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Book Review
| Michael A. Ross, Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court During the Civil War Era, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. 323. $69.95 (ISBN 0-8071-2868-6); $24.95 (ISBN 0-8071-2924-0).
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| There are two sizes of judicial biography. Enormous, sometimes bloated, tomes that include so much of their subjects' lives that they often consume their writers' lives, and more focused efforts aimed at identifying and exposing only the essential issues. Michael A. Ross's volume falls into the latter category. This is a perceptive, persuasive, and graceful intellectual biography set against the rich background of the intense economic and political struggles of the nineteenth century. |
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Ross persuades his reader of the importance of Justice Miller's early economic disappointments—the shattered dreams of the title—for explaining his judicial reasoning in a host of crucial constitutional decisions. While doing so, he raises an intriguing question: were the legal opponents of large-scale financial capitalism in the late nineteenth century any more principled than the robber barons they criticized? Or were they simply unlucky or unwise capitalists who would have been just as happy to wallow in wealth if only their investments had paid off? |
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Ross does not put this question; he is too fond of Miller. I can see why. Miller is a joy to a biographer. He left behind a remarkable collection of candid and impassioned letters, many of them to his brother-in-law, southerner William Pitt Ballinger. To Republican Miller, stubborn white southerners were "men incapable of forgiving or learning"(135). When white New Orleans rejected the public health measures of a Reconstruction government it "delivered [the city] over to yellow fever . . . and folly" (210). Miller condemned the Court's stand against bond repudiation by municipalities as "a farce whose result is inevitably the same, namely to give more to those who have already, and to take away from those who have little, the little they have" (187). |
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This last quotation was used by Charles Fairman as well in Mr. Justice Miller and the Supreme Court, 1862–1890, published by Harvard University Press in 1939. But Ross corrects Fairman's impression of Miller "as an agrarian folk hero" who came out against industrial urbanites on behalf of farmers. Yes, Miller embraced free labor ideology (a world view until recently ascribed to Justice Stephen J. Field as well), but Miller added to it "the western booster ethos "of the rivertown of Keokuk, Iowa (xvii). An ambitious and disgruntled farm boy from Richmond, Kentucky, Miller turned to the profession of medicine and then of law in order to better his lot. When Barbourville, Kentucky, the town to which he had moved to make his fortune, fell into the economic doldrums in the 1840s, Miller moved to Keokuk on the Mississippi River. There he made his name and fortune in real estate litigation and invested in real estate as the town boomed. But the town lost out in the great western scramble for a railroad. Keokuk was already doomed by the panic of 1857. And its residents, including Miller, found their land worthless. The city further impoverished itself and its taxpayers by issuing railroad bonds in a vain attempt to catch up with more successful towns. Maybe they should have blamed themselves. Instead, Iowa Republicans like Miller blamed parasitical financiers. As Miller wrote privately later: "They engage in no commerce, no trade, no manufactures, no agriculture. They produce nothing" (emphasis Miller's, 175.). (Which, of course, might be said of lawyers as well.) |
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After Abraham Lincoln appointed him in 1862, Miller continued to argue that bonds could be repudiated. In Gelpcke v. Dubuque (1864), Miller argued in dissent that Iowa's Supreme Court was right to change its mind and rule that municipal bonds issued to pay for railroads were invalid, and he would continue to dissent in such cases for decades. Keokuk never recovered, nor did Miller's finances although he did enjoy living well beyond his means despite his debts as Ross points out. |
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As economically parasitical as financiers in Miller's eyes were white southern planters who refused to accept their defeat in the Civil War. Miller had inherited some slaves and freed them during the 1840s; one of the reasons he left Kentucky was his opposition to the peculiar institution. Ross uses Miller's letters to help reveal the judge's logic in the Slaughter-House Cases in 1874. Modern scholars have lamented Miller's narrow construction of the Fourteenth Amendment's privileges and immunities clause. Had he purposively doomed the freed people to domination by southern whites? Had he grown disillusioned by the alleged corruption of Reconstruction and given up on the capacity of black voters? Not according to Ross. Miller's immediate purpose in Slaughter-House was to make clear to the New Orleans whites who opposed the butchering regulations at issue that the bi-racial Reconstruction government was in charge of the city. He also wanted to make clear to his brethren, especially Justice Field whom Ross notes was very friendly with robber barons, that the Fourteenth Amendment should not be used to shield the propertied classes from local government. |
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Miller had not lost faith in Reconstruction. But Ross admits that Miller did place too much confidence in the power of the Fifteenth Amendment and in the power of the vote to protect the freed people from abuse and to incorporate them fully into the body politic. Miller defended the voting rights of black men vigorously in Ex parte Yarborough (1883), but the precedent would be ignored. It was apparent even before Miller's death in 1890 that his two archenemies, the capitalists and the planters, had triumphed. |
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| Linda Przybyszewski
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| University of Notre Dame |
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