Stephen J. Field

American Supreme Court justice

• Born: November 4, 1816
• Birthplace: Haddam, Connecticut
• Died: April 9, 1899
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Justice Field’s brilliant and often ingenious legal opinions protected American entrepreneurs from what they perceived to be the destructive power of popular government.

Early Life

Stephen Johnson Field was the sixth child of seven boys and two girls born to David and Submit Field. His father was an austere Congregational minister. His mother, whose Puritan father had given her the name “Submit” as an expression of Christian virtue, imbued her son with an independence of mind and motives that graphically demonstrated that she had been misnamed. Field’s earliest education was the product of his parents’ unchangeable convictions. “Our whole domestic life,” wrote his brother, “received its tone from this unaffected piety of our parents, who taught their children to lie down and rise up in that fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom.” At thirteen, Field’s hearthside education ended when he accompanied his older sister and her husband to Greece, where they were to establish a school for young women. Two and a half years later, Field returned to Massachusetts with a less provincial view of the world and a determination to enroll at Williams College. In 1833, he entered Williams and was graduated valedictorian four years later.

Faced with the problem of choosing a vocation at the age of twenty-one, Field joined his brother’s law firm in were chosen. In 1841, he passed the New York bar. After ten years of service in the family law firm, however, he was eager to set off on his own; with his brother’s encouragement, he moved to San Francisco to try his luck at gold mining and lawyering. In California, it soon became apparent that he was a better lawyer than a miner. San Francisco was much too expensive for his meager purse, however, so he made his way up the Sacramento River to the frontier town of Marysville.

In Marysville, Field had the good fortune of rendering legal services to General John Augustus Sutter, on whose land gold had been discovered in 1849. With Sutter’s help, he was elected the alcalde (the Mexican equivalent to the justice of the peace) of the Marysville township. A year later, with the installation of the newly drafted California constitution, he exchanged his position of alcalde for a seat in the legislature. In 1853, he ran for the California senate but was defeated by two votes and, with the defeat, never again sought a political position in the state.

Field devoted the next six years to establishing a successful law practice and becoming financially independent. Indeed, by 1857 he had acquired enough influence with the rich and powerful people in California to be nominated and appointed to the state supreme court. A few years later, as a result of his brilliantly reasoned and orderly laissez-faire legal opinions, he became the chief justice of the court. In 1863, although a Democrat, Field was appointed by the Republican president Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Life’s Work

Field’s judicial activities covered more than forty years, thirty-four of which were on the federal bench, and during which time he wrote more than one thousand opinions. It was not the number of opinions but rather their quality that was to become his national legacy, a legacy in defense of the entrepreneurial class that was to last for more than half a century. Often he was the minority voice in his own court, yet long after majority decisions had lost their influence and had grown silent, his opinions directed the course of law in the United States.

Field’s appearance, when he sat on the Supreme Court bench, was reported by some to be reminiscent of that of a Hebrew prophet. He was, in fact, short and stout, with a rounded body and an oval face covered with a white flowing beard that curled around the back of his neck and ears; yet this profusion of hair was wholly missing from the top of his head.

It is not difficult to find the foundations for Field’s arguments in his religious training as a child. It was the inexorable propositions of the Bible that solidified his moral convictions and were later to mold his notions of natural and inalienable rights. As a mature judge, he found easy the transition from the God of the Bible to the Creator of inalienable rights. These autonomous, God-given rights became the bedrock conviction of nineteenth century American judicial conservatism. In his earliest opinions, Field was hard put to find precedent for his inalienable rights arguments. While the Declaration of Independence mentioned inalienable rights, the Constitution itself, which was the primary document for legal decisions, had nothing to say about such rights. With the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment , however, Field finally had a federal document wholly adequate to his legal mission.

The critical passage in the Fourteenth Amendment read:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

In later years, the “due process” and “equal protection of the laws” clauses were to become the most quoted words in the amendment, but for Field the “shall [not] abridge the privileges or immunities” clause was exactly the terminology he was looking for to secure his doctrine of inalienable rights.

In his earliest opinions, Field consistently applied the “privileges or immunities” clause to those cases in which individuals were seeking redress from the intrusion of government into their private lives. Eventually, however, as his influence and leadership in the Court grew, so also did his more collective definition of inalienable rights grow.

Soon he transposed and expanded his doctrine so as to accommodate the concept of citizen to include “citizens in the aggregate.” Ostensibly, he argued that natural or inalienable constitutional rights applied to groups qua groups, and specifically to corporations. Business institutions and corporations had the same rights of protection from the invidious usurpation of privileges as did the individual citizen. This transposition from private to public rights was dramatically exhibited in a series of landmark opinions he wrote between 1865 and 1885. The earliest of these opinions was concerned with the abridgment of rights that individuals suffer at the hands of majoritarian legislation, but by 1875 he was applying the rationale he had employed in private rights cases to corporate business and industry.

For example, in 1865 there was a series of cases commonly described as “test-oath” cases that came before the Court. Cummings v. Missouri was one such case. In this case, the state of Missouri had required those seeking public office to declare under oath that they had not been disloyal to the United States or to the state of Missouri. This was divisive legislation since, in this border state, roughly half the population’s sympathies lay with the South during the Civil War. It was legislation clearly intended to punish those who had backed the wrong side. As a consequence, anyone refusing to take this oath was to be prohibited access to various public stations and privileges. For example, they could not vote, hold public office, teach, preach, practice law, or administer public trusts.

Field was unequivocally opposed to test-oath restrictions. He argued that the requirement was punitive and in no manner tested the fitness or unfitness of citizens. Such a law, he continued, was ex post facto, intended to punish people without trial for past allegiances—punishment, in fact, for behavior that at the time committed was not a prosecutorial offense. Field joined a majority of the Court in striking down this legislation on the grounds that it was an abrogation of a citizen’s inalienable right not to be subjected to sanctions for an act performed before the institution of a statute.

A second set of so-called due process cases was known as the “Chinese immigration” laws. Soon after the gold rush of 1849, enterprising shipping merchants began importing Chinese workers into California to do the menial labor brought on by the rapid industrial growth. In order to complete the transcontinental railroad, greater and greater numbers of Chinese were brought into California, and by 1869 government authorities were devising ways to limit the influx of these immigrants into the state. They enacted a series of laws that were unabashedly discriminatory.

The Supreme Court had the task of determining the constitutionality of these laws. One law, for example, declared in the most general terms that “undesirable” Chinese were forbidden entry into the port of San Francisco, leaving the definition of undesirable up to city officials. Undesirables might mean prostitutes, or the poor, or unbonded workers. Another particularly pernicious law required that imprisoned Chinese men have their hair shorn, even though the cutting off of their plaited hair (queue) was for them an act of religious degradation. Again, there was a law requiring those Chinese wishing to establish a laundry business to obtain in writing the support of at least twelve taxpayers in the same city block. This was obviously a law intended to restrain the trade of the Chinese. In almost all these cases, Field argued that these laws accomplished nothing worthwhile and were merely acts of “hostility and spitefulness,” clearly intended to deprive the Chinese of their natural and inalienable rights.

By 1870, Field was ready to transfer his inalienable rights doctrine from individuals to corporations and to expand his definition of persons to include “bodies of persons with a common interest.” One of the earliest constitutional cases in which he argued in this fashion was Hepburn v. Griswold. Hepburn v. Griswold was a “legal-tender” or “greenback” case. Greenbacks referred to paper money, and many people had no confidence in paper money, particularly in its inflated state immediately after the Civil War.

Despite private protests, the government insisted on paying its postwar debts with paper currency; creditors of the government regarded this practice as unstable because the government could print currency as it was needed, thus making it less and less valuable. For this reason, creditors began demanding payment in gold and silver.

In most of these legal-tender cases the Court majority supported the right of the government to pay its debts in greenbacks. Field, however, at times single-handedly, supported the creditors’ right not to be required to accept these highly fluctuating, unstable paper notes. These creditors, he argued, had the right to payment special basis: They had the right to assess the worth of the payment, once it could be shown that the debtor had agreed to the value of the original contract. Legal-tender cases were clear evidence of Field’s defense of his inalienable rights doctrine applied not only to aggrieved individuals but also to aggrieved groups of individuals, specifically, to corporations and industry.

Some of Field’s most noteworthy “corporate citizen” arguments revolve around a series of cases pertaining to the country’s railroads, and particularly to the railroad interests of some of Field’s most influential California friends, men with controlling interests in midwestern and far-western railroads (Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins). During the 1840’s and 1850’s, in order to stimulate the growth of railroad building across the continent, Congress had provided railroad companies with enormous financial subsidies, tax exemptions, and outright land donations. As a result, these companies grew at an unbounded pace with an apparently unfair economic advantage over other commercial institutions. This advantage grew even larger during the next two decades because the railroads were able to escape the country’s rising tax burden.

The railroads also demonstrated an arrogance indicative of their power. They charged exorbitant and discriminatory rates, undercut their competitors, and refused to service the communities that they judged antirailroad. In due course, legislators, with popular support, began to introduce initiatives whose express purpose was to reduce the power and influence of these companies. In an effort to regain years of lost tax revenue, for example, the California constitutional convention of 1878 introduced a provision that would levy a tax against these companies’ vast housing and equipment holdings. It was clear to everyone that this legislative maneuver was discriminatory because most of the inventory held by railroads was mortgaged inventory, and mortgage holdings were tax-exempt for private citizens in California.

The railroads refused to pay what they perceived as an inequitable tax and brought the disputed provision before the Supreme Court in 1882 (San Mateo v. Southern Pacific ). This case gave Field an unambiguous opportunity to defend his “corporate citizen” argument once again. The Fourteenth Amendment, he declared, is intended to protect corporations in the same manner that individual citizens are protected. “Due process” requires that railroads, despite their vast wealth and holdings, are entitled to the same provisions of justice afforded the humblest citizen. Congress, he argued, fully intended that corporate interests receive “equal protection of the laws,” and those lawyers who argued that this amendment was intended solely for black Americans were interpreting the amendment much too narrowly.

Field had considerable personal charm and was known as an enjoyable party guest. However, he was also intensely disliked by many—with good reason, for he had some very unlikable character traits. He was a constant public moralizer, insatiably ambitious, at times vindictive, and not above making ethical compromises. Two of his brothers, David Dudley Field and Cyrus Field, became powerful, influential industrialists, and Stephen Field was accused, and not without some provocation, of tailoring his legal judgments to fit his brothers’ financial interests. Off the bench, Stephen Field was intimate with Stanford, Huntington, J. P. Morgan, Jay Gould, and other wealthy industrialists, and on one occasion he even attended a private dinner party with them the night before he was to hear legal arguments in his court against their business holdings.

Stephen Field’s tenure on the Supreme Court was longer than that of any justice who had gone before. He finally stepped down as a result of failing health at the age of eighty-two. While his devotion to individual rights was not always steadfast (he later ruled against private citizens such as women, laborers, and Chinese immigrants), his commitment to the interests of corporations and business never faltered. He died in Washington, D.C., on a cold, gray day in April, 1899, with the wealthy and powerful in government and business close at hand. There was also his wife, Sue Virginia, to whom he had been devoted for more than forty years.

Significance

Stephen Field’s significant contribution to American society was unquestionably his brilliant legal opinions in defense of private rights. This defense was consistently sustained in support of private over public jurisdictions, opposition to loyalty oaths, opinions against the government’s “legal tender” arguments, and his antislavery sympathies manifested in the “Chinese immigration” decisions. This fearless independence of mind set the direction of the Court for many years.

Bibliography

Black, Chauncey F. Some Account of the Work of Stephen J. Field. New York: Samuel B. Smith, 1881. A systematic collection of Field’s legal opinions. Includes his work as a member of the California Supreme Court as well as his decisions on the U.S. Supreme Court. The introduction by John Norton Pomeroy, who was a law professor at the University of California during Field’s lifetime, is of high scholarly quality but overly favorable to Field. One must, however, expect this from a volume put together by Field’s political and legal friends during his lifetime.

Field, Stephen J. California Alcalde. Oakland, Calif.: Biobooks, 1950. Field’s personal record of his reasons for coming to California, and how he became the administrative judge of Marysville and eventually ran for the newly formed California legislature. There is also a description of his stormy struggle to obtain various political and judicial appointments, culminating in his appointment to the California Supreme Court.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California. Washington, D.C.: Privately printed, 1893. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1968. Field produces, in lively fashion, personal sketches of his early days in California, his first few days in San Francisco, his success and good luck in Marysville, his legislative years, and his membership on the California Supreme Court. Also included is his version of what he describes as an attempt to assassinate him by former chief justice of the California Supreme Court, David S. Terry, in 1889.

Kens, Paul. Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Comprehensive biography chronicling Field’s life and career. Kens describes the influences that shaped Field’s legal thought and judicial opinions, and explains why his opinions remain relevant today.

McCloskey, Robert Green. American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951. A provocative, albeit unsympathetic analysis of Field’s legal influences in the post-Civil War era. McCloskey attempts to show a conceptual line of influence, from the social Darwinism of William Graham Sumner through the legal conservatism of Field to the entrepreneurial, laissez-faire ideology of the capitalist Andrew Carnegie. McCloskey argues that Sumner and Field produced the moral and legal foundation for American capitalism.

Swisher, Carl Brent. Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of Law. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1930. This is the best account of Field’s career. It offers a rich record of his early years, his appointment as a Democrat from California to the U.S. Supreme Court by the Republican president Abraham Lincoln, and his political aspirations to be the Democratic nominee for president in 1880. Field had a dramatic and strenuous career, and Swisher’s book covers it with literary skill.

Warren, Charles. The Supreme Court in United States History. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1926. This two-volume work is one of the greatest treatments of American constitutional history available. In volume 2, chapters 30-34, Warren offers a concise record of the constitutional period between 1863-1888, the period in which Field’s legal decisions so indelibly influenced the bench. Readers may find Warren’s style excessively juridical, but the work is an invaluable account of Field’s and other justices’ supporting and dissenting opinions.