Path to the Supreme Court
John McLean ran the United States Post Office before he ran for everything else: an Ohio congressman and state judge, he became Postmaster General under Monroe and John Quincy Adams and made the sprawling system famously efficient — so efficient that Jackson, wary of his ambitions, kicked him upstairs in 1829 as his first Supreme Court appointment. The ambition came along. Across thirty-two years on the bench McLean courted presidential nominations as a Jacksonian, an Anti-Mason, a Whig, a Free Soiler, and finally a Republican — drawing nearly two hundred votes at the 1856 convention that chose Frémont.
On the Supreme Court
History remembers the politician on the bench as the judge who got the great questions right. McLean was the lone dissenter in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, defending a state's power to protect its free Black residents from kidnappers, and in Dred Scott he and Curtis (§32) were the two dissenters — 'a slave is not a mere chattel,' he wrote; 'he bears the impress of his Maker.' His workhorse opinions mattered too: Wheaton v. Peters settled that American copyright is a creature of statute, not common law, and in Groves v. Slaughter he answered Baldwin (§22) that human beings were not articles of commerce. He died in April 1861, eight days before Fort Sumter — having spent three decades predicting the collision and positioning himself to profit from it.
The Voting Record
How McLean voted in the 1,820 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1830 term through the 1860 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 McLean 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
Wheaton v. Peters
1834Holding · There is no perpetual common-law copyright in published works; copyright in America is a creature of federal statute and its formalities.
Role · McLean wrote for the Court.
The foundation of American copyright law — fittingly, a fight between two of the Court's own reporters.
Read the opinion →Groves v. Slaughter
1841Holding · Mississippi's constitutional ban on importing slaves for sale was not self-executing, so the notes at issue were valid.
Role · McLean concurred separately: enslaved people were persons, not articles of commerce, and power over slavery was local.
The Court's first open airing of the collision between the commerce power and slavery, with McLean and Baldwin (§22) staking the poles.
Read the opinion →Prigg v. Pennsylvania
1842Holding · Federal power over fugitive-slave rendition is exclusive; Pennsylvania's personal-liberty law was void.
Role · McLean was the lone dissenter.
Alone among nine, he defended a state's power to shield its free Black residents from kidnapping.
Read the opinion →Dred Scott v. Sandford
1857Holding · Scott remained a slave; Black Americans could not be citizens; the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
Role · McLean dissented, with Curtis (§32): slavery exists only by force of local law, and freedom follows the free soil.
One of the two dissents that armed the Republican answer to Taney (§24) — and, his critics noted, kept his presidential hopes alive.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
The Life of John McLean: A Politician on the United States Supreme Court (Ohio State University Press, 1937; Da Capo reprint, 1971) by Francis P. Weisenburger — still the only full biography, and the subtitle remains the verdict. Nearly ninety years old and thinner on the jurisprudence than a modern reader wants, but no one has replaced it, and its portrait of judicial ambition has never been bettered.
The Bookshelf
The whole improbable ascent: the New Jersey-born printer's apprentice who founded a Lebanon, Ohio newspaper, read law, reached Congress at twenty-seven, and built the Post Office into the government's largest machine before Jackson kicked him upstairs in 1829 — then thirty-two years on the bench spent, in no small part, running for president. Ohio State University Press; Da Capo reprint 1971.
The best modern study, from the same 2009 Vanderbilt symposium that reassessed Samuel Chase, Bushrod Washington, and William Johnson elsewhere on this site — and usefully double-edged. Finkelman, elsewhere the Court's sternest prosecutor on slavery, gives McLean real credit: the lone Prigg dissenter, the Dred Scott dissenter, the one justice antislavery America trusted. But the second half of the title cuts — the antislavery record and the presidential hunger were never fully separable, and Finkelman lets the reader decide which drove which.
The definitive history of the case that fixed McLean's place in the story — winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History, and still the standard against which all Dred Scott scholarship is measured. Characteristically double-edged on McLean: the dissent was powerful and morally right, but his known presidential ambitions for 1856 arguably helped provoke the majority into deciding more rather than less. Oxford University Press.
The dissent that made a seventy-one-year-old justice a Republican hero: Congress had full power over slavery in the territories, Scott's residence on free soil made him free, and — against Taney's holding that Black Americans could never be citizens — "a slave is not a mere chattel. He bears the impress of his Maker." Read alongside Curtis's longer, more lawyerly dissent; McLean's is the moral register. Free online.
A recent group study of all six Jackson appointees — McLean first among them — as the FJC's bibliography lists it. Useful precisely for the frame this section argues: McLean's appointment was patronage management, not jurisprudence, and the Jackson bench as a whole remade the Court that Marshall had built. Covenant Books.
The pre-Court career that explains the man: under Monroe and Adams, McLean built the Post Office into the largest department in the government and ran its thousands of appointments with a nonpartisan skill that made him indispensable to every administration and trusted by none. Ten pages that explain why Jackson wanted him promoted out of the way — the appointment to the Court as an act of removal.
The Holmes Devise volume for the Court on which McLean served his last twenty-five years — the successor frame to White's Marshall Court volume used throughout this site. The fractured, sectional Taney Court, the slavery docket that consumed it, and the institution McLean dissented his way through as its senior associate and most public dissenter. Macmillan.
The major modern study of the thing McLean is famous for — running for president from the bench, without apology, in an era that considered it normal. Shelden reconstructs the 1848 campaign McLean and Woodbury each waged from the Court, and what its acceptability says about the antebellum judiciary.
The dedicated study of McLean's perennial candidacies — courted by the Anti-Masons, Whigs, Free Soilers, and Republicans across nearly forty years while sitting as a justice. The full account of the ambition Weisenburger's biography chronicles and Finkelman's article judges.
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.Weisenburger, the biography — for the only full life — the printer's apprentice who ran for president from the bench
- 2.Finkelman — for the modern verdict — moderate abolitionist, Court politician, and the question of which drove which
- 3.Fehrenbacher, then the dissent itself — for Dred Scott whole, and McLean's moral register within it
- 4.Weisenburger's postmaster article — for the machine-builder Jackson needed to promote out of the way
- 5.Jacobsen — for the Jackson bench as a group portrait
- 6.Swisher — for the Taney Court — the institution McLean dissented his way through
Where the Papers Are Kept
The principal McLean collection — thick with the political correspondence of a man who never stopped writing to party managers, editors, and convention delegates. Further collections at Harvard Law School, the University of Michigan, and the Ohio History Connection (1816–1859), as the FJC lists them. Visit →
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The apotheosis of the politics-on-the-bench thread begun with Smith Thompson: Thompson ran for governor once; McLean angled for the presidency for thirty years across four parties — Jacksonian, Anti-Masonic, Whig, Free Soil, and finally Republican, contending seriously for the new party's first nomination in 1856 at seventy-one.
- The sliding door that seated him: Trimble dead at fifty-one, Crittenden blocked by the lame-duck Senate, and Jackson looking for a dignified way to get McLean out of the Post Office. The appointment as an act of removal — and it produced the Court's most durable antislavery voice.
- He died in office in April 1861, days before Fort Sumter — a justice whose entire tenure spanned the road to the war, from Jackson's inauguration to secession.