William B. Woods

Louis Filler's chapter is ten pages exactly, 1327 to 1336 of volume 2, and it is the longest sustained treatment of the man ever published — which tells you most of what you need to know about the shelf. Filler is arguing against a verdict, and says so on his first page: he quotes Ernest Sutherland Bates calling Woods "a carpetbag politician and judge from Georgia appointed by President Hayes" and Fred Rodell going further, and spends the chapter showing what that misses. The circuit years get the most room, and they are the surprise: the Louisiana civil law mastered from French and Spanish precedent, the Slaughter-House litigation decided with Bradley in 1870, and the 1876 episode that later got turned into a legend. He is honest about the puzzle at the centre — a judge who read the Fourteenth Amendment generously in United States v. Hall and then wrote Harris — and honest too that Woods was an early author of separate-but-equal, in Bertonneau, which most short accounts leave out. His closing pages are bleak and fair: 218 opinions, most of them in equity, and two obituaries that were mostly about who would replace him.

The opinion that defines his place in the story. A Tennessee lynch mob had been indicted under the Ku Klux Klan Act's criminal-conspiracy provisions; Woods held that the Fourteenth Amendment reaches only state action, not private violence, and struck the provisions down. Harris belongs on the same shelf-line as Waite's Cruikshank (§43) and Bradley's Civil Rights Cases (§41) later the same year — the doctrinal corridor through which federal protection of Black citizens drained away, over Harlan's protests (§44). The puzzle is the author: on circuit in the early 1870s Woods had read the amendment broadly. Free online.

His other opinion with an afterlife. Herman Presser had paraded four hundred armed workingmen through Chicago as a private militia; Woods held for a unanimous Court that the Second Amendment restrains only the federal government, not the states. For over a century Presser was a fixture of the incorporation debate — cited, distinguished, and finally superseded in 2010 when McDonald v. Chicago applied the Second Amendment to the states. A minor justice's opinion that courts argued about for 124 years. Free online.

The standing institutional frame for this shelf, and where Woods's judicial work gets its only serious scrutiny — the circuit years under the 1869 Judiciary Act, the traffic between the Fifth Circuit and the Court on Enforcement Act questions, and the doctrinal corridor from Cruikshank (§43) through Harris to the Civil Rights Cases (§41). For a justice with no biography, the era history has to carry the load, and this one can. Macmillan.

The sole standalone study of Woods ever published — Baynes's search for the transplanted Ohio Union general who became a New South justice and wrote almost nothing memorable in six years. That this article is the entire dedicated literature is the measure of Woods's obscurity.

The fullest life of Woods anyone wrote, and it is a county subscription history. Volume II carries a sketch headed simply "William Burnham Woods," faced by a portrait plate captioned "William B. Woods, Justice of United States Supreme Court" — a native son of Newark whose "birth occurred on the 3d of August, 1824," of Kentucky parentage on his father's side and New England on his mother's, the 1869 appointment to a circuit running over six Southern states, and the judgment that "few judicial records exhibit a combination of greater impartiality, faithfulness and sound exposition of the law." Written in his own county twenty-two years after his death, and worth more than that sounds: it also biographies his brother General Charles R. Woods, and records that Willard Warner — his Alabama partner in the Reconstruction years — had married Woods's sister Eliza. The Alabama story is a family story, which nothing else on this shelf says.

The contemporaneous account, published while Woods was still a circuit judge and written by a journalist who had covered Ohio politics himself. Volume I carries a sketch of "Brevet Major-General William B. Woods" that opens on Newark and the law practice and then turns to the reversal that made him. As Speaker of the Ohio House in 1858–9 he was "noted for the virulence of his opposition to every measure of Mr. Lincoln's administration and of his party," and he was still delaying the Million Loan bill after Sumter — until, on the 18th of April, moving its passage himself, "he signalized the change of party policy by an eloquent war speech." That is the primary source for the war-Democrat-turned-Unionist story, in the order it actually happened, and it fixes his rank as brevet major-general, which later reference works routinely get wrong.

Cited on every Woods list, and the surprise is what it actually holds: his conversion, in two scenes, in a history compiled by the party he converted to. At Columbus on 5 January 1860, Woods "of Licking, was elected Permanent Chairman" of the Ohio Democratic State Convention, having been Speaker of the House and his county's delegate. Five years later, on 21 June 1865, "Dr. Dorsey introduced General William B. Woods, of Licking County, as Temporary Chairman" — of the Union Republican state convention — and the compiler adds that "he proved an orator of no little ability." A party history is an odd place to find a justice's early career and the right place to find the turn that made the appointments from Grant and Hayes possible at all.

Friedman & Israel call these his best memorial, and they are right: four volumes of Fifth Circuit reports that Woods compiled himself while sitting on the circuit, over Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. They are the circuit's reports and not his collected opinions — Joseph Bradley sits through them as Circuit Justice, and the district judges appear — but Woods's own are there in quantity, headed "Woods, Circuit Judge," running through patent, admiralty, banking, bankruptcy and the Reconstruction federal-question litigation that produced the doctrines he carried onto the Supreme Court. The Slaughter-House litigation is in volume I at 1 Woods 21, decided by Woods and Bradley together in 1870 and against the monopoly — the opposite of what the Supreme Court did with it three years later. Volume III carries the one that reached furthest: Bertonneau v. Board of Directors of City Schools, 3 Woods 177, which the Supreme Court cited by name in Plessy v. Ferguson eighteen years later. Anyone weighing the circuit-riding Woods against the author of Harris and Presser has to work from these, and there is no substitute. Cited simply as Woods — 1 Woods 42, and so on.

The memorial session of Monday, 7 November 1887, printed as an appendix to volume 123 of the United States Reports. The Attorney General presents the bar's resolutions, traces the career from Ohio through the war to the circuit and the Court, and supplies the figure that has followed Woods ever since: "He wrote and delivered for the time he was here — a period of not quite five years and a half — one hundred and sixty-three opinions." The number was offered against Justice Curtis, who in about the same span wrote fifty-one. The Chief Justice answers for the Court that Woods "was an upright man and a just judge," and orders the resolutions and the Attorney General's remarks, though not his own, entered on the records. Short, primary, and the Court's own estimate of a colleague it had just lost.

Friedman & Israel send you here with a bare citation, and until the pages themselves turned up, this shelf carried it unread and said so. It is an unsigned obituary in the issue of 8 June 1887, three and a half weeks after Woods died, reprinted from the Ohio Law Journal and credited at the foot. Most of it is the best contemporary account of the Ohio years there is — Newark, Yale, the mayoralty, the Democratic speakership, the war-loan reversal of 18 April 1861, and the full brigadier-generalcy given in 1865 on the recommendation of Grant, Sherman and Logan. Then comes the showpiece, and it collapses. In 1876–77, it says, Woods "preferred not to be intrusted with the decision of the case of the South Carolina State canvassers, which was practically to settle the Tilden-Hayes Presidential contest," so that "another judge was sent into his circuit to relieve him of the case" — and Hayes, "whose fortunes were in the balance which Judge Woods had refused to hold," repaid the scruple with a seat on the Supreme Court. South Carolina was not in Woods's circuit. It had been moved to the Fourth in 1866, and the canvassers case was decided there by the Fourth Circuit's own judge, Hugh Lennox Bond, in December 1876. No judge was sent anywhere. What actually happened is in Filler (TMC-0100, p. 1331), and it is quieter and better. The crucial state was FLORIDA, which was in Woods's circuit. F. C. Humphreys, one of its Republican electors, was a federal shipping commissioner appointed by the circuit court, and on 24 September 1876 he posted his resignation to Woods personally, in Ohio, rather than to the court that had appointed him. When the Democrats argued the resignation was therefore void and Humphreys disqualified, Woods "was evidently approached to give his views on the effectiveness of the resignation but declined to do so." He declined to give an opinion about a letter. Eleven years later that had become a refusal to decide the presidency, in a different state, in a circuit that was not his. Read it for the life, and then read it as a dated specimen of how fast a small scruple turns into a large legend — in print, in a law journal, within a month of the funeral.

Stephen Cresswell's entry runs pp. 618-620 — Woods is the last justice in an alphabetical volume — and it is the best short modern account of him in print after Filler. It gets the shape right: the circuit judge is the reason to remember him, not the six years on the Court; Hayes wanted a southerner with Union credentials; the Senate confirmed him 39 to 8 on 21 December 1880; and once he was on the Court he reversed his own expansive readings of the Fourteenth Amendment, with Harris the significant opinion and Presser written for a unanimous bench. One caution, in the entry's own first sentence: it calls him a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a court that did not exist until 1891. He was a United States circuit judge.

The Woods entry, pp. 199-202 of the third edition, is by Thomas E. Baynes Jr. — the same scholar who wrote "Yankee from Georgia" thirty-five years earlier, which makes him about the only person who has gone looking for Woods twice. It is the illustrated capsule life: Ezekiel Woods the Kentucky farmer and merchant, Sarah Burnham the New Englander, three years at Western Reserve and then the Yale valedictory, the Ohio bar in 1847, his marriage to Anne E. Warner in 1855, Whig to Democrat to Republican, and the six-state circuit. Published by CQ Press for the Supreme Court Historical Society, which is why it is the best-illustrated short life on this shelf.

Robert J. Cottrol wrote the Woods entry — and, in the same volume, the entries on Presser v. Illinois, Hall v. DeCuir, the Civil Rights Cases and the Second Amendment. That is precisely the intersection Woods sits on, written by one hand, and it makes this the most coherent short treatment of him anywhere: the entry on the man and the entry on his best-known opinion are by the same scholar of race and the right to bear arms. He did both editions, 1992 and 2005.

The standard biographical register of the Union army: all 583 men who reached the rank of general, with photographs and compact factual entries. Woods is one of them, which is more than most of this shelf can say — a book that is about him, if only for a page. It is also where the brothers get separated, since Charles R. Woods, the younger one, the West Pointer, the man who actually raised the 76th Ohio and whose promotion in 1863 handed William the regiment, has his own entry alongside. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.

The only book-length modern treatment of the Court Woods actually served on — Waite's, from 1874 to 1888 — in the University of South Carolina Press series on the chief justiceships. What it says about him specifically is not established here: the one full review reachable online works through Waite, Field, Miller, Bradley and Harlan and never mentions Woods, Harris or Presser at all, which may say more about his standing in the literature than about the book. Shelved for the Court, not for the man.

Woods sat on the Waite Court for the whole of his tenure, and this is the reference handbook to it. The publisher describes profiles of all fifteen justices who sat between 1874 and 1888, the major rulings, and a documents section. Be clear about what that means for him. The publisher's own description singles out five of the fifteen for extensive treatment, and Woods is not among them. Nothing of this book is online in any legitimate form, so what it says about him specifically is, for now, unread here.

Woods was nearly incapacitated by illness through 1886 and died in office on 14 May 1887, and this is the book about that: a justice-by-justice account, in rough chronological order, of how each one left the Court, carrying the medical detail most accounts leave out. Woods falls in the second chapter, "Civil War to Century's End, 1865-1899," pp. 46-73. Read Richard Friedman's review alongside it — he credits Atkinson with few factual mistakes and faults him for a potpourri of curios where more serious research was possible.

A census of the justices' graves, and it earns its place here because for Woods the small verifiable facts are the scarce ones. Christensen surveyed every Supreme Court gravesite for the Society's Yearbook in 1983 and did the whole thing again twenty-five years later. Woods lies at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Newark, Ohio, the town he was born in and represented before the war — section 8, lot 58 by the city's own cemetery record, with his brother Charles in the same section. Free in full: the Society posts the entire issue as a PDF.

The second half of Fairman, published sixteen years after the first and a separate book, and the one that matters here. At p. 192 it prints Bradley’s 1871 letter of advice to Woods and the note Bradley later attached to it, admitting his views “were much modified by subsequent reflection.” That single page is the documentary hinge of this shelf: the sentence Woods put into Hall came from Bradley, and Bradley took it back. Fairman also worked the same Newark manuscripts a researcher is sent to today, so if a date for the two Civil Rights Act letters has ever been printed anywhere, it is most likely here. No copy of volume 7 is online in any form — the Internet Archive has Part One only — so this is a library errand.

Seven hundred words by a Vassar undergraduate reporting a research trip, and the only published account by anyone who has actually opened the thing. In the Bradley papers at Newark she found “a book with its own table of contents written in Bradley’s careful script” holding a memorandum headed “Civil Rights,” in which Bradley works through the scope of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and concludes that “the antipathy of race cannot be crushed and annihilated by” the Reconstruction amendments — and, in the same book, “two letters to his colleague on the Circuit Court of Louisiana, Judge Woods, only one of which he sent.” The sent letter was uncertain about federal power under the Act; the unsent one was the harder-line examination. She also found the 1871 letter and the loose sheet Bradley clipped to it. Cite it for what it is: testimony about what is in a collection, by a student who was in the room, not authority for dates — she gives none. It is here because for Woods this is the state of the evidence, and because it tells the next person exactly what to ask for.