Samuel Nelson

Samuel Nelson (born Nov. 10, 1792, Hebron, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 13, 1873, Cooperstown, N.Y.) was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1845–72).

Nelson was the son of farmers John Rogers Nelson and Jean McArthur Nelson. He initially planned to become a minister but instead studied law at Middlebury College (Vermont), from which he graduated in 1813. Upon graduation, he became a law clerk in Salem, N.Y., but after the law firm dissolved two years later, he followed one of the former partners to Madison county, N.Y., to form a new law firm.

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In 1817 Nelson was admitted to the bar and moved to Cortland, N.Y., to begin private practice. His political aspirations grew along with the success of his practice, and in 1820 Nelson was appointed Cortland’s postmaster, served as a presidential elector for James Monroe, and became a delegate to the New York constitutional convention of 1821, in which he advocated the abolition of property requirements for male suffrage. He was appointed in 1823 judge of New York’s sixth circuit court and in 1831 associate justice of the state Supreme Court. In 1837 Nelson was promoted to chief justice of the New York Supreme Court. Despite the ordinary limitation of state court precedents, his decisions began to gain recognition in other states. In February 1845, after an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate, Nelson was nominated by Pres. John Tyler to replace Smith Thompson on the U.S. Supreme Court. Although he was not the first choice—several candidates had been nominated, but all had either refused service or had been denied confirmation by the Senate—he easily won confirmation by the Senate in March 1845.

A hardworking but politically neutral member of the court, Nelson became an authority on international, admiralty, maritime, and patent law and often addressed himself primarily to the technical aspects of the cases before the court. Largely less interested in constitutional questions and unwilling to politicize the judiciary, Nelson voted in conference to reject certiorari in the famous Dred Scott case. Ultimately, he was the lone justice to refuse consideration of the political and constitutional aspects of the Dred Scott decision (1857); writing separately, he declared merely that the slave Dred Scott was not a citizen of Missouri—based on the Missouri Supreme Court’s rejection of the principle that a slave won his freedom by traveling with his master to a free state—and therefore could not sue in a federal court.

Having earlier attempted reconciliation efforts to avoid civil war, Nelson came under intense public scrutiny because of several decisions that led some of his critics to question his patriotism during the American Civil War; for example, he dissented in the prize cases (1863), arguing that because an official declaration of war had not been adopted, a blockade of the South could not be enforced, and in Ex Parte Milligan (1866) he voted with the majority in overturning the conviction of Lambdin Milligan, who had been charged with aiding the Confederacy. He also opposed the expansion of federal power and urged conciliation with the Confederacy—all unpopular stances, especially within the Union.

In 1871 Pres. Ulysses S. Grant appointed Nelson to serve on the Joint High Commission that met at Geneva to settle the Alabama claims (i.e., claims resulting from damage caused by a vessel manufactured in England and sold to the Confederacy); the commission awarded the United States $15.5 million in reparations from Britain, maintaining that countries were required to use “due diligence” in preventing the sale of military weapons to an enemy of a country with which it is at peace. Nelson retired from the court in November 1872 and died the following year.