Path to the Supreme Court
Noah Swayne was the Court's first and only Quaker: Virginia-born, he left the slave state for Ohio as a young lawyer in the 1820s, prospered in Columbus, and served a decade as Jackson's U.S. attorney for the district. Justice McLean (§21) urged Swayne as his own successor, and when McLean died in 1861 Swayne mobilized Ohio's political establishment on his own behalf. In January 1862 he became Lincoln's first Supreme Court appointment.
On the Supreme Court
Swayne voted with the antislavery, pro-Union side of every wartime question, and twice campaigned hard for the Chief Justiceship — losing to Salmon P. Chase (§39) in 1864 and to Waite (§43) in 1873. His best-remembered opinion, Gelpcke v. Dubuque, refused to let Iowa's courts destroy municipal bondholders by changing the law after the fact: 'We shall never immolate truth, justice, and the law, because a state tribunal has erected the altar and decreed the sacrifice.' He dissented separately in the Slaughter-House Cases, reading the new Fourteenth Amendment generously, and in Springer v. United States upheld the Civil War income tax — authority that stood until Pollock. His faculties declined through the late 1870s; Hayes eased him out in January 1881 with a promise to nominate his friend Matthews (§46) to the seat.
The Voting Record
How Swayne voted in the 3,129 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1861 term through the 1880 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.
Across the whole career Swayne voted with Strong more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 73.1% of their 316 divided cases — and with Field least, at 60.2%. See this Court →Compared against the 5 colleagues Swayne shared at least 300 divided cases with.
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
Gelpcke v. City of Dubuque
1864Holding · Municipal bonds valid under the state-court decisions in force when issued remain enforceable despite the state court's later reversal of doctrine.
Role · Swayne wrote for the Court; Miller (§36) dissented.
'We shall never immolate truth, justice, and the law…' — the era's great bondholder-protection case and an early federal check on state judicial flip-flops.
Read the opinion →Slaughter-House Cases
1873Holding · The majority read the Privileges or Immunities Clause to protect only rights of national citizenship.
Role · Swayne wrote a separate dissent, alongside Field's (§38) and Bradley's (§41).
One of three dissents insisting the Fourteenth Amendment had actually changed the constitutional order.
Read the opinion →Springer v. United States
1881Holding · The Civil War income tax was not a 'direct tax' requiring apportionment; direct taxes are capitations and taxes on land.
Role · Swayne wrote for a unanimous Court.
The income-tax precedent Pollock overturned fourteen years later — and the Sixteenth Amendment restored.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
No full biography of Noah Swayne exists — but as Lincoln's first appointment to the Court, he is best approached through David M. Silver's Lincoln's Supreme Court (University of Illinois Press, 1956; reprint 1998), the definitive study of the five justices Lincoln named. Swayne is a supporting figure there, which is fitting; the book is the frame in which his significance is visible, and the natural first read for the whole cohort (Miller, Davis, Field, and Chief Justice Chase follow).
The Bookshelf
The definitive study of the five justices Lincoln named: the politics that put Swayne in John McLean's Ohio seat in 1862 (McLean had recommended him repeatedly before dying), Lincoln's criteria — Union loyalty, antislavery, geographic fit — and the wartime Court that upheld the blockade, the greenbacks, and martial law. Swayne is a supporting figure, which is right; the book is the frame in which his significance is visible. University of Illinois Press; reprinted 1998.
Swayne's one indispensable page. Against Miller's 5–4 majority — which drained the Fourteenth Amendment's privileges-or-immunities clause of nearly all force — Swayne insisted the Reconstruction amendments "rise to the dignity of a new Magna Charta," and that the majority had turned "what was meant for bread into a stone." History has drifted toward the dissenters: the same broad reading John Archibald Campbell argued at the lectern (see Campbell), and that modern scholars keep returning to. Free online.
The fullest connected account of the life in print, and honest about it: the Quaker upbringing and Virginia-to-Ohio departure, the appointment as Lincoln's first, the twice-thwarted Chief Justice ambition, the pro-corporation jurisprudence, and the Slaughter-House dissent. Neither inflates a middling record nor misses the one opinion that mattered.
The monumental institutional history of the Court on which Swayne spent all but two of his years — the standing frame for this site from Clifford forward. Fairman gives the workaday Swayne his setting: the legal-tender wars, the railroad-bond and municipal-debt docket where he was most at home, the Slaughter-House term. The fullest treatment his ordinary opinions will ever receive. 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.Silver — for Lincoln's Court and how the first appointee got there
- 2.The Slaughter-House dissent — for the one indispensable page — "a new Magna Charta"
- 3.The Friedman & Israel chapter — for the fullest connected life
- 4.Fairman — for the Reconstruction Court and the workaday docket
Where the Papers Are Kept
Noah Haynes Swayne legal papers, 1823–1860 — one box, nearly the whole surviving archive (formerly the Ohio Historical Society). A thinness typical of the Reconstruction associate justices, and part of why the reference works and Fairman stand in for a biography. Visit →
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The only Quaker ever to sit on the Court, and the rare justice whose politics were his conscience: he left slaveholding Virginia for free Ohio in 1824, defended fugitives, and — by several accounts — freed enslaved people who came into his family. Lincoln's first appointee opens the site's Reconstruction era.
- The redemption pattern again (cf. Duvall's Hepburn dissent, Catron's Queen suits): a middling justice — "the weakest of Lincoln's five," twice passed over for Chief Justice — is saved by one opinion. His Slaughter-House dissent is the Fourteenth Amendment's road not taken, and it binds him to Campbell (§33), who argued the same broad reading.
- Seat lineage and endgame: McLean (§21) recommended him and Swayne took his seat; in 1881 President Hayes eased the infirm Swayne into retirement on the understanding that Stanley Matthews would replace him — and Matthews was then confirmed 24–23, the narrowest margin ever (see the Failed Nominations list). A gentler cousin to the Grier and Clifford exits.