Thomas Stanley Matthews, known as Stanley Matthews, was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from May 1881 to 1889. Mr. Matthews was the Court's 46th justice. Before his appointment to the Court by President James Garfield, Mr. Matthews served as a senator from his home state of Ohio.
Background
Justice Matthews was born on July 21, 1824 in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. Born Thomas Stanley Matthews, he eventually stopped using his first name and was known from adulthood on as Stanley Matthews. He grew up with his parents, Thomas Johnson Matthews and Isabella Brown Matthews, in Lexington, Kentucky, and in Cincinnati. Mr. Matthews’s father was a talented educator who taught mathematics in Cincinnati, then obtained the position of professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Transylvania University (later the University of Kentucky). In 1832 he returned with his family to Cincinnati, where he became president of Woodward High School.
Education
After attending school in Cincinnati, Stanley Matthews enrolled in Kenyon College in Ohio in 1839. There he met a classmate - Rutherford B. Hayes - who would one day gain the presidency of the United States and deeply influence the course of his life. After Mr. Matthews graduated from Kenyon College, he returned to Cincinnati to study law and then set out for Tennessee, where - unlike Ohio, which required attorneys admitted to the bar to be at least 21 years of age - the 18-year-old he could begin the practice of law.
In Columbia, Tennessee, Mr. Matthews combined a legal career with the work of editing the Tennessee Democrat. In the mid-1840s he returned to Cincinnati and gained admission to the bar there, practicing law and soon becoming the editor of the Cincinnati Herald. By the end of the decade he had been appointed clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives. In 1851 Stanley Matthews was elected to the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas, serving for two years before the position’s inadequate salary forced him back to the practice of law. But political ambition lured him again in 1855 when he won election to the Ohio state senate and served there for three years.
In 1858 President James Buchanan appointed Stanley Matthews U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. The post, which Mr. Matthews held until Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, thrust on him the first of many public controversies. As U.S. attorney, Stanley prosecuted W. B. Connelly, a highly regarded Cincinnati reporter, for aiding the escape of two slaves in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Though no friend of slavery himself, Stanley Matthews secured Mr. Connelly’s conviction.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Stanley Matthews decided with his friend and fellow Cincinnati lawyer Rutherford B. Hayes to enlist in the 23rd Ohio Infantry. Mr. Matthews entered military service as a lieutenant-colonel and was later promoted to the rank of colonel in the 51st Ohio Volunteers. He resigned from military service in 1863, though, and successfully ran as a Republican for the Cincinnati Superior Court. After two years as a judge, he returned again to the private practice of law in 1865. The following years saw him develop a successful reputation as a railroad lawyer. In 1869 he courted controversy again when he represented the Cincinnati Board of Education in a volatile case that seemed to many observers inconsistent with his Presbyterian faith. The Board of Education passed a resolution, challenged in court, providing that "religious instruction, and the reading of religious books, including the Holy Bible, are prohibited in the common schools of Cincinnati, it being the true object and intent of this rule to allow the children of all sects and opinions, in matters of faith and worship, to enjoy alike the benefit of the Common School Fund." Losing initially, Stanley Matthews pursued the case to the Ohio Supreme Court, where he vindicated the hoard’s position in Board of Education of Cincinnati v. Minor (1873).
In 1876 Mr. Matthews’s longtime friend Rutherford B. Hayes was locked in what would become one of the most controversial election campaigns in presidential history. Stanley Matthews himself ran unsuccessfully for Congress during the same election season but soon became deeply embroiled in his most significant political controversy yet. The presidential election contest between the Republican Mr. Hayes and Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden erupted into crisis when Mr. Tilden received a majority of the popular vote, but contested electoral votes from four states cast the election into the House of Representatives for determination. Congress appointed a special commission, including five Supreme Court justices, to resolve the issue, and Mr. Hayes turned to his friend Stanley Matthews to represent his claim to the presidency before the commission. Mr. Matthews mounted an able case, and with a Republican majority on a commission that ultimately voted strictly on party lines, Mr. Hayes was declared the victor. Stanley Matthews continued to assist him after this by helping to negotiate the Compromise of 1877, which assured that Mr. Hayes would be declared president by the House of Representatives in exchange for his commitment to withdraw federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction.
Stanley Matthews’s initial prize for his service to Hayes and the Republican party was to be named U.S. senator from Ohio in the spring of 1877 to complete the term of John Sherman, who had joined Hayes’s administration as secretary of the treasury. A more generous compensation lay before him, though. As Hayes’s presidency drew to a close in the early part of 1881, he named Stanley Matthews to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by Associate Justice Noah Swayne’s resignation. Matthews, however, had found himself in too many political hot spots to hope for an easy confirmation. In fact, the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to act on his nomination until after Hayes had retired from office. Thereafter, though Rutherford Hayes had secured a commitment from President James A. Carfield to resubmit Mr. Matthew’s appointment, even the blessing of a second president did not assure Stanley Matthews of the post. The Senate did finally confirm him, in spite of a 7-1 vote to the contrary in the Judiciary Committee, but the final tally was close: 24-23 in favor of confirmation.
Mr. Matthews was caught in New York City in the great blizzard of 1888, and the illness he contracted from this experience led to his death the following spring.
Stanley Matthews's reputation grew quickly, and he was honored with numerous appointments and election victories. He served at different periods as an attorney, judge and senator. Though his tenure was relatively brief (only seven years), his opinions for the Court in the Hurtado and Yick Wo cases, have had lasting influence since they are cited by judges to this day.
Religion
The 1950s ended with tragedy for Mr. Matthews and his wife, when an epidemic of scarlet fever claimed the lives of four of their six children. Four more children would be added to the family over the coming years, but the loss redirected the course of their lives. Before the deaths of their children, Stanley Matthews and his wife had followed theological free thinking, traveling with what Rutherford B. Hayes described as a "circle of fast men" in religious affairs. Tragedy rerouted their religious affections toward a devout, and conservative, Presbyterian faith.
Politics
Stanley Matthews was an adherent of the Republican Party of the United States. According to Justice Stanley Matthews, the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause prohibited not only laws that discriminated on the basis of race but also the racially discriminatory administration of laws. Though the law itself be fair on its face and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discrimination between persons in similar circumstances, material to their rights, denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the Constitution.
Connections
He married Mary Ann Black, known to her friends and family as Minnie. The couple had 10 children together. Justice Matthews’s wife Minnie died in 1885, and he remarried two years later to Mary Theaker. This marriage, though, did not endure long. His son, Paul Matthews, was a Episcopal bishop of New Jersey. His grandson was T. S. Matthews, editor of Time magazine.
