Johnson, William

Johnson, William (b. near Charleston in St. James Goose Creek Parish, S.C., 27 Dec. 1771; d. Brooklyn, N.Y., 4 Aug. 1834, interred St. Philips churchyard, Charleston, S.C.), associate justice, 1805–1833. The son of blacksmith William Johnson and Sarah (Nightingale) Johnson, William Johnson attended grammar school in Charleston, graduated from Princeton in 1790, read law with Charles C. Pinckney, and was admitted to the bar in 1793. At age twenty‐two, he was elected to the state house of representatives; in March 1794, he married the well‐born Sarah Bennett. During Johnson's three terms in the assembly, he joined the Jeffersonian Republican camp, served as cashier of the House, and, in 1798, became speaker of the House. In December 1799, the assembly elevated Johnson to the Constitutional Court; three years later, President Thomas Jefferson appointed him to the United States Supreme Court.

The thirty‐three‐year‐old Johnson attracted controversy. In 1807, he enraged Republicans by relying on Chief Justice John Marshall's anti‐Jeffersonian Marbury v. Madison opinion to protest the Supreme Court's grant of mandamus in the treason trial of two accomplices of Aaron Burr. A year later, in Johnson's first major circuit court opinion, he denied presidential authority to remove the collector of the Port of Charleston for refusing to implement the administration's embargo policies. Shortly afterward, Attorney General Caesar Rodney told Jefferson that the Carolinian had been infected with “leprosy of the Bench.”

But Rodney's diagnosis was premature. After 1812, Johnson grappled constantly with Joseph Story. In U.S. v. Hudson and Goodwin (1812). Johnson refused to extend federal jurisdiction to criminal cases; Story wrote a stinging dissent and pointedly disregarded Hudson on circuit. (See Judicial Power and Jurisdiction; Federal Common Law.) In Ramsay v. Allegre (1827) and elsewhere, Johnson challenged attempts to expand admiralty jurisdiction to inland waterways without constitutional amendment. He also took a dim view of corporate power. On circuit in Bank of the United States v. Deveaux (1809), Johnson denied the Bank's right to sue in federal court. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Osborn v. Bank of the United States (1824), he agreed that the elastic clause permitted creation of a federal bank; but, he also blasted Marshall's grant of privileges and immunities to artificial persons.

Although Johnson resisted the aggressive use of executive discretion, he encouraged broad readings of congressional power when it constructively supplemented state legislative authority. He therefore concurred in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee (1816) and Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831; see Cherokee Cases); repudiated President James Monroe's veto of the Cumberland Road Act in 1822; and sketched his cautiously nationalist, freetrading philosophy in a separate concurring Gibbons v. Ogden opinion (1824).

The slaveholding Johnson opposed abolitionism as well as inhumane treatment of Africans (see Slavery). Between 1822 and 1824, he jeopardized his reputation at home by denouncing both antifederal sentiment in South Carolina and state denial of due process to slave rebel Denmark Vesey. In his circuit court opinion in Elkison v. Deliesseline (1823), he invalidated South Carolina's Negro Seamen Act, which excluded free African‐American traders from state ports; later, he opposed state nullification of the Tariff of Abominations.

In contract disputes, Johnson walked a fine line between antifederalism and prounionism. Because Marshall initially had altered contract opinions to reflect dissent, Johnson endorsed the majority view in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) and Sturges v. Crowninshield (1819); but in 1823, he broke silence over the Court's decision to wield the Contracts Clause against state exercise of ordinary remedial powers. Johnson reluctantly endorsed Bushrod Washington's invalidation of Kentucky's occupying claimant laws in Green v. Biddle (1823); yet his concurring opinion pointed not to the federal clause but to abridgments of property rights protected by the Kentucky constitution and to denial of the right to trial by jury in federal courts. He also denounced the Court's use of the federal clause to support speculators and restrain legislatures. Johnson's fear of excessive deference to “money men” underlay his seriatim opinion in Ogden v. Saunders (1827) in which he supported state prohibition of unremitting creditors' claims (see Bankruptcy and Insolvency Legislation); yet, in the same case, he promoted economic union by drawing the line at state discharge of debtors from obligations to out‐of‐state creditors.

During his twenty‐nine years on the federal bench, Johnson wrote 112 majority opinions, twenty‐one concurrences, thirty‐four dissents, and five seriatim opinions; only Marshall and Story produced more opinions. He was regularly vilified—by Federalists for his devotion to legislative energy, and by Jeffersonians for attacks on executive power and radical states' rights theory. Johnson was indeed a loose cannon. He viewed written opinions as occasions for experimentation. He freely admitted that he was impetuous and easily distracted by nonjudicial activities—among them, land speculation and a two‐volume biography of Nathaniel Greene.

Still, Johnson's legacy was substantial. After 1819, he experienced a principled sea change, away from abstract decisions rooted in political theory and natural law toward a community‐centered, systematic jurisprudence capable of accommodating disparate conceptions of fairness without devolving into mere relativism. He therefore was an unwitting harbinger of Chief Justice Roger Taney's “dual federalism” and economic pragmatism. Johnson's death was unexpected. In July 1834, he traveled to New York for jaw surgery; shortly after the painful procedure, he died, apparently of “exhaustion.”

Bibliography

Donald G. Morgan , Justice William Johnson, the First Dissenter: The Career and Constitutional Philosophy of a Jeffersonian Judge (1954).

Sandra F. Van Burkleo