28 N College St, Carlisle, Pennsylvania 17013, United States
Dickinson College.
28 N College St, Carlisle, Pennsylvania 17013, United States
Dickinson College.
Mr. Grier was born on March 5, 1794, in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, to Isaac Grier and Elizabeth Cooper Grier. From his family background, he might have been expected to become a clergyman, since both his father and his maternal grandfather were ministers. When Robert was 12 years old, his father moved the family to Northumberland, where he pastored three churches and ran a private school.
In Northumberland Robert Grier gained a solid classical education and demonstrated significant aptitude as a student of Latin and Greek. In 1811 Dickinson College recognized his academic promise by admitting him as a junior; he graduated the following year.
Mr. Grier served at Dickinson College for a year as an instructor, but eventually he returned home to Northumberland, where he assisted his father in running the school. When his father died in 1815, the 21-year-old son donned the mantle of administrator and teacher. His time still not sufficiently occupied, Robert Grier also studied law with Charles Hall, a lawyer in a nearby town. By 1817 this study had yielded admission to the bar. Mr. Grier thereupon established a legal practice that helped him support the large family that his father’s death had cast into precarious financial circumstances. He practiced first in Bloomsburg, then later in Danville. After 15 years of legal practice, he became a judge through something of a political accident. The creation of a district court for Allegheny County had occasioned a good deal of wrangling over an appropriate candidate to fill the judicial scat. Through a series of backroom manipulations, the governor offered the post first to Robert Grier, who was expected to decline the appointment. But Mr. Grier surprised everyone involved by accepting and then by moving to Pittsburgh to become district judge. Though he received a chilly welcome at first, solid - if not exceptional - judicial work eventually made him a respected member of the Allegheny County legal community.
Robert Grier had stumbled into his first judicial appointment. His advancement 13 years later to the nation’s highest court had the same unexpected air, as though he had happened on a seat reserved for some other man, more qualified or at least more prominent than Mr. Grier. The series of events that would catapult him onto the Supreme Court began with the death of Associate Justice Henry Baldwin of Pennsylvania in 1844 during the last year of President John Tyler’s administration. Mr. Tyler could not find a candidate suitable for the Senate’s approval prior to his leaving office. President James Polk had similar difficulty finding a candidate both willing to accept the appointment and able to win Senate confirmation. Mr. Polk’s first nominee, George Woodward, was rejected, and James Buchanan, whom President Tyler had unsuccessfully approached about an appointment to the Court, declined to serve when James Polk made a similar overture. Finally, Mr. Polk nominated Robert Grier, and the Senate confirmed his appointment at once on August 4, 1846.
By the time Mr. Grier joined the court, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had led his colleagues to a minor revision of the strong nationalism that had prevailed on the Supreme Court during the first three decades of the 19th century. In a trilogy of cases decided in 1837, the Court had granted increasing power to states to regulate matters affecting interstate commerce. Thus, when the Prize Cases (1863) arrived before the Court, Robert Grier spoke for a bare majority that upheld Lincoln’s blockade of Southern ports even before Congress had declared war. "A civil war is never solemnly declared," he wrote for the Court, "it becomes such by its accidents." Faced with Southern insurrection, Robert Grier said, Mr. Lincoln was entitled to respond aggressively: "The President was bound to meet it in the shape [Civil War] presented itself, without waiting for Congress to baptize it with a name; and no name given to it by him could change the fact."
Shortly after the decision in the Prize Cases, Robert Grier suffered a sharp decline in his physical and mental condition. He ceased riding the judicial circuit assigned to him, and by the end of the decade he was the subject of veiled reference on the floor of Congress as a justice "who is not able today to reach the bench without being borne to it by the hands of others." Rumors of his growing incompetence and increasing evidence of senility ultimately persuaded his colleagues on the Court to press for his retirement. He finally agreed to this course in December 1869, with his resignation from the Court to be effective at the end of the following month.
Robert Cooper Grier left an impressive impact during an eventful era of the Supreme Court of the United States by authoring opinions discussing slavery and the Civil War. His most significant contributions to the Supreme Court and the Constitution are found in his decisions regarding slavery, particularly Dred Scott v. Sandford, and his support of the Union in the Prize Cases.
Robert Grier was raised in a Presbyterian environment.
Robert Grier was a Jacksonian Democrat. Mr. Grier, who was neither known for being sympathetic to abolitionists nor staunchly proslavery, decided that slaves were property, not citizens, and could not sue in federal court. He stayed true to his northern roots and was vocal in his opposition to the South’s secession.
Over several years after Mr. Grier’s appointment as an Associate Justice, the Court continued to refine the balance between federal and state power. In this process, Robert Grier occupied solid middle ground on the Court, joining first in the majority that upheld state power to regulate liquor traffic in the Licence Cases (1847), and then in the majority that found a state tax on immigrants an intrusion on Congress’s commerce power in the Passenger Carer (1849). When the Taney court finally articulated the doctrine of "selective exclusiveness" in Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852), which gave formal expression to the attempt to balance congressional power against the legitimate police power of states, Mr. Grier once again joined with the Court’s majority.
At the end of 1817 he married Isabella Rose, the daughter of a wealthy Scottish immigrant.
