THE POLITICAL SUPREME COURT
My forthcoming book, The Political Supreme Court: The Forgotten History of Justices, Parties, & the People’s Constitution, will be published by UNC Press’s W. Hodding Carter III Books imprint in Fall 2026. The book explores the world of Supreme Court justices in the nineteenth century. Today’s Supreme Court justices bristle at the label “politicians in robes,” insisting that they operate above the fray of partisan politics. But for the first century of the nation’s history, the Court was unmistakably a political institution, designed to play an integral role in the everyday politics of the moment. Justices maintained their partisan relationships when they joined the bench without fear of corruption or undue bias, and they remained deeply involved in civic debate and the electoral process while on the Court. In addition to hearing cases in the capital, each justice spent much of his time “riding circuit” and presiding over federal trial courts. On circuit and in Washington, nineteenth-century justices wrote for partisan newspapers, drafted legislation, advised partisan allies, campaigned for colleagues, and even ran for political offices from the bench. Through these political interactions, members of the Court could contribute more effectively to debates about the Constitution’s meaning at a time when most Americans did not believe in judicial supremacy.
The Political Supreme Court recovers the justices’ integral role in the era’s turbulent politics and reveals how their role began to shift as the legal community refashioned the Court as an apolitical body at the turn of the twentieth century. I explain that this set the stage for the emergence of an increasingly powerful modern Court that also grew more isolated from the people.
I previewed some of these themes in an article in the December 2022 issue of The Journal of Supreme Court History, entitled “Anatomy of a Presidential Campaign from the Supreme Court Bench: John McLean, Levi Woodbury, and the Election of 1848,” which won the Hughes-Gossett Award from the Supreme Court Historical Society. (Please contact me if you would like a copy of the article and do not have institutional access.)
My research for this project has been graciously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.
RECENT ARTICLES
Journal of American History
In this article, we argue that 19th-century politics were characterized by fluidity, instability, and federalism, rather than the “party system” model scholars typically associate with partisan combat throughout American history. Politics operated through a series of mechanisms–laws, customs, networks, and newspapers–that helped integrate parties into the broader broader world of political engagement. Parties organized to tackle pressing political issues and dissolved once those issues were no longer relevant or another political organization took them up more effectively. Nineteenth-century Americans believed this flexible and fluid political atmosphere was essential to preserving their constitutional experiment. The end of party fluidity developed slowly at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century as the political world became more formal and institutionalized.
Journal of American Constitutional History
In this piece, I revisit Mark Graber’s book, Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty and his use of the Congressional Globe—which then served as the “official” records of the legislative branch—to explain the broader constitutional and political considerations of the men who framed the Fourteenth Amendment. I argue that a closer look at the context in which the Globe operated shows its text was far from an accurate depiction of congressional business. Instead, the Globe’s pages contained an outsized number of “buncombe” speeches–or speeches designed for constituents rather than for persuading or negotiating with colleagues; the men who make up Graber’s book used these speeches as a tool of dialogue with the broader public. Ultimately, the Globe may tell us just as much about the public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment—and many other constitutional and statutory concerns—as it does about legislative intent.
Maryland Law Review
Abraham Lincoln famously argued in his “House Divided” speech in 1858 that there was a conspiracy among four men–including Chief Justice Roger Taney–to perpetuate slavery in the United States. In this piece, I argue that Taney’s place in the conspiracy charge has been largely misunderstood. Scholars have argued that Taney violated judicial propriety and have read the Chief’s behavior (and that of his colleagues) in the context of modern notions of judicial ethics. Instead, Lincoln’s charge against Taney should be understood in the context of nineteenth-century political and judicial norms–norms that included a much fuzzier boundary between judicial and political worlds. As a longtime player in antebellum politics, Lincoln was intimately familiar with the peculiar political and ethical norms that defined Taney’s Supreme Court.
WASHINGTON BROTHERHOOD
From UNC Press: Traditional portrayals of politicians in antebellum Washington, D.C., describe a violent and divisive society, full of angry debates and violent duels, a microcosm of the building animosity throughout the country. Yet, in Washington Brotherhood, Rachel Shelden paints a more nuanced portrait of Washington as a less fractious city with a vibrant social and cultural life. Politicians from different parties and sections of the country interacted in a variety of day-to-day activities outside traditional political spaces and came to know one another on a personal level. Shelden shows that this engagement by figures such as Stephen Douglas, John Crittenden, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Stephens had important consequences for how lawmakers dealt with the sectional disputes that bedeviled the country during the 1840s and 1850s–particularly disputes involving slavery in the territories.
Shelden uses primary documents–from housing records to personal diaries–to reveal the ways in which this political sociability influenced how laws were made in the antebellum era. Ultimately, this Washington “bubble” explains why so many of these men were unprepared for secession and war when the winter of 1860-61 arrived.
From UVA Press: This impressive collection joins the recent outpouring of exciting new work on American politics and political actors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several generations, much of the scholarship on the political history of the period from 1840 to 1877 has carried a theme of failure; after all, politicians in the antebellum years failed to prevent war, and those of the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to take advantage of opportunities to remake the nation. Moving beyond these older debates, the essays in this volume ask new questions about mid-nineteenth-century American politics and politicians.
In A Political Nation, the contributors address the dynamics of political parties and factions, illuminate the presence of consensus and conflict in American political life, and analyze elections, voters, and issues. In addition to examining the structures of the United States Congress, state and local governments, and other political organizations, this collection emphasizes political leaders—those who made policy, ran for office, influenced elections, and helped to shape American life from the early years of the Second Party System to the turbulent period of Reconstruction.
Other Scholarly Contributions
Special Issue of the JCWE on Federalism in the Civil War Era
This special issue focuses on the role of federalism in the Civil War era, primarily in the years before the war. Federalism—or the distribution of power among different governing bodies—defined how most nineteenth-century Americans understood their relationship to the government, both in theory and in practice. These men and women did not simply interact with the government and the law; rather, they were forced to navigate the complex relationships and overlapping authorities among the various governing bodies and regulations that made up the federal system.
“The Politics of Continuity and Change in the Long Civil War Era: A State of the Field”
From the Article: Now is the right time to reevaluate our broad approach to politics in the Civil War era, not because the political history of the mid-nineteenth century is stale or failing, but rather because political history of the period is thriving. In fact, Civil War–era political history of the last fifty years is among the most creative and methodologically sophisticated in the discipline; historians have effectively used the tools of social, cultural, economic, and legal history, as well as employed cross-disciplinary ideas from political science, sociology, and psychology to reimagine political participation, organization, and governance in this period. We now know more about politics from the local to the national level, we have effectively integrated Americans who were relegated to the margins by earlier political histories, and we better understand how politics did and did not define American life in the mid-nineteenth century.
On the heels of so much innovation, historians can begin to think more broadly about the era as a whole; new scholarship has the opportunity to make important changes to the way we understand continuity and change across the long Civil War era, stretching from the Jacksonian period to the early Gilded Age. Writing chronologically broad political histories of the period will allow us to break free of older historiographical divides and will tell us more about the generations of Americans who experienced and participated in the politics of one of the most fraught eras in US history.