Path to the Supreme Court
John McKinley came up through Kentucky self-taught, made his fortune and his career in Huntsville, Alabama — land speculation and Jacksonian politics — and represented the state in both House and Senate. In April 1837 Van Buren gave him a recess appointment to the second of the new western seats, and with it the new Ninth Circuit: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. McKinley reported to the Senate in 1838 that the duty required some ten thousand miles of travel a year — the heaviest burden any justice bore, and it broke his health.
On the Supreme Court
McKinley left barely twenty opinions in fifteen years, but his two famous moments have lasting shape. In Bank of Augusta v. Earle he stood alone: he had ruled on circuit that out-of-state corporations had no right to do business in Alabama, and when Taney (§24) reversed him 8–1 and established interstate comity for corporations, McKinley alone dissented. In Pollard v. Hagan he spoke for the Court, permanently: new states enter the Union on an equal footing with the original ones and take sovereign title to the lands beneath their navigable waters — the equal-footing doctrine courts still apply. Often absent and visibly failing through his last years, he died in July 1852; after three failed nominations the seat finally passed to Campbell (§33).
The Voting Record
How McKinley voted in the 550 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1838 term through the 1851 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 McKinley 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
Bank of Augusta v. Earle
1839Holding · A corporation chartered in one state may contract and do business in another under interstate comity, unless the host state expressly forbids it.
Role · McKinley was the lone dissenter, adhering to his own circuit ruling that Taney's (§24) majority reversed.
The charter of interstate corporate enterprise in America — with McKinley cast as the last defender of state economic sovereignty.
Read the opinion →Pollard v. Hagan
1845Holding · New states enter the Union on an equal footing with the original thirteen and take sovereign title to lands beneath their navigable waters.
Role · McKinley wrote for the Court.
The equal-footing doctrine — his one enduring majority, still the law of submerged lands.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest (University of Alabama Press, 2012) by Steven P. Brown — the era's most obscure justice got, improbably, one of its better modern biographies, because Brown saw that McKinley is the perfect lens on the system that consumed him. His own 1838 report to Congress put his Ninth Circuit at roughly ten thousand miles of travel a year.
The Bookshelf
The subtitle is the thesis: a study of circuit riding in the Old Southwest, with McKinley as its exhausted exemplar. Brown recovers the whole life around the odometer — the Kentucky practice, the Huntsville land boom, the Senate and House years, and the fifteen terms that ill health and impossible geography reduced to a couple dozen opinions. The definitive account, and a genuinely good book about why the early Court worked the way it did. University of Alabama Press.
The one McKinley opinion that outlived him, and it is still working law: every new state enters the Union on an "equal footing" with the original thirteen — including sovereignty over the lands beneath its navigable waters. The equal-footing doctrine has governed submerged-lands fights, tideland oil disputes, and statehood questions from Alabama's riverbeds to Alaska's, and it came from the justice history filed under exhaustion. Ten readable pages, free online.
McKinley's most famous act was an opinion the Supreme Court overturned — his circuit holding that a corporation had no existence outside its chartering state, a ruling that electrified commercial America. Taney's reversal invented the comity framework — corporations may act across state lines unless a state forbids it — that governed American corporate law for a century. The full episode is best followed in Brown and Swisher; the case itself is free online.
The home-state bar's two remembrances, forty years apart, as the FJC's bibliography lists them — Fiebelman's the fuller career sketch, Noles's a double portrait pairing McKinley with Alabama's other justice, John Archibald Campbell (who gets his own page later on this site). That even Alabama files its two justices under 'forgotten' is the McKinley problem in a phrase.
The compact reference account, and for four decades — until Brown — the fullest thing in print. Honest about the thin judicial record, the absences, and the circuit that caused both.
Particular value here for the circuit-system chapters: the geography, the mileage tables, the congressional complaints, and the 1842–43 reorganization that finally moved McKinley to the manageable Fifth Circuit. Also gives the Bank of Augusta episode its full institutional setting. 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.Brown — for the definitive life — and the best book on the circuit system that consumed a justice
- 2.Pollard v. Hagan — for the opinion still alive in the reports — equal footing, ten readable pages
- 3.Bank of Augusta v. Earle — for the circuit bombshell and Taney's repair of it
- 4.The Friedman & Israel chapter — for the quick orientation
- 5.Fiebelman and Noles — for the home-state memory — filed, even there, under forgotten
- 6.Swisher — for the mileage tables and the 1843 reprieve
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- A new register for the insignificance thread: Todd and Duvall were silenced by the consensus system, Trimble by death — McKinley by geography. His own 1838 report to Congress put the Ninth Circuit at roughly ten thousand miles of travel a year through the roadless Old Southwest. The job, not the man, was the obstacle.
- The 1837 twin seats, completed: Congress created two on Jackson's last full day; Catron took one, McKinley (after William Smith of Alabama declined) the other. One seat was abolished at its first occupant's death; the other passed to Campbell — Alabama's second 'forgotten justice.'
- Third straight justice with no recorded manuscript collection — yet Brown built a real biography from court records, congressional documents, and land-office files. Proof the thing can be done, which makes the earlier gaps look a little less inevitable.