MCKINLEY, JOHN (1780–1852)

Like several other Jacksonian Justices on the taney court, John McKinley was a product of the Southwest. Born in Virginia, he went with his family to Kentucky where he learned law and began practice. In 1818 he moved to Huntsville, Alabama, then a frontier town, where he practiced law and pursued a diversified political career—first as a supporter of henry clay and then, when Clay's fortunes waned in Alabama, of andrew jackson. This timely shift got him a Senate seat in 1826. He served there until 1830, when he lost reelection. He then returned to the Alabama legislature, and in 1832 he went to the United States House of Representatives where he served for one term. After another term in the state legislature in 1836, he was elected by that body to the Senate but chose instead to accept an appointment to the Supreme Court from martin van buren in 1837.

McKinley's legislative career lacked distinction, but the policy preferences he revealed were those that would guide his work on the Court: in addition to unswerving loyalty to Jackson and Van Buren, he was a strict states' rights man, though he never argued out his case philosophically or constitutionally. In good Jacksonian fashion he was suspicious of monopolies and hated the second Bank of the United States. He also had a strong preference for land laws that favored small settlers and a firm belief that slavery was a state problem and that property in slaves was entitled to legal protection.

McKinley's fifteen years on the Supreme Court (1837–1852) were unproductive and frustrating, both for him and for those who worked with him. In general, states' rights ideas guided his judicial behavior, but he never spoke for the Court in any important cases. He took his duties seriously, as Chief Justice roger b. taney pointed out in his brief eulogy, and was decent and fairminded to the best of his ability. But during his entire tenure, which was interrupted by illness and frequent absences, he wrote only about twenty opinions for the Court, all routine.

Perhaps his most notorious opinion came in bank of augusta v. earle (1839) where, both on circuit and in a lone dissent at Washington, he held that a corporation chartered in one state (a bank in the Earle case) could not do business within the boundaries of another state without the latter's express consent. McKinley's position was consistent with a deep concern for state sovereignty, but it was, as Justice joseph story observed in dismay, totally unrealistic in an age when interstate corporate business was increasingly the norm. McKinley dissented twenty-three times but none of his dissents attracted support and none pioneered new law. Many were unwritten, evidence of the Justice's increasing isolation from the ongoing operations of the Court.

McKinley was also isolated on his own circuit, although Supreme Court Justices, as senior circuit judges, ordinarily dominated the district judges with whom they sat. Not so on the Fifth Circuit where district judges Philip K. Lawrence and, to a lesser extent, Theodore H. McCaleb held the upper hand. There is evidence also that leading members of the circuit bar held the Justice in disrepute. Part of the problem was the 10,000 miles of annual travel (which left McKinley little time to study cases) and the large number of cases (2,700 at each of the two terms in 1839 by his reckoning). His circuit also included Louisiana, where the civil law received from France and the common law formed a mixture that was well-nigh incomprehensible to all save lawyers who grew up with it. The main difficulty on circuit as on the full Court, however, was McKinley himself. His talents were simply too modest for the duties of his office. Even his eulogizers found nothing about his legal ability to praise, and all evidence points to the correctness of carl b. swisher's assessment: that John McKinley, of all the Justices on the Taney Court, was the least distinguished.

R. Kent Newmyer
(1986)

Bibliography

Gatell, Frank O. 1969 John McKinley. In Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel (eds.), The Justices of the United States Supreme Court 1789–1969, Vol. 1, pages 769–792. New York: Chelsea House.

Proceedings in Relation to the Death of the Late Judge McKinley 1852 14 Howard iii–v.