HUNT, WARD (1810–1886)

Ward Hunt, a New York judge, was appointed to the Supreme Court by ulysses s. grant in late 1872; seven years later, although permanently incapacitated by a stroke, he refused to resign until Congress passed a special retirement act in 1882. His judicial contributions were largely unexceptional and insignificant. He consistently sided with the waite court majority in supporting bondholders' claims, upholding state regulation under traditional police power doctrines, and denying claims for racial equality under the fourteenth amendment.

Hunt also upheld claims of immunity from federal taxation for states or their instrumentalities. (See intergovernmental immunity.) Earlier, in collector v. day (1871), the Court had exempted state judges from the federal income tax. In one of his first opinions, Hunt treated municipally financed railroads as state agencies and as similarly exempt. "Their operation," he said in United States v. Railroad Co. (1873), "may be impeded and may be destroyed, if any interference is permitted." A few years later he dissented from the nationalistic holding in pensacola telegraph co. v. western union telegraph co. (1877), in which the majority held that states could not interfere with telegraph lines established under federal law. Hunt, however, insisted that federal authority extended only to lands in the public domain.

Hunt usually followed his colleagues in ruling against claims advancing Negro rights. But in united states v. reese (1876) he alone dissented to support the constitutionality of the force act (1870) which was designed to implement the fifteenth amendment. Hunt interpreted the amendment as guaranteeing "the right to vote in its broadest terms" for all citizens, an all elections, state as well as federal. The majority had refused to sanction federal interference against acts of individual state officers who had refused on their own account to allow blacks to vote. For Hunt, it was obvious that such individual acts were tantamount to state action and subject to federal restraint. The word "state" in the Fifteenth Amendment, he maintained, included "the acts of all those who proceed under [a state's] … authority." The Reese decision reflected the growing national consensus for sectional reconciliation which inevitably meant abandonment of national protection for the freedmen's civil rights. Hunt acknowledged this mood and he recognized that the majority's decision "brings to an impotent conclusion the vigorous amendments on the subject of slavery." Yet he silently acquiesced later that term in the further emasculation of the Force Act in united states v. cruikshank (1876).

Hunt's fleeting concern for guaranteeing black suffrage did not extend to women. On circuit in 1873, he presided at the trial of susan b. anthony, who had voted in the 1872 presidential election in New York despite a state constitutional requirement limiting the franchise to men. Anthony claimed that the state denied her the privileges and immunities guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. Hunt flatly denied the argument. He invoked the reasoning of the recent slaughterhouse cases (1873) and held that such regulations, however unjust, were under the absolute domain of the state. Hunt directed a guilty verdict, refused to poll the jury, and fined Anthony $100. The sentence was not enforced, and there was no appeal to the Supreme Court.

Hunt was a hard-working able craftsman during his brief career on the Court (1873–1882) but he had little apparent influence on his brethren or on constitutional law.

Stanley I. Kutler
(1986)

Bibliography

Fairman, Charles 1971 Reconstruction and Reunion, 1864–1888. Volume 6 of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States. New York: Macmillan.

Magrath, C. Peter 1963 Morrison R. Waite: The Triumph of Character. New York: Macmillan.