Wayne, James Moore (b. Savannah, Ga., 1790; d. Washington, D.C., 7 July 1867; interred Laurel Grove Cemetery, Savannah), associate justice, 1835–1867. James Moore Wayne was the son of Richard Wayne and Elizabeth Clifford, members of Georgia's aristocracy. Educated in the northeast, he was a local politician with a national perspective, and a slaveholder who during the Civil War supported the cause of union.

Wayne graduated from the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1808. He studied law in Connecticut under Judge Charles Chauncey of New Haven, and in 1810 returned to Georgia where he was admitted to the bar and entered private practice a year later.

Though he saw no action, Wayne interrupted his legal career to serve as a captain with a Georgia militia unit during the War of 1812. After the war, he reentered private practice and embarked upon a peripatetic political career. Between 1815 and 1819, Wayne served as a member of the legislature, a member of Savannah's Board of Aldermen, and then mayor. In 1819 the state legislature elected him judge of the Savannah Court of Common Pleas, which handled misdemeanors and small civil claims. In 1822 Wayne became a judge of the superior court, the trial court of general jurisdiction. In 1828 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. A loyal supporter of President Andrew Jackson, Wayne was reelected three times. When Associate Justice William Johnson of South Carolina died in 1834, President Jackson rewarded Wayne's loyalty with Johnson's seat.

Justice Wayne's particular expertise was admiralty, and in this area he adopted an expansive view of federal power. In Waring v. Clarke (1847), for example, he ruled that the federal admiralty power extended to sea waters flowing by tide or otherwise into ports and rivers.

In Commerce Clause cases, Justice Wayne tracked a course mindful of the states' police powers but nonetheless jealous of federal power. In City of New York v. Miln (1837), Wayne concurred in a decision forcing ship captains to report on and to post bond for immigrant passengers who might become public charges. Wayne concurred without opinion in the License Cases (1847), involving taxes levied upon ship captains for each immigrant carried, but in the Passenger Cases (1849), he delivered a concurring opinion that the commerce power was vested exclusively in Congress. In Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852), involving a local pilotage law, Wayne restated his view of the exclusivity of federal power over interstate and foreign commerce and dissented from Justice Benjamin R. *Curtis's formula recognizing state power to regulate those aspects of commerce that were essentially local and not demanding of national uniformity.

As a southerner and slaveholder, Justice Wayne regularly ruled in favor of slave interests (see Slavery). Consistent with his vision of the supremacy and the expansiveness of federal power, in Ableman v. Booth (1859), Wayne was part of a unanimous Court that turned back Wisconsin's effort to interpose the power of its state courts between a federal court and those arrested for violations of the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Similarly, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), Wayne concurred that federal power regarding the subject of fugitive slaves was exclusive.

It was in Scott v. Sandford (1857) that the conflict between Justice Wayne's view of the expansiveness of federal power over slavery and his desire to conserve the institution came to judicial fruition. The only justice to concur in Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's opinion, Justice Wayne agreed foursquare with the position that under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, Congress had no power to prohibit the introduction of slavery into the territories, nor to declare as free those slaves brought into the territories (see Due Process, Substantive).

Unlike many other southern federal officeholders, including Justice John A. Campbell of Alabama, Justice Wayne did not resign to join the South during the Civil War. The Confederacy branded him a traitor and confiscated his property in Georgia. Wayne voted to uphold President Abraham Lincoln's declaration of a naval blockade of Southern ports during the war, in the Prize Cases (1863), but after the war, he voted in Cummings v. Missouri (1867) and Ex parte Garland (1867) to strike down the test oaths.

Bibliography

Alexander A. Lawrence , James Moore Wayne, Southern Unionist (1943).

Raymond T. Diamond

WAYNE, JAMES MOORE

As an associate justice, James Moore Wayne served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1835 to 1867. Wayne rose to prominence in his native Georgia in the early 1800s, establishing himself as a local politician with cosmopolitan views. Nominated to the Court by President andrew jackson, he shared the president's strong federalist views, and Wayne often took an expansive view of federal power in his opinions. His federalism was put to the test, however, because of

his support of slavery. Loyal in his support for the Union during the u.s. civil war, he paid a dear price in the south for choosing to remain on the Court even as other southern judges quit the federal bench.

"A corporation … seems to us to be a person, though an artificial one, inhabiting and belonging to that state [of incorporation], and therefore entitled, for the purpose of suing and being sued, to be deemed a citizen of that state."
—James Moore Wayne

Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1790, Wayne was the son of aristocratic parents. In his teens, he chose to leave Georgia in order to attend Princeton University. He graduated in 1808, and two years later returned home to establish a law practice. After brief service as a captain in the war of 1812, he set out on an intermittent political career. From 1815 to 1816, he served in the Georgia House of Representatives and was then

elected mayor of Savannah. His local political career soon gave way to a judicial one. In 1819 he was elected judge of the Savannah Court of Common Pleas, and in 1822 he became a judge of the superior court.

In 1828, Wayne's interest in national affairs took him to Washington. Winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives, he became a strong supporter of Andrew Jackson over the course of three terms in office. In 1834, when President Jackson needed a southerner to fill the vacancy left by the death of Associate Justice william johnson, Jackson nominated Wayne.

On the Court Wayne's federalism expressed itself repeatedly. His specialty was admiralty law—the law of the seas—which was of great significance during the era. Admiralty issues were often volatile because they involved one of the sharpest constitutional conflicts of the day, the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce relative to state police powers. The cases heard by the Court during Wayne's tenure involved taxation, licensing, and slavery, and the Court was often divided due to its inability to agree upon the extent of power vested in the Constitution's commerce clause. Wayne generally voted in favor of the federal government's interests. In the so-called Passenger Cases of 1849, when the Court invalidated New York and Massachusetts laws that imposed taxes on incoming ship passengers, Wayne wrote in his concurring opinion that Congress had exclusive control over interstate commerce.

Politically, the dividing point in Wayne's federalism was the very issue that split the nation into Civil War—slavery. As a slave owner, he struggled to find justification for preserving the institution even as the federal government opposed it. He believed that Congress had no power to interfere with slavery under the due process clause of the fifth amendment, and thus concurred in Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney's opinion in dred scott v. sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 19 How. 393, 15 L. Ed. 691 (1857), which upheld the legality of slavery. The decision fueled animosities which led to the Civil War.

Southerners detested Wayne's decision to remain on the Court during the war. Yet even as he was denounced as a traitor and his property in Georgia was seized, he supported the cause of union. He remained on the bench until his death on July 7, 1867.

further readings

Lawrence, Alexander A. 1970. James Moore Wayne, Southern Unionist. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

O'Connor, Sandra Day. 1991. "Supreme Court Justices from Georgia." Georgia Journal of Southern Legal History 1 (fall-winter).