Thomas Johnson was an 18th century American judge and politician. He was known to be the leader of the American Revolutionary War, first governor of Maryland (1777-1779), a delegate to the Continental Congress, and an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1792-1793).
Background
Mr. Johnson was born on October 4, 1732 in Calvert County, Maryland, United States, to Thomas and Dorcas Sedgwick Johnson. His father had served in the Maryland Assembly for several years in the third decade of the 18th century. His grandfather, also named Thomas, was a lawyer in London who had emigrated to Maryland sometime before 1700. The family was a large one. Mr. Johnson was the fifth child of twelve, eleven of whom survived infancy.
Education
Johnson was educated at home until he left to make his way in Annapolis, the colonial capital of Maryland. There he found work as a court clerk and studied law under the tutelage of Stephen Bordley, eventually gaining admission to the Annapolis Mayor’s Court in 1756 and the Charles County and Provincial Courts in 1759.
Career
By 1762 Mr. Johnson had been elected a delegate to the lower house of the Maryland Assembly; he would continue to serve in the assembly repeatedly over the next 12 years.
By the early years of the decade that would led to American independence, Thomas Johnson had already gravitated toward revolutionary activism. In 1765 he led Maryland protests against the soon-to-be-repealed Stamp Act, passed by Parliament that year and rescinded the next. He counted among his friends several men who would sign the Declaration of Independence on behalf of Maryland, including Samuel Chase, a future Supreme Court justice, and Charles Carroll, a wealthy man who became one of Mr. Johnson’s clients.
In the acceleration of congresses and conventions that ultimately severed the colonies from England, Thomas Johnson played an important role and earned the attention of national statesmen. Maryland sent him as one of its delegates to the First and Second Continental Congresses beginning in 1774, and at these gatherings he broadened his acquaintances to include men such as John Adams and John Jay. At the Second Continental Congress he nominated his friend George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army, but then he rushed back to Maryland without tarrying to sign the Declaration of Independence. Once there, he helped to gather arms and supplies for Washington’s army and was appointed commander of Maryland’s militia. Soon after marching his forces to New Jersey to reinforce Washington’s army, he learned that he had been elected the first governor of the state of Maryland in February 1777. He therefore returned home again to take up that office. He was elected again to the governorship each of the following two years, and left the office in 1779 only because the Maryland constitution prevented him from holding another consecutive term.
When Johnson finished his final term as governor of Maryland in 1779, he attempted the first of several attempted retirements. He settled in Frederick, Maryland, where he built a house and turned down the chance to serve in Congress, although he did accept a seat in the Maryland state legislature and served there from 1780 to 1782. He resumed the practice of law and joined with Washington in 1785 to help found the Potomac Company. Toward the end of the decade, he served again in the Maryland House of Delegates and also represented his county in the Maryland ratifying convention, where he urged the state to ratify the Constitution and subsequently worked to see George Washington elected the first president of the United States. In April 1790 Maryland’s governor appointed Thomas Johnson chief judge of the Maryland General Court.
His appointment to the Maryland court was not the first instance in which Mr. Johnson had been considered for a judicial post. President Washington had offered him the position as Maryland’s first federal district judge, and the Senate had in fact confirmed Mr. Johnson for this post on September 26, 1789, immediately after passage of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and the creation of the federal court system, but Thomas Johnson refused the appointment.
A year and a half later, in March 1791, John Rutledge resigned from the Supreme Court, and President Washington turned again to Thomas Johnson. In July 1791 Mr. Washington wrote to him asking to accept an appointment in the Supreme Judiciary of the United States. Mr. Johnson responded to the president, but without definitely accepting his offer. He desired to make inquiry “whether the southern Circuit would fall to me; if it would at my Time of Life and otherwise circumstanced as I am it would be an insurmountable Objection.” The difficulty he alluded to was the burdensome requirement that Supreme Court justices serve as judges of circuit courts and participate in circuit riding, which had been imposed by the Judiciary Act of 1789 and was not completely abandoned until 1869. Circuit courts conducted trials and heard appeals from district courts; they were superintended by federal district judges and Supreme Court justices riding circuit.
Initially, the new nation was divided into three circuits, the most expansive of which was the southern circuit, consisting of North and South Carolina and Georgia. Supreme Court justices assigned to hear cases in the courts of the southern circuit had to travel 1,800 miles or more twice yearly. Thomas Johnson was, not surprisingly, worried that by becoming the junior member of the Court, he would be saddled with the exhausting responsibility of riding the southern circuit. Mr. Washington, though, continued to press him to join the Court, and ultimately persuaded him to accept a temporary commission - while the Senate was out of session - on August 5, 1791. The Senate confirmed his appointment on November 7, 1791. The appointment was short-lived, however. As Thomas Johnson feared, he was assigned the southern circuit, and his health proved inadequate for the work of a Supreme Court justice. After illnesses interfered with his attendance at both sessions of the Supreme Court and with his obligations, he resigned on January 16, 1793.
Thomas Johnson participated in no important decisions during his brief tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court. The year that he resigned the Court decided Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), but the justice from Maryland had already retired to his estate in Frederick by the time the case came before the Court. However, when he left his position on the Supreme Court, he did not retire completely from public life. In January 1791 President Washington appointed him one of three commissioners to oversee the location and design of a new national capital; Mr. Johnson served in this position until 1794. He finally managed to extricate himself from this post as well, upon which he retired to his estate in Frederick, Maryland. Mr. Washington made one last attempt to entice him back to public life by offering him the position of Secretary of State in 1795, but Thomas Johnson declined and settled into a long retirement.
Achievements
Politics
Mr. Johnson was a member of the Federalist Party of the United States.
Connections
Johnson married Ann Jennings in 1766, and the couple would eventually have eight children in the course of their 28 years of marriage.