Jackson, Howell Edmonds

Jackson, Howell Edmonds (b. Paris, Tenn., 8 Apr. 1832; d. Nashville, Tenn., 8 Aug. 1895; interred Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Nashville), associate justice, 1893–1895. The first native Tennessean to serve on the United States Supreme Court, Howell E. Jackson was, by all accounts, a serious child and an excellent student, and at the age of eighteen he graduated from West Tennessee College. After several years of tutoring and a year of law school at Cumberland University, Jackson embarked on a legal career. In 1858 he formed the partnership of Currin and Jackson in Memphis. The partnership was short lived, however, owing to Tennessee's secession from the Union in 1861. Personally opposed to secession, Jackson nevertheless accepted an official position with the Confederate government. After the Civil War, Jackson returned to Memphis and resumed the practice of law in partnership with B. M. Estes. In 1874 he removed to Jackson, Tennessee, where he established a practice that regularly brought him before the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Although a Whig before the Civil War, Jackson joined the Democratic party and in 1875 secured a judgeship on the provisional Court of Arbitration for West Tennessee. When this tribunal was abolished two years later, Jackson sought unsuccessfully to win a seat on the Tennessee Supreme Court. He then shifted his energies to the state legislature, and in 1880 he was elected to the state House of Representatives. Within a matter of months Jackson ran successfully for the United States Senate.

In Washington, Jackson earned a reputation as one of the hardest‐working members of Congress. More important in terms of his judicial future, Jackson developed close friendships with President Grover Cleveland and with Republican Senate colleague Benjamin Harrison, who succeeded Cleveland as president in 1889. In 1887 Jackson left the Senate to take a position on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, at the request of President Cleveland. Seven years later, despite the difference in their party affiliations, President Harrison nominated Jackson to the United States Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed him without opposition.

Howell Jackson took his seat on the Supreme Court on 4 March 1893. Because of failing health, his tenure on the Court was only two and a half years and illness prevented him from participating in many important constitutional decisions. He did, however, manage to participate in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Company (1895), in which the Court (dividing 5 to 4) struck down a federal income tax law, notwithstanding Jackson's vigorous dissenting opinion. In Jackson's view, the Court's decision in Pollock was “the most disastrous blow ever struck at the constitutional power of Congress” (p. 704). Congress regained its power to levy an income tax when the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913.

When the Supreme Court finished its term in late spring of 1895, a seriously ill Justice Jackson returned to his home at West Meade, just outside Nashville. There he passed away on 8 August 1895.

John M. Scheb II