Mckinley, John (1780–1852)

• Author: R. Kent Newmyer
• Pages: 1710-1711

Page 1710

Like several other Jacksonian Justices on the TANEY COURT, John McKinley was a product of the Southwest. Born in Virginia, he went with his family to Kentucky where he learned law and began practice. In 1818 he moved to Huntsville, Alabama, then a frontier town, where he practiced law and pursued a diversified political career?first as a supporter of HENRY CLAY and then, when Clay's fortunes waned in Alabama, of ANDREW JACKSON. This timely shift got him a Senate seat in 1826. He served there until 1830, when he lost reelection. He then returned to the Alabama legislature, and in 1832 he went to the United States House of Representatives where he served for one term. After another term in the state legislature in 1836, he was elected by that body to the Senate but chose instead to accept an appointment to the Supreme Court from MARTIN VAN BUREN in 1837.

McKinley's legislative career lacked distinction, but the policy preferences he revealed were those that would guide his work on the Court: in addition to unswerving loyalty to Jackson and Van Buren, he was a strict states' rights man, though he never argued out his case philosophically or constitutionally. In good Jacksonian fashion he was suspicious of monopolies and hated the second Bank of the United States. He also had a strong preference for land laws that favored small settlers and a firm belief that SLAVERY was a state problem and that property in slaves was entitled to legal protection.

McKinley's fifteen years on the Supreme Court (1837?1852) were unproductive and frustrating, both for him and for those who worked with him. In general, states' rights ideas guided his judicial behavior, but he never spoke for the Court in any important cases. He took his duties seriously, as Chief Justice ROGER B. TANEY pointed out in his brief eulogy, and was decent and fairminded to the best of his ability. But during his entire tenure, which was interrupted by illness and frequent absences, he wrote only about twenty opinions for the Court, all routine.

Perhaps his most notorious opinion came in BANK OF AUGUSTA V. EARLE (1839) where, both on circuit and in a lone dissent at Washington, he held that a CORPORATION chartered in one state (a bank in the Earle case) could not do business within the boundaries of another state without the latter's express consent. McKinley's position was consistent with a deep concern for state SOVEREIGNTY, but it was, as Justice JOSEPH...