Morrison Waite

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Morrison Remick Waite (November 29, 1816 – March 23, 1888) was the Chief Justice of the United States from 1874 to 1888.

He was born at Lyme, Connecticut, the son of Henry Matson Waite, who was a judge of the Superior Court and associate judge of the Supreme Court of Connecticut in 1834-1854 and chief justice of the latter in 1854-1857.

He graduated from Yale as a member of the Skull and Bones Society in 1837, and soon afterwards moved to Maumee, Ohio, where he studied law in the office of Samuel L. Young and was admitted to the bar in 1839. In 1850, he moved to Toledo, and he soon came to be recognized as a leader of the state bar. In politics, he was first a Whig and later a Republican, and, in 1849-1850, he was a member of the Ohio Senate. In 1871, with William M. Evarts and Caleb Cushing, he represented the United States as counsel before the Alabama Tribunal at Geneva, and, in 1874, he presided over the Ohio constitutional convention. In the same year he was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to succeed Judge Salmon P. Chase as Chief Justice of the United States, and he held this position until his death at Washington, D.C..

In the cases which grew out of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and especially in those which involved the interpretation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, he sympathized with the general tendency of the court to restrict the further extension of the powers of the Federal government. In a particularly disturbing ruling in United States v. Cruikshank, he struck down the Enforcement Act, ruling that "The very highest duty of the States, when they entered into the Union under the Constitution, was to protect all persons within their boundaries in the enjoyment of these 'unalienable rights with which they were endowed by their Creator.' Sovereignty, for this purpose, rests alone with the States. It is no more the duty or within the power of the United States to punish for a conspiracy to falsely imprison or murder within a State, than it would be to punish for false imprisonment or murder itself." The ruling completely ignored the text and intent of the Fourteenth Amendment, and helped extend the Jim Crow era.

He concurred with the majority in the Head Money Cases (1884), the Ku-Klux Case (United States v. Harris, 1882), the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and the Legal Tender Case (Juillard v. Greenman) (1883). Among his own most important decisions were those in the Enforcement Act Cases (1875), the Sinking Fund Cases (1878), the Railroad Commission Cases (1886) and the Telephone Cases (1887).

There is reason to believe that Justice Waite was not highly regarded by every one. One quote, attributed to one of his brother Justices, call him "an experiment no President has a right to make with our Court."

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