Path to the Supreme Court
Robert Cooper Grier, a Presbyterian minister's son who ran the family academy before turning to law, judged Pittsburgh's district court for thirteen years while Henry Baldwin's (§22) seat sat empty through twenty-seven months of failed nominations. Polk sent up Grier's name on August 3, 1846, and the exhausted Senate confirmed him the next day.
On the Supreme Court
Grier's ledger holds the era's extremes. In 1851 he presided over the Christiana treason trial and charged the jury that armed resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act — whatever crime it was — was not levying war; Castner Hanway was acquitted in minutes, and constructive treason effectively died in American law. In 1857 came the stain: pressed by President-elect Buchanan at Catron's (§26) prompting, Grier disclosed the coming Dred Scott decision in writing and joined the southern majority so the ruling would not look sectional. In 1863 came the masterpiece: his Prize Cases opinion, 5–4, sustaining Lincoln's blockade — 'a civil war is never solemnly declared'; the President must meet war as a fact. Strokes then wrecked him; after his wandering votes in the legal-tender conference, a delegation of colleagues led by Field (§38) asked him to step down, and he retired on the last day of January 1870.
The Voting Record
How Grier voted in the 1,846 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1847 term through the 1869 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 Grier 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
United States v. Hanway (on circuit)
1851Holding · Armed resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act at Christiana was riot or murder at most — not treason, which requires actually levying war.
Role · Grier presided with Judge Kane and charged the jury against constructive treason.
The jury acquitted in minutes; the government abandoned some forty treason indictments, and constructive treason was finished in America.
Read the opinion →Dred Scott v. Sandford
1857Holding · Scott remained a slave; the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
Role · Grier concurred with Nelson (§29) and with Taney (§24) on the Compromise — after assuring President-elect Buchanan of the outcome by letter.
The Pennsylvania vote that made the decision look national rather than sectional — procured by presidential pressure.
Read the opinion →Prize Cases
1863Holding · The President could lawfully blockade the South after Sumter without a declaration of war; war existed as a fact he was bound to meet.
Role · Grier wrote the 5–4 majority.
The legal foundation of the Union war effort — 'a civil war is never solemnly declared.'
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
No biography of Robert Grier exists — startling for the man who wrote the Prize Cases, co-starred in the Dred Scott scandal, and became the first justice ever pressured off the bench for incapacity. The standard account is the Grier chapter in Friedman & Israel's The Justices of the United States Supreme Court (Chelsea House, 1969); the great moments each have their own literature.
The Bookshelf
The standard connected account: the minister's son who ran the family academy at nineteen to support his siblings, thirteen years as Pittsburgh's president judge, the twenty-eight-month vacancy he ended in a single day (nominated August 3, 1846, confirmed August 4), and twenty-three years of blunt, vigorous, occasionally reckless judging.
The most consequential opinion of the wartime Court and Grier's one immortal performance: a civil war does not wait for a declaration — "it is a fact" — and a president confronted by rebellion may treat it as war from the first shot. The 5–4 majority upheld the blockade and much of the Union's legal theory of the conflict; Nelson's dissent for four shows how close it was, and Wayne's vote held the line. Free online.
The indispensable frame for Grier's finest hour — McGinty builds his wartime chapters around the Prize Cases argument and decision, with Grier's bluff courtroom personality on full display. The book's third appearance on this site (Wayne's loyalty, Catron's border circuit, Grier's opinion) makes the point by accumulation: the Union's legal survival ran through the Taney Court's unlikeliest trio. Harvard University Press.
The other half of the scandal begun on the Catron page: nudged by Buchanan at Catron's instigation, Grier replied with the Court's secrets — the vote, the coming breadth of the opinion, his agreement to join Taney "so that the decision should not appear to be that of a sectional majority." Days later the president-elect piously promised at his inauguration to submit to a decision he already knew. Documented line by line in Fehrenbacher's The Dred Scott Case (see the Taney and Catron pages).
The standard account of the 1851 Christiana resistance and its astonishing aftermath: the largest treason prosecution in American history, aimed at Quaker bystanders and free Black defendants. Grier presided at Castner Hanway's trial, and his jury charge gutted the treason theory — refusing to aid a slave-catcher was not levying war. Acquittal in fifteen minutes. The episode is Grier whole: contemptuous of abolitionists, rigorous about the law's limits anyway. Oxford University Press.
The book this site's whole theme was waiting for: a study of how justices leave — death, resignation, decline, denial — with Grier as the founding case of the hardest kind. The strokes, the contradictory Legal Tender votes, and the December 1869 delegation of colleagues who urged him off; Hughes's classic account adds the coda, in which Stephen Field, a member of that delegation, was decades later reminded of it in his own decline: "Yes! And a dirtier day's work I never did in my life!" University Press of Kansas.
Two period portraits, as the FJC's bibliography lists them: the 1852 profile from the same magazine series that covered Wayne and Catron on earlier pages — the antebellum bar surveying the sitting Court, justice by justice — and the Green Bag's retrospective a generation later. Both public domain.
The frame for Grier's first two decades: the fugitive-slave docket he enforced, the License and Passenger Cases era, and the sectional pressure that produced both the Christiana charge and the Buchanan letter. For the last act, the trail runs into Fairman's Reconstruction-era Holmes Devise volumes and Atkinson. Macmillan.
The only modern archival study centered on Grier himself — the Wheeling Bridge bribery allegations that nearly ended his career, reopened with the documents. A rare close look at judicial ethics enforcement, such as it was, in the antebellum Court.
The standard legal history of the Civil War, with blockade law and the Prize Cases — Grier's one great opinion, upholding Lincoln's blockade by a 5–4 vote in 1863 — at its center. The book that explains why Grier's majority mattered as much as any battle that year. Harvard University Press.
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.The Friedman & Israel chapter — for the standard account of the arc
- 2.The Prize Cases, with McGinty — for the masterpiece and its one-vote margin
- 3.The Buchanan letter, via Fehrenbacher — for the scandal's other half, beside the Catron page
- 4.Slaughter — for Christiana — the treason charge that collapsed in fifteen minutes
- 5.Atkinson — for the ending: the first justice pressured off the bench, and Field's dirty day's work
- 6.The 1852 and 1904 profiles, then Swisher — for the reputation in period, and the Court around it
Where the Papers Are Kept
Pennsylvania holds no Grier collection — the State Archives' list of manuscript groups has none — and neither does the Library of Congress. What survives is item-level and in two places. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has a single catalogued piece, his letter to President-elect Buchanan of 1857, which is on this shelf. The larger cluster is at Dickinson, his own college, in the Boyd Lee Spahr Collection: letters from Grant and Chase, family letters, and the six-page letter of 31 January 1870 in which Chase, Nelson (§29), Clifford, Swayne, Miller, Davis and Field thanked him on the resignation they had pressed him into. Visit →
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The mortal court distilled: strokes and creeping confusion left Grier casting contradictory votes in the Legal Tender Cases, and in December 1869 a delegation of his own colleagues waited upon him to urge retirement — the first justice effectively removed for incapacity. Field's later line, when the story turned on him, belongs in any essay on judicial decline.
- Grier holds the era's contradictions in one man: the judge whose Christiana charge demolished the largest treason prosecution in American history also enforced the Fugitive Slave Act as vigorously as any Northern justice — and leaked Dred Scott to the president-elect. The shelf declines to simplify him.
- Threads closed and opened: the Baldwin seat's 28-month, four-failure vacancy ends in a 24-hour confirmation; the Prize Cases now appear from three angles (Grier's majority, Nelson's dissent, Wayne's vote); Atkinson's Leaving the Bench joins the site's core library; and the 1852 U.S. Monthly Law Magazine series (Wayne, Catron, Grier) emerges as a recurring primary source.