Story, Joseph (1779-1845)

Joseph Story (1779-1845)

Sources

Legal polymath

Massachusetts Elite. Joseph Story personified the dominant forces in early-nineteenth-century Boston much as Edward Livingston typified the aristocracy of old New York. Born in 1779 in Marblehead, then an active port city, he was the oldest of eleven children, although his father also had seven children by a previous marriage. His father, a physician, had been a member of the Sons of Liberty and joined in the Boston Tea Party, while his mother was the daughter of a wealthy Loyalist merchant. He graduated from Harvard College in 1798, ranked second behind the future Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, and returned to Marblehead to study law in the office of Samuel Sewall, then serving in Congress but soon to become chief justice of Massachusetts. Sewall’s other commitments left Story to depend on his own industry and self-discipline, which proved to be prodigious. No figure in the history of American law has ever matched the level of intellectual energy sustained by Story, who for months at a time routinely studied the most technical legal literature for fourteen hours each day. Moving to Salem when Sewall took the bench, Story opened a law office in 1801.

Youngest Justice. Although Essex County, Massachusetts, was the citadel of the extreme wing of the Federalist Party, Story entered public life as a Jeffersonian Republican. He represented Salem in the state legislature from 1805 to 1808, when he was elected to Congress to fill the vacancy created by the death of Jacob Crowninshield, a member of the prominent shipping family that Story often represented in court. He declined to stand for election for the full term, preferring to pursue his private practice and finding it difficult to reconcile his Republican affiliation with the devastating effects of the Jeffersonian embargo on the Massachusetts economy. Jefferso would blame the repeal of the embargo on “one pseudo-Republican Story.” Returned to the Massachusetts legislature, Story become Speaker of the House in January 1811. Ten months later President James Madison made the thirty-two-year-old Story the youngest person ever appointed to the United States Supreme Court. In an era when Supreme Court seats were rigidly assigned to particular geographic areas, the appointment partly reflected the scarcity of Republicans in New England. John Quincy Adams and Jefferson’s attorney general, Levi Lincoln, had already turned down Madison’s offer of the appointment, and the Senate had refused to confirm Alexander Wolcott of Connecticut.

Court Leadership. His youth notwithstanding, Story quickly became a powerful influence on the Court through the force of his vast learning, his boundless energy, and his sympathy with the nationalist principles of Chief Justice John Marshall. Another element in his success was his mastery of admiralty (law of the sea), Story’s specialty in his thriving private practice. Each justice was required to travel through an assigned circuit to hear cases when the Supreme Court was not in session, and in the aftermath of the Embargo and the War of 1812, the New England circuit was dominated by cases in admiralty. Story’s decisions as circuit judge in such cases as DeLovio v. Boit (1815), which addressed the scope of admiralty jurisdiction, and La Jeune Eugénie (1822), which analyzed the international slave trade, were scarcely less influential than his 286 Supreme Court opinions, which included such classics as his opinions for the Court in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) and Swift v. Tyson (1842), his concurring opinion in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), and his dissenting opinion in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837).

Teacher and Scholar. Although Harvard Law School had been established in 1817, the institution only began to develop when Story became Dane Professor of Law in 1829. Story taught through an engaging combination of informal discussions and analysis of hypothetical cases, and enrollment grew from the eighteen students in Story’s first class to 150 students at the time of his death. While teaching, Story also enriched legal scholarship by publishing a series of Commentaries on various branches of law. Writing with phenomenal swiftness on difficult, technical subjects, Story produced his Commentaries on the Law of Bailments in 1832; three volumes of Commentaries on the Constitution in 1833; Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws in 1834; two volumes of Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence in 1836; Commentaries on Equity Pleading in 1838; Commentaries on Agency in 1839; Commentaries on Partnership in 1841; Commentaries on Bills of Exchange in 1843; and Commentaries on Promissory Notes in 1845. Although sometimes indulging in unnecessary pyrotechnics of erudition, these volumes reshaped and in several cases invented entire fields of American law.

Civic Force. Story did not content himself with merely sitting on the Supreme Court, riding circuit in New England, teaching at Harvard Law School, and preparing his Commentaries. He also supported his friend Daniel Webster and the Whig Party from behind the scenes, for example, by drafting the Bankruptcy Act of 1841; he served on the governing board of Harvard College; he wrote countless occasional pieces and speeches; and he was one of the most celebrated conversationalists in Boston. He died in September 1845 and was buried in Mount Auburn cemetery, for which he had served as the first president and a longtime member of the governing board.

Sources

Gerald T. Dunne, Justice Joseph Story and the Rise of the Supreme Court (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971);

R. Kent Newmyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).