AMERICAN COUNTERREVOLUTION

AMERICAN "COUNTERREVOLUTION" United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, the nation's fourth , is fondly favored with the sobriquet, "The Great Justice," by we lawyers and judges, as though he were a demigod or a legal titan. However, after reading his 1813 ruling in an appeal from a freedom suit from Prince George's County, Maryland, "Mima Queen and Child, Petitioners for Freedom v. Hepburn," (7 Cranch C.C. 290), I now have a considerably different opinion and conception of the man, who wrote so many of our nation's earlier iconic legal decisions . In a powerful, carefully researched, 2018 book, APPEALING FOR LIBERTY FREEDOM SUITS IN THE SOUTH by Loren Schweninger the following observation appears: "One of the lawyers for the Boston plaintiffs, Gabriel Duval, who by 1813 had become an associate justice of the Supreme Court, had fought for many years against the counterrevolution following the American Revolution, as white Marylanders sought to solidify the 'peculiar institution ' of slavery in the Upper South . In his minority dissent to Marshall 's opinion, Duval pointed out that in Maryland many claims for freedom could be proved only with hearsay, because 'no living evidence' existed. The admission of such evidence in freedom suits had thus been affirmed by the unanimous opinion of the high court of appeals after full and fair argument by the ablest counsel at the bar. 'If the ancestor neglected to claim her right , the issue could not be bound by any length of time, it [freedom] being a natural inherent right,' Duval reasoned , and therefore found the argument for admitting hearsay evidence more compelling in freedom suits than it was in cases concerning pedigree or land boundaries: 'It will be universally admitted that the right to freedom is more important than the right of property.'" P. 24 Justice Marshall saw matters quite contrarily . He therefore perfected the American "counterrevolution" by ruling against Mima Queen and her child in their bid for freedom . That he hid behind hearsay in the plaintiffs' case, while deeming it to be efficacious and admissible in a variety of other cases, shows how much he devalued human freedom; especially that of African slaves! We were not introduced to the "Mima Queen" case even at the Howard Law School, rightly renown for its historic civil rights legacy. Our curriculum was essentially the same as that in white law schools. Nor in the middle 1970s, were we made privy to any semblance of similar cases to "Mimi Queen's reflecting the virulent American "counterrevolution," which surely would have changed our conduct. Given the foregoing, one may now have a better appreciation for the fact that Roger Taney of Maryland (Dred Scott fame) succeeded John Marshall of Virginia on the court !