McKinley, John

McKinley, John (b. Culpepper County, Va., 1 May 1780; d. Lexington, Ky., 19 July 1852; interred Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville, Ky.), associate justice, 1837–1852. Soon after McKinley's birth, his family moved from Virginia to Kentucky, where he studied law and was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1800. He practiced in Frankfort and Louisville before settling in Huntsville, Alabama.

After winning a seat in the Alabama legislature in 1822, he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1826. He began as a follower of Henry Clay, but when that became politically untenable in Alabama, he switched to the camp of Andrew Jackson. His concerns in the Senate included cheaper land for settlers, bankruptcy relief for all categories of debtors, and states' rights. In 1830, McKinley was defeated in his effort to keep the Senate seat, but he won later elections, including another Senate term in 1837, which he declined in order to accept appointment by President Martin Van Buren to the U.S. Supreme Court.

McKinley served on the Supreme Court until 1852, but his career was marked by absences from the Court and little contact with the major legal issues of the day. He wrote only twenty opinions and two concurrences in his fifteen years, and commentators and historians have disparaged his work as lacking any legal significance.

McKinley is best known for his dissent in Bank of Augusta v. Earle (1839), in which he insisted that Alabama, as a sovereign state, could limit business activity to corporations chartered in Alabama. He saw the United States as a federation of sovereign states and rejected the concept of national legal comity between the states (see State Sovereignty and States' Rights). Justice Joseph Story and others desiring a national economy prevailed, and McKinley was alone in his dissent.

McKinley argued for states' rights in three other cases. He was joined by Story in a dissent in Groves v. Slaughter (1841), in which he maintained that a Mississippi constitutional restriction of the importation of slaves was valid. In Pollard v. Hagan (1845), he wrote for the majority of the Court in holding that submerged land belonged to the states and not the federal government.

Throughout his Supreme Court service he complained bitterly about the extensive circuit duty he was required to fulfill. His circuit, the ninth, was the largest and included parts of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi and all of Arkansas. There were years when he did not get to the last of these districts. McKinley petitioned Congress in 1838 and 1842 for relief, explaining the difficulty and expense of the circuit travel and the threat of yellow fever. He did not gain any relief from circuit riding, however, and his many absences from the courts induced complaints from the public and other circuit judges.

McKinley lived in Louisville, Kentucky, during his Supreme Court tenure to take advantage of the water transportation between Washington and the Ninth Circuit. During the last years of his life, McKinley's poor health meant that he contributed little to the Court's work.

R. Michael McReynolds