While one’s relatives are by no means a guarantee of success, it certainly helped in Justice Bushrod Washington’s case to have the nation’s first president as his uncle.
The younger Washington was born in June 1762 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, to Hannah Bushrod and John Augustine Washington, the younger brother of the future president. Said to be the general’s favorite nephew, Washington graduated from William & Mary at 16, then studied law there under the first law professor at an American university, George Wythe, and alongside John Marshall. Washington put his studies aside to serve as a Continental Army private in 1781, although whether he actually watched General Charles Cornwallis surrender at Yorktown depends on whom you ask. His uncle then arranged a Philadelphia apprenticeship with none other than James Wilson, a founder who would eventually serve on the Supreme Court and have snowballing financial problems (to put it mildly).
Back in Virginia, Washington built a busy appellate practice, published a volume of Virginia Court of Appeals decisions in 1796, took on law students of his own, including the young Henry Clay, won a House of Delegates seat in 1787, and voted to ratify the Constitution at Virginia’s 1788 convention.
In 1798, Wilson died and President John Adams offered the vacancy to Marshall, who turned it down because he wanted to run for Congress and recommended his friend Washington instead. Adams gave Washington a recess appointment that fall, and he took his oath in November 1798. The Senate confirmed him that December. Washington was the youngest justice yet at age 37 when he took his late teacher’s spot on the bench.
After Marshall became chief justice in 1801, the two voted together so reliably that Justice William Johnson described them as “commonly estimated as one judge.” Exactly how rarely Washington strayed from the chief is somewhat contested. (His formal dissents have been counted at one or three.)
One of Washington’s best-known opinions came in 1827’s Ogden v. Saunders. Ogden centered around whether a state bankruptcy law could wipe out debts without violating the Constitution’s ban on laws “impairing the obligation of contracts.” Writing for the majority, Washington held that a law already on the books when a contract is signed effectively becomes part of that contract, so applying it at a later time does not impair things. Marshall disagreed, making it the “only constitutional case in which Marshall wrote a dissenting opinion.”
Some of Washington’s heaviest work, though, happened off the court. From 1803 until his death he rode the 3rd Circuit, spending around four months a year holding court in Philadelphia and Trenton (far more than his six annual weeks of Supreme Court work) and adjourning daily at exactly 3:00 p.m., because, as he told one lawyer, if he wasn’t in his wife’s parlor within five minutes of that, “she imagines some evil has happened to me.” While on circuit, Washington decided 1809’s United States v. Bright, in which a Pennsylvania militia general had used armed forces to block a federal court judgment on the state’s orders. Washington held that states cannot resist federal courts at gunpoint. In 1814’s Golden v. Prince, he concluded that only Congress (not the states) could enact bankruptcy legislation.
And then there is 1823’s Corfield v. Coryell, which began as a conflict over who could harvest New Jersey oysters, but ultimately helped define the early reading of Article IV’s guarantee that a state cannot deny citizens visiting from other states the privileges and immunities it extends to its own (relevant for who could work New Jersey’s oyster beds). Washington’s opinion listed the rights he deemed “fundamental,” among them a citizen’s right “to pass through, or to reside in any other state,” which has been credited with laying groundwork for the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment.
Off the bench, Washington inherited his uncle’s papers in 1799 and Mount Vernon itself in 1802, co-producing with Marshall a five-volume biography of George Washington. As his uncle’s executor, he carried out his direction to free those whom America’s first president had enslaved – although he never granted freedom to the many individuals he held in bondage.
Washington died mid-circuit in Philadelphia in November 1829, and his wife Nancy died two days later. Both rest at Mount Vernon.