WOODBURY, LEVI (1789–1851)

Levi Woodbury was a New Hampshire lawyer, state supreme court justice (1817–1823), governor (1823–1824), United States senator (1825–1831; 1841–1842), secretary of the navy (1831–1834), secretary of the treasury (1834–1841), and United States Supreme Court Justice (1845–1851). A staunch Jacksonian Democrat, Woodbury supported territorial expansion, strict construction, and states ' rights, while opposing the bank of the united states, abolitionists, and high tariffs. Although a conservative, Woodbury advocated public schools, female education, and prison reform. He personally disliked slavery but believed it was constitutionally protected and that all agitation over it should cease.

On the New Hampshire bench Woodbury supported the state in dartmouth college v. woodward (1819). As treasury secretary, Woodbury continued President andrew jackson's Bank War and advocated an independent treasury. He believed that Congress lacked constitutional power to recharter the Bank, and as late as 1841 he asserted that mcculloch v. maryland (1819) neither set a valid precedent nor determined the constitutionality of any future bank charter.

In 1830, as a senator, Woodbury criticized the Supreme Court for its "manifest and sleepless opposition…tothe strict construction of the Constitution" which had created "a diseased enlargement of the powers of the General Government and throwing chains over States-Rights.…" Woodbury attempted to stop these tendencies in his brief tenure on the Supreme Court. In the license cases (1847), Woodbury joined the majority in upholding state prohibition statues. In the passenger cases (1849), he asserted, in dissent, that states could constitutionally regulate immigrants without violating the Constitution's commerce clause. In luther v. borden (1848), he agreed with the majority that the case involved a political question beyond the court's jurisdiction, but he nevertheless modified his states' rights position to condemn the use of martial law in Rhode Island. In Warning v. Clarke (1847), he again dissented, this time to assert state jurisdiction over navigable rivers. In a rare deviation from his states' rights philosophy, Woodbury wrote the majority opinion in Planters' Bank v. Sharpe (1848), overturning a Mississippi statute and court decision because both impaired the obligation of contracts in violation of the Constitution.

Woodbury's most important majority opinion was written in Jones v. Van Zandt (1847), where he upheld a particularly harsh interpretation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. Van Zandt, an Ohio Quaker, had given a ride to a group of blacks walking on a road in Ohio. Woodbury held Van Zandt financially liable for the escape of these fugitive slaves, even though at the time Van Zandt had no notice they were fugitives. Woodbury asserted that the Constitution had "flung its shield" over slavery, giving masters a common law right to recapture their property. Woodbury held that the Fugitive Slave Law was a constitutionally proper enforcement of this right. Somewhat inconsistently, he then asserted that slavery itself was "a political question, settled by each State for itself." In 1848 Woodbury sought the presidential nomination. He was considered a likely candidate in 1852, because his Van Zandt opinion gave him southern support, while as a Northerner he might get grudging support from Free Soil Democrats. He campaigned for the nomination from the bench until his death in 1851.

Paul Finkelman
(1986)

Bibliography

Gatell, Frank O. 1968 Levi Woodbury. Pages 843–872 in Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel, eds., The Justices of the United States Supreme Court, 1789–1969: Their Lives and Major Opinions. New York: Chelsea House.