Samuel Chase: In Defense of the Rule of Law and Against the Jeffersonians

INTRODUCTION Samuel Chase is not exactly unknown. Indeed, as the only U.S. Supreme Court Justice to be impeached, he achieved a sort of instant fame, or instant infamy. He is, I think, fairly characterized as a "neglected Justice," however, because, in our exclusive focus on his impeachment, we tend to forget that he did possess considerable intelligence, virtue, legal ability, and energy that make him worth our study. His life is also something of an object lesson in how a judge's self- destructive tendencies can harm his reputation. As Richard Peters, his colleague on the Pennsylvania Circuit Court remarked, Chase had a singular instinct for tumult and appeared to have sought controversy whenever he could. "I never sat with him without pain," Peters remembered, "as he was forever getting into some intemperate and unnecessary squabble."1 Chase is remembered as a rabid Federalist partisan and a vehemently anti-Jeffersonian judge.2 I am not aware of any other Supreme Court Justice who apparently deprived his Court of a full complement of required personnel because he went out on the political hustings to give speeches in support of a presidential candidate he favored (John Adams)3 and against one he feared (Thomas Jefferson).4 During the 1800 election campaign, Chase made himself an easy target for Jeffersonian newspapers when he appeared to sympathize zealously with the prosecution of Jeffersonian editors and writers. Indeed, more than one historian has suggested that in the trial of one of these writers, the notorious John Thompson Callender, Chase actively sought to prevent "all creatures called democrats" from serving on the jury. This assertion, however, is dubious.5 To the victors belong the spoils of writing history, however, and the Jeffersonians and their sympathizers have monopolized the judgment of Chase. Even as recently as Bruce Ackerman's 2005 book on the founding period, Chase continues to be painted as a hyperpartisan, and my own feeble efforts to correct this view are rather cavalierly dismissed.6 Raoul Berger, the late prolific legal historian, took special pains to condemn Chase, probably because of Chase's anti- Jeffersonian views.7 It is likely, then, that it will be a long time, if ever, that Chase ceases to be remembered as the "American Jeffreys."8 It seems likely that Chase will continue to be regarded as a man who, as was charged against Chief Justice Taney, "degraded his age."9 In what follows, I will explore some of the controversial trials over which Chase presided, some of which led to his impeachment. His conduct on these occasions has been almost universally condemned, but I will argue here that this universal condemnation is too glib. I. THE TRIAL OF THOMAS COOPER Those who accuse Chase of being anti-Jeffersonian are correct, but there were, after all, some reasons for opposing the man from Monticello and his champions. Take, for example, the Jeffersonian scribblers who wrote against Adams. One was Thomas Cooper, an English radical immigrant, who, like several others in his position, was either financed or strongly supported by Jefferson himself.10 Chase presided over Cooper's trial for seditious libel in 1800. Cooper had accused Adams, in print, of maintaining a permanent army and navy, of borrowing money at too high a rate during peacetime, and of improperly interfering in the affair of Jonathan Robbins.11 The Constitution provides that appropriations for the Army must be renewed at two-year intervals.12 This theoretically makes a standing army impossible (which was the reason for the constitutional provision). When Cooper wrote, there was an army in the field mopping up the recent rebellion against federal taxes in eastern Pennsylvania. It was also true that naval vessels had recently been commissioned and were engaged in hostilities during the undeclared naval war with France, so Cooper was not totally wrong when he wrote that Adams was maintaining an army and a navy. …