taney and his colleagues reasserted the importance of state government in the constitutional system, retreating somewhat from the strong nationalistic tendencies of the Mr. Marshall court. But even as the Roger Taney court tempered John Marshall’s devotion to exclusive congressional control over interstate commerce, for example, it reasserted Mr. Marshall’s parallel devotion to the authority of the Court to resolve the nation’s constitutional disputes. Thus, justices such as Philip Barbour championed the cause of state participation in the emerging commercial landscape of the 19th century by vigorously asserting the Court’s own power to preside over the interpretation of the Constitution.
Philip Barbour held two one of the most important positions in the United States, being the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was the only individual to serve in both positions. Locations named after him include Barbour County, West Virginia, Philippi, West Virginia and its Philip Barbour High School.
Philip Barbour was an Episcopalian throughout his life.
Being initially Democratic-Republican (before 1825), Mr. Barbour changed his party affiliation in 1828. That year he filled up the ranks of the Democratic Party.
Philip Barbour's tenure on the Court demonstrated his loyalty to President Jackson's national vision and increasing Democratic ideologies in court cases while maintaining Mr. Barbour's vision for a narrowed reading of state's rights into the constitution. His decisions in major Court cases created an enduring Jacksonian legacy on the Taney Court. Mr. Barbour's furtherance of Jacksonian principles of departmental theory in his dissent Kendall v. United States es rel. Stokes, his long history of states' rights advocacy in his major opinion of New York v. Miln, and textualist reading of the Constitution in order to better discern state versus congressional power in his dissent in Holmes v. Jennison, served to illuminate the idea of a stronger state's rights constitutionalism and proponent of slaveholder's rights.
Quotes from others about the person
Daniel Webster: "Barbour, I really think is honest and conscientious; and he is certainly intelligent; but his fear, or hatred, of the powers of diis government is so great, his devotion to State rights so absolute, that perhaps [a situation] could hardly arise, in which he would be willing to exercise the power of declaring a state law void."
Mr. Barbour married Frances Johnson in 1804. Together the couple had seven children.
