Path to the Supreme Court
Howell Edmunds Jackson was a Tennessee Whig who opposed secession and spent the war as a reluctant Confederate receiver of sequestered property. A compromise choice for the U.S. Senate in 1881 after a legislative deadlock, he befriended across the aisle the junior senator from Indiana — Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland made Jackson a Sixth Circuit judge in 1886, and in February 1893 the lame-duck Republican Harrison, facing a Democratic Senate after Lamar's (§49) death, nominated his old Democratic friend. He was confirmed without opposition in sixteen days.
On the Supreme Court
Tuberculosis gave Jackson barely a working year before the great test came to him. In May 1895, with the eight sitting justices split 4–4 on the income tax, the dying Jackson rose from his sickbed in Tennessee and traveled to Washington for the Pollock rehearing — and voted to uphold the tax, warning that striking it down was 'the most disastrous blow ever struck at the constitutional power of Congress.' The tax fell 5–4 anyway: one of the original four upholders, never identified, had switched sides, and Jackson's last journey ended in dissent. He died eleven weeks later, in August 1895; Peckham (§56) took the seat.
The Voting Record
How Jackson voted in the 417 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1892 term through the 1894 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 Jackson 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
Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (rehearing)
1895Holding · The 1894 income tax fell, 5–4, as an unapportioned direct tax.
Role · Jackson, mortally ill, returned to break the 4–4 deadlock and voted to uphold the tax — dissenting when another justice's switch defeated it anyway.
'The most disastrous blow ever struck at the constitutional power of Congress' — a dying justice's protest, vindicated by the Sixteenth Amendment.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Howell Edmunds Jackson served barely two years and is remembered, if at all, for a single desperate act: dying of tuberculosis, he rose from his sickbed to hear the Pollock rehearing and cast a vote to save the income tax — and lost anyway. He has no biography. Approach him through the Friedman & Israel chapter for the life, Fiss's Holmes Devise volume for the Court, and the Pollock rehearing itself for the moment that fixed his small place in history.
The Bookshelf
The nearest thing to a life he has. The Chelsea House chapter carries the arc efficiently: the West Tennessee lawyer, the Confederate receiver of sequestered property during the war, the U.S. senator, and the federal circuit judge who sat beside a young William Howard Taft on the Sixth Circuit — a friendship that mattered, because it was Taft's advocacy and Jackson's own that moved a Republican president to name a Democrat to the Court. For a justice with two years and no biography, this is the whole story between covers.
His one moment on history's stage. When the Court reheard the income-tax case, Jackson — already dying — left his sickbed and traveled to Washington to sit, expecting his vote to save the tax. Instead a colleague on the other side switched (see Shiras §53), and the tax fell 5–4 with Jackson in dissent, calling the result 'the most disastrous blow ever struck at the constitutional power of Congress.' He was dead within three months. The Sixteenth Amendment (1913) would vindicate him. A dissent worth reading for the pathos and the prescience alike. Free online.
The Holmes Devise volume for the Court Jackson so briefly joined — the era anchor for this shelf. Jackson is a footnote in Fiss's story, but the volume supplies what a two-year justice with no biography otherwise lacks: the doctrinal world of Pollock, E.C. Knight, and the property jurisprudence his one famous vote was cast to resist. Macmillan.
For the justices no one has written a book about, the Supreme Court Historical Society's illustrated biographies are the reliable standard — a well-researched capsule life with a portrait. The Jackson entry gives the Tennessee career, the cross-party appointment, and the deathbed vote in a few careful pages, and is the best short, citable account of a man the fuller literature simply skips. CQ Press for the SCHS.
The one substantial scholarly study of Jackson — the Tennessee Whig's rise through the wreckage of the postwar South to the federal bench. Standard citation in everything since written about him.
The main modern account of Jackson's improbable appointment — a Democrat named by Republican Benjamin Harrison — and of the two-year tenure that ended with his dying return for the income-tax rehearing in Pollock.
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 whole two-year life between covers
- 2.The Pollock deathbed dissent — for the moment that fixed his place — and the amendment that vindicated it
- 3.The SCHS Illustrated Biographies — for the reliable capsule life of a bookless justice
- 4.Fiss — for the Fuller Court his one great vote resisted
Where the Papers Are Kept
No dedicated Jackson collection is known; scattered correspondence survives in Tennessee repositories and in the papers of Benjamin Harrison and William Howard Taft — the two men whose friendship put him on the Court. A thin record for a short tenure. Visit →
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The cross-party appointment. A Republican president, Benjamin Harrison, put a Tennessee Democrat and former Confederate official on the Court in 1893 — an act of personal friendship (and a lame-duck's grace note) almost unimaginable in a later age. Set it beside Cleveland's ex-Confederate choice of Lamar (§49) five years earlier: two roads by which the defeated South returned to the bench.
- The deathbed vote and the Sixteenth Amendment. Jackson's Pollock dissent is the losing half of a 5–4 the country later reversed by amendment. Trace the line from his 1895 dissent to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 — and to Fuller's majority (§50) and the silent switch (Shiras §53) on the other side.
- The shortest tenures. Jackson sat about two years; pair him with the other blink-tenures on the site — Thomas Johnson (§7), Moore (§12), Trimble (§20), Barbour (§25) — as a study in what a justice can and cannot leave behind in a handful of terms. He died in office in August 1895 (one of the 51). Seat lineage: Lamar §49 → Howell Jackson → Peckham.