Associate Justice Thomas Todd was the first justice on the Supreme Court from west of the Appalachian Mountains. He occupied the newly created seventh seat on the Court, established by Congress in 1807 to preside over the circuit covering Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. Mr. Todd himself was an emblem of the possibilities for social and economic advancement made possible as the country spilled westward across the Appalachians.
Background
Mr. Todd began life in circumstances roughly as prosperous as those in which he ended it, though childhood reversals temporarily cast him far from the happy prospects that accompanied his birth. Born on January 23, 1765, in King and Queen County, Virginia, to Richard Todd and Elizabeth Richard Todd, Thomas Todd was descended from a wealthy 17th-century Virginia landholder.
His father inherited a sizable portion of this wealth but died within two years after Thomas was born. Existing law deposited Richard Todd’s estate into the hands of his oldest son and Thomas’s brother, William, leaving Thomas and his mother to fend for themselves. When he was 10 years old, the two moved to Manchester, Virginia, where his mother ran a boardinghouse. From this income she was able to provide the money for her son’s education, but loss struck Thomas Todd’s life for the second time when she died shortly after the move to Manchester, leaving him an orphan at the age of 11.
Education
A family friend undertook Mr. Thomas Todd’s guardianship and managed to see that he received a classical education before losing his remaining inheritance from his mother through mismanagement. When Mr. Todd was 16, the British invaded Virginia, and he managed to serve in the Continental army for six months prior to the war’s conclusion. Afterward he attended Liberty Hall in Lexington, Virginia, which would eventually become Washington and Lee University, and received his degree from that institution in 1783. Upon graduation, he received an offer from Harry Innes, a relation of his mother, to serve as a tutor for Mr. Innes’s daughters, a respected member of the Virginia bar and legislature.
With Mr. Innes’s assistance, Mr. Todd immediately plunged into regional politics. In 1784 Kentucky held the first of several conventions designed to create a state separate from Virginia; Thomas Todd served as the clerk for this and subsequent conventions. The final convention produced a constitution for the new state. The document survives today, written in Thomas Todd’s hand. Along with this political activity Mr. Todd established a thriving law practice specializing in the land tide work that soon flooded the new state.
For nearly a decade following 1792, Thomas Todd also served as secretary to the Kentucky legislature and, beginning in 1799, as the clerk of the Kentucky Supreme Court. In 1801 he was appointed to serve as a justice of this court, and he became its chief justice in 1806. During these years of state judicial service, Thomas Todd continued to devote substantial attention to the same land of land tide issues that had made him a wealthy lawyer. On the basis of his previous legal work in this area, he brought significant expertise to his work on the Kentucky city Supreme Court - expertise that would soon serve him as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The spread of the country westward across the Appalachians prompted Congress in 1807 to amend the Judiciary Act of 1789, which had established the federal court system, to create a new circuit court of appeals covering Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. A seventh seat would also be added to the Supreme Court and a justice appointed to oversee the newly created circuit. When President Jefferson asked the congressional representatives from these states about suitable candidates for the new post, Thomas Todd’s name was prominently mentioned. President Jefferson consequendy nominated him for the post of associate justice. The Senate immediately confirmed the appointment, and Mr. Todd attended his first session of the Court in the February 1808 term. He served as a Supreme Court Justice until his death.
Achievements
Religion
Todd was raised Presbyterian.
Politics
Although Thomas Todd’s political principles were solidly Democratic before he ascended to his seat on the Supreme Court, he became almost immediately one of John Marshall’s surest allies in the attempt to have the Court speak with a single voice. All in all, he was politically a supporter of President Jefferson.
Connections
Mr. Todd married Elizabeth Harris in 1788, and the two had five children. One of their sons, Charles Stewart, would be minister to Russia in the mid-19th century. Elizabeth died in 1811, a few years after Todd joined the Court, and the justice married Lucy Payne the following year. Payne was one of Dolley Madison’s sisters as well as the widow of George Steptoe Washington, a nephew of President George Washington. Together, the couple had three more children.