Benjamin Robbins Curtis 1809-74, American jurist, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1851-57), b. Watertown, Mass. After studying law at Harvard, he practiced at Northfield, Mass., and served in the state legislature. Appointed to the Supreme Court by President Fillmore, he wrote one of the two dissenting opinions in the Dred Scott Case and resigned from the court because of the bitter feelings engendered by the case. One of the nation's leading lawyers, he was chief counsel to Andrew Johnson at the President's impeachment trial.

Bibliography: See biography by his son B. R. Curtis (1879, repr. 1970), which includes a memoir by G. T. Curtis.

Curtis, Benjamin Robbins (b. Watertown, Mass., 4 Nov. 1809; d. Newport, R.I., 15 Sept. 1874; interred Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Mass.), associate justice, 1851–1857. Curtis was the son of a Massachusetts ship captain who died on a sea voyage when Curtis was a child. Curtis graduated from Harvard in 1829 and from the law school there in 1832. Shortly thereafter he established a law practice in Boston and became a Whig in politics. It was on the recommendation of then Secretary of State Daniel Webster that President Millard Fillmore appointed Curtis to the high court in 1851.

On the Court, Curtis became known for his participation in two major cases. The first was Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852), in which he enunciated the doctrine of selective exclusiveness (see Commerce Power). In this commerce clause case, Curtis held for the Court that where the object of regulation is such as to require a uniform national rule, the power to legislate is reserved exclusively to Congress; but where a uniform national rule is not required, the states are constitutionally free to enact their own regulation, unless and until Congress legislates.

Curtis's other major opinion was a dissent in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Curtis repudiated Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's opinion for the Court by relying upon facts to show that at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, there were African‐American citizens in several states, Northern and Southern (see Race and Racism). There being no federal citizenship clause in the Constitution, Curtis reasoned, the states must have created federal citizens automatically by having conferred state citizenship. Thus, Scott, despite being of African ancestry, could be a citizen within the meaning of Article III of the Constitution.

With respect to congressional control of slavery in federal territories, Curtis cited no fewer than fourteen separate instances in which Congress had legislated with respect to slavery in the territories prior to the Missouri Compromise. Thus, he concluded that by settled practice Congress had had the power to enact the Compromise, and Scott's residence in the areas governed by that congressional legislation had made him a free man.

The rancor engendered by the Dred Scott decision so strained Curtis's relations with his fellow justices that he resigned. He returned to his Boston law practice and, after the Civil War, argued several significant cases before the Court.

His greatest legal contribution, however, came as one of the defense counsels in the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. In that case—and perhaps contrary to the intent of the founders—Curtis was able to convince the Senate that impeachment was exclusively a judicial, not a political, proceeding, a trial of and not a vote of confidence in the president.

Curtis died at the age of sixty‐four; having been married three times, he was the father of twelve children. In his short tenure on the Supreme Court he gave promise of being a great justice. Whether he would have realized that potential had he remained on the Court will never be known. But today the Cooley Rule is the law of the land, and Dred Scott is not.

Bibliography

Richard H. Leach , Benjamin R. Curtis: Case Study of a Supreme Court Justice (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1951).

Richard Y. Funston

Benjamin Robbins Curtis

Benjamin Robbins Curtis (1809-1874) was one of the most able lawyers on the U.S. Supreme Court in the 19th century.

Benjamin Robbins Curtis was born into an old New England family in Watertown, Mass., on Nov. 4, 1809. He graduated second in his class at Harvard in 1829, then took a degree from Harvard Law School. In 1833 he married Eliza Maria Woodward, with whom he had five children. When she died in 1844, he married again and had three more children.

Through the influence of a prominent uncle, Curtis became a partner in a Boston law firm in 1834, remaining until 1851 and becoming one of the leading commercial lawyers in the United States. He was elected to the Massachusetts General Court in 1849 and 1851 and was largely responsible for the Massachusetts Practice Act of 1851, which eliminated many legal abuses. When what was then the New England seat on the U.S. Supreme Court became vacant in 1851, President Millard Fillmore appointed Curtis.

In his first term Curtis's ability to cut to the heart of a problem led to establishing a commonsense interpretation of the commerce clause in Cooley v. Board of Wardens, which allowed states to regulate local commercial matters while not diminishing Congress's power. Another precedent-setting case enabled administrative officers to determine and collect debts without a court order. He was also highly effective in conference, "educating" by persuasion his fellow justices.

Riding the New England circuit, Curtis continued to show concern for law and order and preservation of the Union. Though labeled a "slave-catcher judge" because of his strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, he dissented on the precedent-setting Dred Scott case (1852) and wrote a long minority opinion demonstrating that African Americans were U.S. citizens in 1787, that residence in free territory made a man free, and that Congress had complete authority to legislate for the territories, including prohibiting slavery. Misunderstandings with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney over dissemination of these opinions were partly responsible for Curtis's resignation from the Court.

Returning to a lucrative private practice, Curtis argued several important cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. When his second wife died in 1860, he married again. He supported the North in the Civil War but raised important questions about presidential power in a pamphlet critical of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and of suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. He opposed Lincoln's reelection in 1864. When President Andrew Johnson was impeached, Curtis and William M. Evarts defended him before the Senate.

In 1874 Curtis suffered a brain hemorrhage and died at Newport, R.I., on September 15. His course of lectures at Harvard for 1872-1873, Jurisdiction, Practice and Peculiar Jurisprudence of the Courts of the United States, was published in 1880.

Further Reading

There is no modern biography of Curtis. A eulogistic memoir by his brother and a volume of his writings edited by his son were published as A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis, L.L.D., with Some of His Professional and Miscellaneous Writings (2 vols., 1879; repr. 1969). Vincent C. Hopkins, Dred Scott's Case (1951), details Curtis's role in that case. His Court career appears in Leo Pfeffer, This Honorable Court: A History of the United States Supreme Court (1965). □