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Howell Edmunds Jackson was born at Paris, Tennessee, April 8, 1832, the second of six children of Dr. Alexander Jackson, a prominent Whig politician and planter, and his first wife, Mary W. Hurt. In 1840 the family moved to Jackson, Tennessee, where young Howell attended Jackson Male Academy and West Tennessee College in 1850 with a Bachelors of Art degree.1
After graduating from West Tennessee, Jackson followed his father's long-expressed desire that he study at the University of Virginia (1851-53). After leaving the university, he read law in the office of Judge Milton Brown and Justice A. W. O. Totten, who was then an associate justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court, for a year. His legal preparation was finished at Cumberland University Law School in Lebanon, Tennessee (1855-56), and he passed the Tennessee bar in 1856.2
Opening his legal practice in Jackson in 1857, his first recorded case involved the implied warranty on the health of a slave. Relocating to Memphis in 1858, Jackson opened a partnership with future Confederate congressman David M. Curren, forming the law office of Curren & Jackson, specializing in corporate, railroad and banking cases. The partnership ended with the outbreak of the Civil War. Jackson was a Whig, as was his father before him, but like many other Whig Southerners, he opposed secession. Nevertheless, he accepted the appointment as receiver of property, under the Confederate Sequestration Act, for the Western District of Tennessee.3 He held this position until the fall of Memphis in June, 1862, after which he made several unsuccessful attempts to secure a judicial commission in the Confederate army. Jackson and his family spent the remainder of the war as refugees in LaGrange, George.
After the war Jackson resumed legal practice in Memphis,4 first with Bedford M. Estes, and later with Estes and Judge H. T. Ellett, under the firm name of Estes, Ellett and Jackson. In 1874, he moved back to Jackson, Tennessee and entered into partnership with General Alexander Campbell under the name of Jackson & Campbell. By 1875, Jackson had received the first of two appointments to the Court of Arbitration for West Tennessee which was a provisional supreme court created to assist the State Supreme Court in disposing of the backlog of cases caused by the Civil War.5 After the provisional supreme court disbanded, Jackson sought to continue his judicial career on the state supreme court and allowed his name to go before the 1877 Democratic judicial nomination convention. The contest between Jackson and the incumbent opponent was extremely close but Jackson lost by a single vote.6
About this time the question of settling the state debt became the liveliest political issue in Tennessee since the days of secession. The controversy was created to a great extent by former President Andrew Johnson, who thought it a popular vehicle in which to ride into the United States Senate. The tactic proved too successful, for it split the Democratic party into "low tax" and Social Credit factions, each of which ran its own candidates in an attempt to gain control of the state legislature. Jackson held strong convictions on the matter and allowed himself to be persuaded to run for the state House of Representatives in 1879 as a Social Credit Democrat. Within a few months of taking his seat in the legislature, he found himself in the midst of another political squabble over the same issue. Subsequently, he was elected by a coalition of Social Credit Democrats and Republicans to the United States Senate in 1881.7
Taking office on March 4, 1881, Jackson spent the next five years supporting such issues as restriction of Chinese immigration and the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. He also favored internal improvements, a lowered tariff, and civil service reforms. In Washington, Jackson served on a total of four Senate committees--Post Office, Pensions, Claims, and later, Judiciary--and earned the reputation of a "work horse" by his long hours and devotion to legislative affairs. In 1885, Senator Jackson introduced a bill for the amendment of the Federal judiciary system which "provided for the appointment of two additional circuit judges in each circuit, established a Court of Appeals, to consist of three circuit judges, and abolished the Circuit Courts, transferring all their jurisdiction and pending business to the existing District Courts."8 But before the bill could be passed, he was appointed United States Circuit Judge by President Grover Cleveland on April 12, 1886, making him the last presiding judge of the U.S. Circuit Courts.
The Judicial Act of March 3, 1892, 26 Stat. 826, authorized circuit judges to sit on the newly-created United States Circuit Court of Appeals. Although Circuit Judge Jackson was still authorized to sit on the U.S. Circuit Court, the new appellate court became his principal judicial responsibility.9 He wrote more than ninety published opinions, fully one-fifth of which were concerned with patent litigation. Among his best known circuit court opinions were United States v. Patrick, 54 F. 338 (6th Cir. 1893), and In Re Greene, 52 F. 104 (6th Cir. 1893).
President Benjamin Harrison elevated Jackson to the United States Supreme Court on February 2, 1893. As a Supreme Court Justice, Jackson, who in terms of actual service spent no more than fifteen months on the court, wrote forty-six majority opinions, many again dealing with patent problems, and four dissents.
Although his tenure on the Supreme Court was brief, he attained nationwide recognition for the part he played in the rehearing of Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., involving the constitutionality of the income tax. Jackson developed tuberculosis after his Supreme Court appointment and was too ill to participate in the first argument of Pollock.10 In its first opinion, the Court was deadlocked 4-4 and scheduled a rehearing of the case.
In spite of his illness, Justice Jackson returned to Washington in May, 1895, to participate in the rehearing of Pollock. Nationwide attention was focused upon him, because of the assumption that he favored the tax and that his vote would be the tie-breaking vote. He sat through three days of oral argument in a crowded courtroom, but as it turned out, Jackson's vote was not crucial because one member of the Court, whose identity has remained a matter of speculation, changed his mind after the first decision and switched his vote to declare it unconstitutional.
"With hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes, the top of his shoulders barely visible above the massive bench behind which he sat,"11 Justice Jackson spoke for forty-five minutes delivering his dissent. Often interrupted by coughing attacks, he decried the decision as "the most disastrous blow ever struck at the constitutional powers of Congress."12 His two colleagues from the Sixth Circuit, Justice Henry Billings Brown of Michigan and Justice John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky, likewise dissented, as did Associate Justice (later Chief Justice) Edward Douglas White. This was Justice Jackson's last court appearance and last opinion. On August 8, 1895, less than three months after delivering his dissent in Pollack, Justice Jackson died at West Meade and was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville, Tennessee.
Pointing out that the death of Justice Jackson had been hastened because he left his sick bed to participate in Pollock, the Attorney General said: "However opinion, legal and lay, was and may remain divided on the questions involved in that case, there is, and will be, no divided judgment about the high qualities shown by the opinion of Mr. Justice Jackson, which all feared would be, and which was, his last."13
In an article on the history of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, written in 1897, William Howard Taft paid this tribute to his former colleague:
The court and the country suffered a great loss in the death of Mr. Justice Jackson. He was a great judge, and as a man and a colleague was one with whom intimate association was most delightful. He took much pleasure in the working out of the new system which he had foreshadowed so clearly in the bill he had introduced to the Senate when he represented Tennessee in that body. It is not too much to say that his reputation as a jurist gave the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals a standing at the outset, because it was known that as senior circuit judge he would be a permanent member of the court.14
Just prior to the breakout of the Civil War, Jackson married Sophia Mallory of Memphis on May 31, 1859, and six children, two of whom died in infancy, were born before Sophia died in 1873.15 After the death of his first wife, Jackson married Mary Elizabeth Harding, whose father, General William G. Harding, owned a 3,000 acre thoroughbred stock farm located on the western outskirts of Nashville. Half of the estate, known as "West Meade", became the property of Mary and the home of the Howell E. Jackson family. The other half, "Belle Meade" came to Jackson's younger brother, William Hicks,16 through his marriage to Mary's sister, Selene. The two brothers operated the stock farm and Judge Jackson divided his time between the affairs of his court and the business of breeding thoroughbreds. Shortly before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Jackson sold his share of the thoroughbred enterprise to his brother. Howell and Mary E. Jackson had three children: Harding A Jackson.; Elizabeth (Jackson) Buckner; and Louise (Jackson) McAlister.17 |
