Todd, Thomas

Todd, Thomas (b. King and Queen County, Va., 23 Jan. 1765; d. 7 Feb. 1826; interred Frankfort Cemetery, Frankfort, Ky.), associate justice, 1807–1826. Thomas Todd, whose ancestor of the same name settled in Norfolk County in 1669, was the youngest of five children of Elizabeth Richards and Robert Todd. His father died when he was eighteen months old; his mother before he reached maturity. After two short enlistments during the War for Independence when he was fourteen and sixteen, Todd graduated from Liberty Hall (later Washington and Lee University). He then lived with his older first cousin, Harry Innes, tutored the Innes children, and studied surveying. When Innes was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature for the Kentucky District in 1783, Todd accompanied the family on its emigration to Danville. The two men were among the founding members of the Political Club, a small but influential organization that included the leadership of the commonwealth.

Todd is said to have begun practicing law in 1788 with only a horse, a bridle, and three shillings in his pockets. (He enjoyed breeding horses, but unlike many contemporaries in Kentucky with his education and training, he never acquired a fortune in land.) Meanwhile, he had established a minor career as the official recorder for almost every official body in Kentucky, thus earning the gratitude of generations of historians for his uniquely legible handwriting. He was clerk for all of the ten conventions (1784–1792) called to arrange separation from Virginia; clerk of the federal district court (of which Innes was judge), 1789–1792; clerk of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, 1792–1801; clerk of the Kentucky constitutional conventions in 1792 and 1799; sometime clerk of the House of Representatives; and in 1793–1794, clerk of the Lexington Democratic Society.

Todd also earned a reputation for untangling the conflicting land claims resulting from the complicated Virginia law that the commonwealth inherited. He was appointed a judge of Kentucky's highest court in 1801 and its chief judge in 1806. When a seventh seat was created on the United States Supreme Court in 1807, Todd was the first or second choice of the senators and representatives from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, the states to be served by the new Seventh Circuit Court. After his unanimous confirmation, he received President Thomas Jefferson's commission in March and took his seat at the February 1808 session.

Todd served on the Supreme Court until 1826, but probably had greater judicial impact through his work on the Seventh Circuit. In Kentucky, for example, where as circuit judge he was Innes's superior until his death in 1816, the court ceased adjudicating cases below the jurisdictional minimum and certified eight cases to the higher court because of disagreement between the judges. Fortunately, the judges' professional differences did not disrupt their close familial relationship, which was reinforced when one of Todd's sons married one of Innes's daughters.

Because of illness, family affairs, and the hardships of traveling to Washington, Todd was absent from half a dozen terms of the Supreme Court. Although he was a Jeffersonian, he accepted Chief Justice John Marshall's leadership and wrote only fourteen opinions of his own: eleven for the majority (of which ten involved land claims), two concurring opinions, and one in dissent.

Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau