John Catron

CATRON, JOHN

John Catron served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1836 to 1865. During his career on the Court, Catron was a staunch defender of STATES’ RIGHTS and the institution of SLAVERY. He participated in the landmark decisions upholding the power of state governments to regulate local aspects of interstate
commerce and, in DRED SCOTT V. SANDFORD, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 15 L. Ed. 691 (1856), he
voted with the Court in deciding that an ex-slave
had no rights as a citizen. Despite personal
Southern affiliations and his own support of
slavery, Catron backed the Union during the
Civil War. A close friend of Andrew Jackson’s as early as the WAR OF 1812 and a fellow resident of Nashville, Catron was a true Jacksonian in his
outlook.His judicial career and opinions – from
a suspicion of large corporations to a fervent
support of states’ rights – bear all the marks of
Jacksonian democracy.
Catron was the descendant of poor, German
immigrants. He was probably born in Pennsyl-
vania around 1786—some sources cite his birth
as early as 1779, however. His father, Peter
Catron, worked with horses in Pennsylvania and
Virginia, and moved to Kentucky in 1804, hop-
ing to establish his own horse farm. Catron grew
up with little formal education. He supported
himself and his family by herding cattle and
grooming horses, but he found time to read the
classics as well. Around 1812, Catron moved to
Sparta, in Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains
region. At about the same time, he married
Matilda Childress; the couple had no children.
Catron read law briefly in Sparta and then
joined the Second Tennessee Regiment, a group
of local volunteers who sought to avenge the
massacre of Fort Mims by the Creek Indians.
This unit eventually joined General Andrew
Jackson’s army in Alabama and fought in the
War of 1812. Catron became friendly with Jack-
son, who had passed the bar exam and served as
a judge, and the two corresponded frequently in
subsequent years.
After the war, Catron returned to the Cum-
berland Mountains and resumed his legal stud-
ies. He was admitted to the Tennessee bar in
1815 and worked both as an attorney in a gen-
eral legal practice and as a prosecutor in a circuit
court. In 1818, Jackson suggested that Catron
move to Nashville, then a growing frontier town,
where Jackson himself lived and had a plantation.
Catron took his advice and developed a lucrative practice in Nashville, with much of his
work involving land titles, a busy area of the law
on the rapidly growing frontier. By 1824, he was
elected to the bench of Tennessee’s highest
court, the Court of Errors and Appeals. In 1831,
the Tennessee legislature created the office of
chief justice of the Supreme Court of Errors and
Appeals and elected Catron to serve in it. Catron
held the position until 1834.
As a judge, Catron worked principally to
resolve the morass of conflicting land claims
then before the courts, but he addressed other
issues as well. In separate 1829 rulings, Catron
denounced both gambling and DUELING, calling
the latter no more than “honorable homicide.”
“The law knows it as a wicked and willful murder,
and it is our duty to treat it as such,” wrote
Catron in his decision for Smith v. State, 9 Tenn.
228. “We are placed here firmly and fearlessly to
execute the laws of the land, not visionary codes
of honor, framed to subserve the purposes of
destruction.” In an 1834 case, Fisher’s Negroes v.
Dabbs, 14 Tenn. 119, Catron ruled on the issue
of freeing slaves. Slave owners would often grant
manumission, or freedom, to their slaves
through their wills. Catron argued that the state
must approve such instruments before they can
be valid, because, he wrote, “free negroes are a
very dangerous and most objectionable population
where slaves are numerous.” Nor would it
do to send freed slaves to states where slavery
was not practiced, according to Catron.Whether
in a slaveholding or nonslaveholding society, the
freed African-American is “a degraded outcast,
and his fancied freedom a delusion.” Slaves
could only be freed, Catron wrote, if they were
sent to the African nation of Liberia.
American Indian affairs, particularly relating
to the Cherokee nation, were also were pressing
issues during Catron’s tenure on the Tennessee
high court. In 1833, the state legislature, following
the earlier example of Georgia’s general
assembly, passed laws giving itself jurisdiction
over Cherokee land within its boundaries. In
State v. Foreman, 16 Tenn. 256, it was charged
that these laws were unconstitutional. Catron
upheld the state laws in a long opinion that is
notable for its brutal attitude toward the Indians.
“It was more just,” Catron wrote, “that the
country should be peopled by Europeans, than
continue the haunts of savage beasts, and of
men yet more fierce and savage.” The Indians
were, in his mind, “mere wandering tribes of
savages”who “deserve to be exterminated as savage
and pernicious beasts.” Furthermore, it was
simply by right of power that whites could exert
their dominance: “Our claim is based on the
right to coerce obedience. The claim may be
denounced by the moralist. We answer, it is the
law of the land.Without its assertion and vigorous
execution, this continent never could have
been inhabited by our ancestors.” The issue
resurfaced a few years later during Martin Van
Buren’s presidency when the Cherokee were
forced to give up their land and make a long
march on what was called the Trail of Tears to
land west of the Mississippi.
In 1836, Catron directed Van Buren’s presidential
campaign in Tennessee. Van Buren won
the election, succeeding fellow Democrat Jackson.
On his last day in office, March 3, 1837,
Jackson appointed two new members—Catron
and John McKinley—to the U.S. Supreme Court
as required by the JUDICIARY ACT OF 1837,
which increased the size of the Court from seven
to nine members. Catron was confirmed five
days later, and at age fifty-one he became a sitting
justice with ROGER B. TANEY serving as chief
justice.
Catron was a strong advocate of states’ rights
during his tenure on the Court. In the cases considered
in Thurlow v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
46 U.S. (5 How.) 504, 12 L. Ed. 256
(1847), Catron wrote two opinions upholding
the rights of states to regulate the importation of liquor from other states and countries. The cases
touched on interpretation of the COMMERCE
CLAUSE, the part of the Constitution—Article I,
Section 8, Clause 3—that gives Congress power
“[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,
and among the several States, and with the
Indian Tribes.” Catron argued that the federal
government does not have exclusive power to
regulate interstate commerce and that where it
does not act to regulate commerce, the states are
free to do so. The state laws in question had
encroached on no laws passed by Congress and
were therefore valid. According to Catron, “the
POLICE POWER was not touched by the Constitution,
but left to the States as the Constitution
found it.” Catron and the Court ruled similarly
in Cooley v. Board ofWardens, 53 U.S. (12 How.)
299, 13 L. Ed. 996 (1851), again upholding the
ability of states to regulate local aspects of interstate
commerce.
Catron dissented from the Court’s opinion
in several cases involving the states’ ability to
regulate corporations. In one case in which the
Court had ruled in favor of a large corporation,
Catron expressed concern regarding “the unparalleled
increase of corporations throughout the
Union . . . ; the ease with which charters containing
exclusive privileges and exemptions are
obtained; the vast amount of property, power,
and exclusive benefits, prejudicial to other
classes of society that are vested in and held by
these numerous bodies of associated wealth”
(Ohio Life Insurance & Trust Co. v. Debolt, 57
U.S. [16 How.] 416, 14 L. Ed. 997 [1853]).
Catron played an important role in the
famous Dred Scott case, which concerned the
highly controversial issue of slavery in the territories.
Dred Scott was a slave from Missouri
whose owner took him into Illinois, where slavery
had been outlawed, and the Louisiana Territory,
where it had been forbidden as well by the
Missouri Compromise, the 1820 agreement that
attempted to resolve the dispute as to whether
new states would be admitted to the Union as
free or slave states.When Scott returned to Missouri,
he brought suit against his owner, claiming
that he was free because he had resided in
free territory. In its decision, the Court, with
Catron writing a concurring opinion, held that a
slave could not become a citizen under the U.S.
Constitution. Scott, the Court wrote, was not a
citizen and therefore could not sue in federal
courts. Chief Justice Taney went further and
declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional,
denying the authority of Congress to
exclude slavery from the territories. This was
only the second time the U.S. Supreme Court
had found an act of Congress unconstitutional,
the first having been the 1803 decision MARBURY
V. MADISON 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 2 L. Ed. 60
[1803].Many viewed Dred Scott as a pro-slavery
ruling from a Court dominated by a Southern
majority. The ruling may very well have hastened
the coming of the Civil War.
In his concurring opinion, Catron emphasized
that Congress could not abridge the property
rights of slave-owning citizens in the
Louisiana Territory by outlawing slavery.He also
argued that the Missouri Compromise violated
the constitutional guarantee of equal PRIVILEGES
AND IMMUNITIES to citizens of all states, a
guarantee that was, Catron wrote, a “leading feature
of the constitution—a feature on which the
Union depends, and which secures to the
respective States and their citizens an entire
equality of rights” (60 U.S. at 529). Three of the
seven concurring justices argued that an
African-American descended from slaves had no rights as a U.S. citizen and no standing in court.
Catron was one of four justices who did not
address this last question of whether a freed
slave was a citizen or not.
Despite his pro-Southern leanings and the
subsequent loss of his estate, Catron supported
the Union during the Civil War. As hostilities
began to mount and war neared in March 1861,
Catron returned to Nashville to try to keep the
border states of his judicial circuit—Tennessee,
Kentucky, and Missouri—in the Union. Of
these, only Tennessee would eventually join the
Confederacy. After an angry mob confronted
him when he tried to hold federal court in
Nashville, Catron was forced to leave for Washington,
D.C., accompanied by a military escort,
leaving behind an estate worth more than
$100,000. During the war, Catron continued to
support the Union by broadly interpreting the
federal government’s war powers. In one case, he
wrote an opinion refusing to release a prisoner if
evidence showed that he was a Confederate
sympathizer. After 1862, Catron also worked
hard to keep order in the states forming his new
circuit: Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas,
and Kentucky. He stayed in close touch with
President ABRAHAM LINCOLN and worked hard
to keep the federal judiciary effective during the
war.
On May 30, 1865, Catron, one of the last
embodiments of Jacksonian democracy to leave
the national scene, died in his adopted city of
Nashville.
FURTHER READINGS
Anderson, Burnet. 1993. “John Catron.” In The Supreme
Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789–1993, ed.
Claire Cushman. Washington, D.C.: Congressional
Quarterly.
Gatell, Frank O. 1969. The Justices of the United States
Supreme Court, 1789–1969: Their Lives and Major Opinions,
Vol. 1. ed. Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel. New
York: Chelsea House.
CROSS-REFERENCES
Judicial Review; Native American Rights.