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Supreme
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Noah Swayne (1804-1884) |
 Noah
Swayne was born in Virginia on December 7, 1804. He read law as a
teenager, and was admitted to practice in Virginia at age 19. Because he
was opposed to slavery, Swayne moved to Ohio to practice law. Between
1830-41, Swayne was a part-time United States Attorney (prosecuting
federal cases in Ohio). His anti-slavery views may have led to his
acting as counsel in several fugitive slave cases in the 1850s. Swayne
joined the newly formed Republican Party in 1856 (founded by, among
others, future Supreme Court Chief Justice
Morrison Waite). After the death of
John
McLean, one of the two dissenters in
Dred
Scott, less than a week before the beginning of the Civil War,
Swayne campaigned for the nomination to replace his friend. Lincoln,
desperately trying to hold together the Union, did not nominate Swayne
to replace McLean until January 1862, eight months after McLean's death.
Swayne supported Lincoln's war efforts, and campaigned to be named Chief
Justice after the deaths of
Roger
Taney in 1864 and
Salmon Chase in 1873. Swayne joined the dissents of Justices
Stephen
Field and
Joseph Bradley in the
Slaughterhouse Cases, but four years later joined the majority in
Munn v.
Illinois, in which Field and Bradley also dissented.
In 1881, President Rutherford B. Hayes, an Ohioan like Swayne, asked Swayne to step down from the Court. He did so only because Hayes promised to appoint Swayne's friend Stanley Matthews in Swayne's seat. Swayne died on June 8, 1884, at age 79. |
