# Benjamin Robbins Curtis *American lawyer and associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1851–1857)* Benjamin Robbins Curtis (November 4, 1809 – September 15, 1874), a lawyer from Massachusetts, sat as an associate justice of the [[Supreme Court of the United States]] for six years, from 1851 until 1857.[^1] He was the only member of the Whig Party ever to serve on the Court, and he was the first justice to hold a formal law degree. He is best known as one of the two justices who dissented in *Dred Scott v. Sandford* (1857).[^1] Curtis resigned from the Court in 1857 and resumed private practice in Boston. In 1868 he led the defense of President Andrew Johnson at Johnson's impeachment trial. He was later the Democratic candidate for United States senator from Massachusetts in 1874 but lost that race.[^1] ## Early life and education Curtis was born in Watertown, Massachusetts. His mother was Lois Robbins, and his father, Benjamin Curtis, commanded a merchant ship.[^1] After common school in Newton, he entered Harvard College in 1825. In his junior year he won an essay-writing contest. He joined the Porcellian Club and Phi Beta Kappa, finished at Harvard in 1829, and took his degree from Harvard Law School in 1832.[^1] ## First private practice Curtis was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1832. In 1834 he relocated to Boston and joined the law firm of Charles P. Curtis. There he built a practice in admiralty law and gained a reputation in patent law.[^1] In 1836 Curtis was among the lawyers who represented Thomas Aves, a slaveholding father, in the Massachusetts freedom suit *Commonwealth v. Aves*. They lost the case.[^1] Aves's daughter, Mary Slater, lived in New Orleans. She had brought an enslaved girl of about six, named Med, with her on a visit to Boston. When Slater fell ill, she left Med in her father's care. The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and others sought a [[writ of habeas corpus]] against Aves. They argued that Med had become free because her mistress had voluntarily brought her into Massachusetts. Aves answered that he held Med as his daughter's agent.[^1] The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled through Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw. It held that Med was free and placed her under the court's wardship.[^1] Earlier rulings in other jurisdictions had freed enslaved people only after they had lived for years in a free state. *Aves* was the first decision to hold that an enslaved person voluntarily brought into a free state became free on arrival. The ruling was considered revolutionary when it was issued, and it drew strong objection in the slaveholding South.[^1] ## Supreme Court service On September 22, 1851, President Millard Fillmore gave Curtis a recess appointment to the seat left vacant by the death of [[Levi Woodbury]]. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster was Curtis's primary sponsor and urged Fillmore to choose him.[^1] Fillmore sent the formal nomination on December 11, 1851. The [[United States Senate]] confirmed Curtis on December 20, 1851, and his commission issued that day.[^1] Curtis was the first justice born in the 19th century to serve on the Court. His predecessors had either "read law" as apprentices or attended law school without taking a degree, which made him the first justice to earn a law-school degree. He became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1854.[^1] Curtis wrote the Court's opinion in *Cooley v. Board of Wardens*, 53 U.S. 299 (1852). The case asked whether states may regulate aspects of commerce or whether that power belongs only to Congress. The opinion held that the commerce power under Article I, § 8, clause 3 of the Constitution extends to pilotage laws. It also held that state commerce laws remain valid while Congress has not acted on the subject.[^1] In Curtis's reasoning, federal power over commerce is exclusive only where the subject requires national uniformity. Elsewhere the states may regulate. The decision remains a precedent in Commerce Clause cases.[^1] In *Dred Scott v. Sandford* (1857), Curtis was one of two dissenting justices. He disputed essentially every holding of the majority, including its rejection of Dred Scott's claim to emancipation.[^1] ## Return to private practice After resigning in 1857, Curtis went back to his Boston practice and became, in the Wikipedia account's words, a "leading lawyer" nationally. Over the next decade and a half he argued several cases before the Supreme Court.[^1] He had first supported [[Abraham Lincoln]]. By 1863, however, he was attacking Lincoln's "utter incompetence" and arguing in public that the Emancipation Proclamation was unconstitutional. According to the account, this took him out of consideration when Lincoln chose a successor to Chief Justice Roger Taney, who died in October 1864.[^1] In that year's presidential campaign Curtis backed the Democrat George B. McClellan against Lincoln.[^1] In 1868 Curtis was defense counsel for President Andrew Johnson at the impeachment trial. He read the answer to the articles of impeachment, which the account calls "largely his work." His opening statement ran for two days.[^1] He convinced the Senate that impeachment was a judicial act rather than a political one, and that it therefore required a full hearing of evidence. The account states that this precedent "influenced every subsequent impeachment."[^1] After the trial Johnson offered Curtis the post of U.S. Attorney General, and Curtis turned it down. Salmon P. Chase died in 1873, and Curtis was widely recommended to succeed him, but President Ulysses S. Grant passed him over.[^1] In 1874 Curtis ran for U.S. senator from Massachusetts as a Democrat and was not elected. Between leaving the bench in 1857 and his death in 1874, his professional earnings totaled about $650,000.[^1] ## Personal life Curtis married three times and was the father of 12 children.[^1] ## Death and legacy Curtis died at Newport, Rhode Island, on September 15, 1874. He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.[^1] On October 23, 1874, Attorney General George Henry Williams presented the bar's resolutions on Curtis's death in the Supreme Court. Williams also offered remarks on Curtis's defense of President Johnson.[^1] On December 9, 1880, Curtis's daughter Annie Wroe Scollay Curtis married Seth Low, who later became president of Columbia University and mayor of New York. The couple had no children.[^1] ## Published works Curtis published the following works:[^1] - *Reports of Cases in the Circuit Courts of the United States* (2 vols., Boston, 1854). - An edition of the Supreme Court's decisions, with notes and a digest (22 vols., Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1855). - *Digest of the Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States from the origin of the court to 1854* (Little, Brown & Co., 1864). - *Memoir and Writings* (2 vols., Boston, 1880), published after his death. The first volume contains a memoir by his brother, George Ticknor Curtis. The second, *Miscellaneous Writings*, was edited by his son, Benjamin R. Curtis Jr. ## Notes [^1]: Wikipedia contributors, *Benjamin Robbins Curtis* (revision 1380655414, retrieved 2026-10-26) — Curtis's birth, education, legal practice, *Commonwealth v. Aves*, appointment and confirmation, *Cooley*, *Dred Scott* dissent, the 1868 impeachment defense, later career, family, death and published works. CC BY-SA 4.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Robbins_Curtis