Miller’s church in Keokuk.
Miller's house in Keokuk.
Samuel Freeman Miller. Library of Congress description Miller, Judge S.F. (Supreme Court).
Miller’s church in Keokuk.
Miller's house in Keokuk.
Samuel Miller.
Samuel Freeman Miller. Library of Congress description Miller, Judge S.F. (Supreme Court).
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B3UGO38/?tag=2022091-20
judge lawyer physician politician
Mr. Miller was born on April 5, 1816, in the bluegrass city of Richmond, Kentucky, United States. His father, Frederick Miller, had only recently moved from Reading, Pennsylvania, to Richmond, Kentucky, where Samuel Miller was born. His mother, Patsy Freeman Miller, came from a family that had settled in Kentucky a generation earlier.
Samuel Miller spent his early years on the family farm, with intermittent stints at a local academy, until he dropped out of school at the age of 14 to work in a pharmacy. Inspired by this work to study medicine, Mr. Miller read medical texts on his own and attended lectures at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky (later to become the University of Kentucky). He received his Doctor of Medicine from Transylvania in the spring of 1838.
At the age of 21, Mr. Miller embarked on the practice of medicine in Barbourville. He shared an office with a young lawyer, Silas Woodson, and dispensed medical advice and treatment to the people scattered around the small village he had chosen for a home. Over the next nine years, Samuel Miller gradually discovered that he desired something more than the toil and tedium provided by his career as a country doctor. Even before he had begun his medical practice he had helped organize the Barbourville Debating Society, and in the discussion of public issues sponsored by this society, Samuel Miller found an intellectual satisfaction not paralleled by his simple medical practice.
After his marriage, Samuel Miller began to focus his energy on pursuits other than medical practice. By 1844 he had been appointed justice of the peace for Barbourville, and this public service focused his attention on the possibility of a legal career. He read law with his office mate and gained admission to the bar in 1847.
He was already a confirmed opponent of slavery. After a few years of practicing law in Kentucky, he began to cast about for another place to work. In 1850 he decided to relocate his family, his slaves (whom he freed on arrival), and his legal practice to the free state of Iowa. He settled in Keokuk, where a prominent local lawyer, Lewis Reeves, invited Samuel Miller to practice with him, and Mr. Miller’s legal career immediately prospered. Four years later, though, both his wife Lucy and his law partner died. He replaced his lost legal partnership by joining another Keokuk lawyer, John Rankin, in practice.
He served as chairman of the Keokuk Republican party organization in 1856 but lost a bid for the state senate, and in 1861 he lost to incumbent governor Samuel Kirkwood in his quest to obtain the Republican nomination for governor of Iowa. Mr. Miller’s Republican credentials were nevertheless impeccable.
All said, however, Samuel Miller lacked the significant political or judicial experience normally expected of potential Supreme Court appointees. He was a prominent Iowa lawyer by this time, but his practice had been confined mainly to Keokuk, a relatively small town. Congress eventually came to his rescue by creating a new federal circuit court to cover the area west of the Mississippi River. Supreme Court justices still served double duty by not only participating in cases brought before the Court but also by serving as federal circuit court judges, with each assigned to a particular circuit. With a newly created circuit in need of a Supreme Court justice, Mr. Miller’s prospects for capturing one of the three seats on the Court then vacant improved markedly. His political supporters eventually besieged President Lincoln with an overwhelming display of support for his appointment to the high court. President Lincoln nominated the Iowa lawyer on July 16, 1862, the Senate immediately confirmed the appointment, and the American western frontier had its first Supreme Court justice.
Samuel Miller arrived on the Court during the crisis of Civil War, and he generally supported the extraordinary measures employed by President Lincoln to preserve the Union, including the blockage of southern ports upheld in the Prize Cases (1863), the issuance of greenbacks to finance the war, and the operation of military trials to try persons suspected of disloyalty to the Union. After the war he would uphold the retroactive loyalty oaths that a majority of the Court invalidated in Cummings v. Missouri (1867) and Ex parte Garland (1867). The most important decision of his long judicial career, however, would be rendered in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873).
The Reconstruction Congress proposed a great triumvirate of constitutional amendments to secure the civil rights and liberties of the newly freed slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment negated the effects of Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in the Dred Scott case, which had disqualified blacks from U.S. citizenship. It also prohibited states from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States or of depriving persons of due process of law or the equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth Amendment barred states from discriminating along racial lines in connection with the right to vote. Though forged in the crucible of controversy over African-American slavery, the Reconstruction amendments, as ratified, set for general protections of civil rights and civil liberties not restricted by their terms solely to the condition of the newly freed slave. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), the Court confronted the issue of whether the Fourteenth Amendment, in particular, might create a new federal superintendence over the rights and liberties of citizens against state infringement. Associate Justice Samuel Miller, writing for a majority of the Court, declared that it did not.
Justice Miller, for a bare majority of the Court, concluded otherwise. He summarily rejected the claim that the slaughterhouse monopoly deprived any person of due process of law. As to the assertion that Louisiana had failed to accord equal protection of the law to competitors of the monopoly, he suggested that discrimination not directed at blacks probably did not raise any Fourteenth Amendment claim. Finally, as to the claimed abridgment of "the privileges or immunities of U.S. citizens," he interpreted this clause narrowly to cover only a handful of rights uniquely applicable to the federal government, such as the right of petitioning the federal government for a redress of grievances. By this construction Miller made the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment into a virtual dead letter. The next century, new majorities of the Court would rescue the due process and equal protection clauses of the amendment from Samuel Miller’s cramped reading in the Slaughterhouse Cases. But his construction of the privileges and immunities clause would survive to the present.
Unlike some justices who, on their appointment to the Supreme Court, receded into air august obscurity, Mr. Miller remained at the forefront of national affairs. He served on the commission appointed to settle the disputed presidential election of 1876 and voted with the Republican majority on the commission to certify Rutherford B. Hayes as the victor. Two presidents considered him for the position of chief justice: Ulysses S. Grant in 1873 and Grover Cleveland in 1888. He was even considered briefly as a possible presidential candidate in the 1880s. None of these advancements ever materialized, however, and Miller continued to serve as air associate justice until his death from a stroke in 1890.
Samuel Miller was a prominent Keokuk lawyer. During his long tenure on the Court, Mr. Miller wrote more than 600 majority opinions. Today he is chiefly remembered as the author of the Court's opinion in the Slaughterhouse Cases, an important decision interpreting the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. He was, after all, an example of the self-made man: one who, with education and ambition, had risen to a prominent station in life. Moreover, Mr. Miller had been one of the congregation's founders of Keokuk's First Unitarian Church.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
Mr. Miller, a religious liberal, belonged to the Unitarian Church and served as President of the Unitarians' National Conference.
Initially, Mr. Miller was a member of the Whig Party, but with the birth of the Republican party in the 1850s, Samuel Miller joined its ranks in 1854. He opposed slavery and secession, supported Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1860, and above all supported the Union.
He later became concerned that the development of urban industries and the growth of large corporations limited personal freedom and opportunities. His distrust of eastern bondholders and financiers, developed in the wake of Keokuk's economic collapse and expressed in a number of opinions he wrote while on the Court, enhanced his popularity in the West, and he was mentioned as a possible Republican presidential candidate. By declaring most civil rights to be aspects of state rather than of federal citizenship, Samuel Miller unwittingly deprived the federal government of jurisdiction over many problems of the political and social equality of blacks.
His legal philosophy was pragmatic rather than theoretical, and he aimed to reach the right result in cases, even if it was not the outcome dictated by the Court's earlier decisions. Mr. Miller's own social views changed with the century.
Quotations: "It does not ... follow, that when a word was used in a statute ... seventy years since, that it must be held to include everything to which the same word is applied at the present day."
Samuel Miller was a sociable person, and he was popular among both the employees of the Supreme Court and his judicial colleagues, who respected his independence and his intellectual leadership.
In November 1842 Miller married Lucy L. Ballinger. This union produced three children. Two years later after the death of his first wife, in 1856, he married Eliza Winter Reeves, with whom he had a son and daughter.
