Path to the Supreme Court
Peter Vivian Daniel married into the Randolphs — his first wife was Edmund Randolph's daughter Lucy — and spent a quarter-century inside Virginia's ruling machinery: privy councillor and lieutenant governor, Richmond Junto stalwart, then federal district judge. Van Buren nominated him in the final week of his presidency, and the Senate confirmed him on March 2, 1841, two days before Harrison's inauguration — a midnight appointment that went on to outlast its critics by twenty years.
On the Supreme Court
Daniel was the Court's implacable agrarian — against banks, corporations, federal admiralty, and internal improvements, a Virginia ideologue filing minority reports against the century. He denied that corporations could be 'citizens' entitled to federal courts (dissenting in Marshall v. Baltimore & Ohio R.R.), dissented alone when The Genesee Chief carried admiralty jurisdiction beyond the tide, and in Dred Scott filed the most extreme of the nine opinions, denying that Black Americans had ever 'belonged to the family of nations.' His one great majority cut the other way: West River Bridge v. Dix held that eminent domain reaches even a chartered franchise — state sovereignty trumping the corporate contract. Widowed twice — his second wife died in 1857 when a candle caught her dress — he died in 1860, and his seat waited two years for Samuel Miller (§36).
The Voting Record
How Daniel voted in the 1,213 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1842 term through the 1859 term, using that database’s classification of each vote as liberal or conservative. The gold tick on each bar is the rate for the other justices sitting on those same cases.
Where Daniel sat among the colleagues on the same bench — and whether that Court divided clearly enough for the question to have an answer — is laid out Court by Court. See this Court →
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
West River Bridge Co. v. Dix
1848Holding · A state's eminent domain power can take a chartered corporate franchise; compensation, not the Contract Clause, is the owner's protection.
Role · Daniel wrote for the Court.
The great counterweight to Dartmouth College: charters are property, and property yields to the sovereign on payment.
Read the opinion →The Propeller Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh
1851Holding · Federal admiralty jurisdiction extends to the Great Lakes and navigable inland waters, not merely tidewater.
Role · Daniel dissented alone, holding to the English tidewater rule.
Taney's (§24) most nationalist opinion, with Daniel as the last agrarian holdout against commercial reality.
Read the opinion →Marshall v. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
1854Holding · A corporation's shareholders are presumed citizens of the chartering state, preserving corporate access to federal diversity jurisdiction.
Role · Daniel dissented, denying that a corporation could ever be a 'citizen.'
The purest statement of his lifelong war on corporate access to the federal courts.
Read the opinion →Dred Scott v. Sandford
1857Holding · Scott remained a slave; for Daniel, even the Northwest Ordinance's slavery ban had been unconstitutional.
Role · Daniel concurred — the most extreme proslavery opinion of the nine.
The furthest edge of the decision: race, in Daniel's telling, placed Black Americans forever outside 'the family of nations.'
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Justice Daniel Dissenting: A Biography of Peter V. Daniel, 1784–1860 (Harvard University Press, 1964) by John P. Frank — one of the finest biographies ever written of a minor justice, and the title is the thesis: a study of what happens when a pure ideologue holds a life seat while history moves the other way. Frank, a distinguished constitutional lawyer who clerked for Hugo Black, writes it with wit and rigor. Sixty years old and still a model of the genre.
The Bookshelf
Daniel dissented against corporations, banks, admiralty, federal roads — against the nineteenth century itself — with a consistency no colleague matched. Frank covers it all: the Randolph apprenticeship, the decades as Virginia's perpetual second man, the midnight appointment, the miserable Arkansas circuit, the tragedies at home. If this site ever compiles a list of the best books about the Court's obscure members, this leads it. Harvard University Press.
The best short modern treatment, with a title that states this site's whole thesis better than we could: Daniel's jurisprudence was his biography — the declining Virginia gentry world, the Randolph inheritance, the agrarian resentments — carried onto the bench intact and never revised. The limiting case of how far ideology can substitute for judging, and a caution about what a life appointment preserves.
A thirty-page audit of Daniel's dissents, by an author generally identified as Henry Billings Brown — who would join the Court himself in 1891. The justice-on-justice thread gains its strangest entry: the future author of Plessy v. Ferguson cataloging the great agrarian dissenter, with the double irony that Brown's own reputation now rests on one notorious majority. Public domain.
Powell's survey returns from the Barbour page, with Daniel as its hardest case: the last Virginian seated on the Court for seventy-five years after him, and the one whose constitutional world a modern Virginia justice could least defend. Quietly instructive about how the institution remembers its ideologues.
The agrarian creed's one big day in the majority: a corporate franchise is property like any other, and a state may take it by eminent domain, charter notwithstanding. The holding disciplined the Contract Clause a decade after Charles River Bridge and remains foundational to eminent-domain law. For once the century's most anti-corporate judge spoke for the Court, and he made it count. Free online.
The compact reference account — the Privy Council decades, the midnight appointment, the dissents, the Dred Scott concurrence (the most extreme of the nine opinions; see the Taney page). Written with Frank's biography already on the shelf, it serves mainly as orientation.
The frame for Daniel's nineteen years of losing: the License and Passenger Cases, the admiralty expansion he fought, the corporate docket that grew despite him, and the circuit reorganization that sent him west. Swisher treats him fairly as the Court's fixed point — the man against whom the era's drift can be measured. Macmillan.
The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The one-volume reference on the Court: more than a thousand signed entries on cases, doctrines, institutions and the justices, current to 2005. Cases and people share one alphabet, so a citation can be followed without changing volumes, and the biographical entries are short, written by specialists, and better than a longer sketch at carrying the historiography — what the argument about a justice currently is. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.Frank — for one of the best judicial biographies ever written about anyone, let alone a minor justice
- 2.Maltz — for the thesis in ten pages — biography as destiny
- 3.West River Bridge — for the creed's one day in the majority
- 4.H. B. Brown — for the dissents audited by a future justice
- 5.Powell and the Friedman & Israel chapter — for the Virginia memory and the quick orientation
- 6.Swisher — for the era that outvoted him, measured from his fixed point
Where the Papers Are Kept
Three modest collections, as the FJC lists them — Richmond for the Virginia world, with strays at the Morgan Library and the Huntington. Frank worked them all, plus the Van Buren papers at the Library of Congress, where Daniel's long political correspondence survives — his letters to Van Buren are among the best sources on Jacksonian Virginia. Visit →
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- Daniel followed Barbour twice: into the Eastern Virginia district judgeship in 1836, and into the Supreme Court seat in 1841 — nominated one day after Barbour's death, confirmed two days before Van Buren left office. The Whigs called it a midnight appointment; they could not know Van Buren had planted the most immovable ideologue in the Court's history.
- The circuit-burden thread continues from McKinley: the remade western circuit — Arkansas and Mississippi — fell to Daniel in 1843, and he hated every mile. The personal register is dark throughout: a rival reportedly killed in an 1809 duel; a second wife lost to a household fire in 1857.
- His death in May 1860 opened the vacancy that sat through the entire secession winter — Buchanan's nominee was rejected, and the seat waited for Lincoln and Samuel Miller. A life seat as a hinge of history: the mortal court in one vacancy.