Women Advocates Before the Supreme Court

Abstract

Women Advocates Before the Supreme Court CLARE CUSHMAN Legend has it that when Dolley Madison and a group ofthe First Lady’s friends arrived one day at the Supreme Court in the middle of an oral argument, the great advocate Daniel Webster stopped his oration, bowed to the ladies, and started again from the beginning. Although such excessive gallantry was not standard practice in the early nineteenth century, it was customary for wives of Washington dignitaries to dress up in the latest fashions and come to the Supreme Court to observe oral arguments. The passive, decorative role women then played in the life of the Court contrasts sharply with the professional one they play today. This gradual transformation did not begin until 1880, ninety-one years after the Court’s inception, when a woman was finally permitted to leave the spectator ranks and join the show. That was the year that Belva A. Lockwood became the first female attorney to argue a case before the Supreme Court.1 The previous year she had forced the Court, through congressional intervention, to license women to practice before it.2 It had not been an easy task.3 Lockwood’s admission opened the doors for successive women attorneys to file petitions and briefs at the Supreme Court, to join its bar and to move the admission of other attorneys, and to argue cases before the Bench. Before examining the contributions of the women advocates who followed in Lock­ wood’s footsteps, however, it is appropriate to consider claims that two earlier women, Lucy Terry Prince and Myra Clark Gaines— neither of whom were lawyers—personally pleaded their own land dispute cases before the Supreme Court. No official documents have been discovered to support these claims. Lucy Terry Prince (c. 1725-1821) Lucy Terry Prince, an African-American, is usually hailed in reference books as the first 68 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY i I No official record has been found documenting the alleged oral argument of Lucy Terry Prince, a freed slave, before Justice Samuel Chase in 1796. This oil portrait of Prince, one of the first published African-American poets, is purely imaginary; no likeness of her exists. WOMEN ADVOCATES BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT 69 woman to address the Supreme Court of the United States. The popularizer of this legend is Massachusetts historian George Sheldon, who described the event in his 1893 article “Negro Slavery in Old Deerfield,” which was published in New England Magazine and widely circulated. He wrote that Prince was permitted to argue her Vermont land claim suit in 1796 before the “Supreme Court of the United States . . . presided over by [Justice] Samuel Chase of Maryland.” Apparently, Chase was so impressed by Prince’s elo­ quence that he complimented her on making “a better argument than he had heard from any lawyer at the Vermont bar.”4 Her performance would have been all the more extraordinary considering her back­ ground. She was taken from Africa as a child in 1730 and eventually sold to a Deerfield, MA, innkeeper named Ebenezer Wells. She purchased her freedom in 1756 after her mar­ riage to Abijah Prince, a free black. In 1762, a wealthy Deerfield landowner deeded Abijah Prince 100 acres of land in the newly opened territory of Guilford, VT. The Princes and their six children took up residence there in the 1780s. Hungry for land, they had also ob­ tained a grant of 300 acres of wilderness tract in nearby Sunderland. The predatory behavior of a wealthy Sunderland neighbor, Colonel Eli Bronson, was the basis for the legendary suit. He set up a claim to the Princes’ property and, accord­ ing to nineteenth-century Sunderland histo­ rian Giles B. Bacon, “by repeated law suits obtained about one-half of the home lot, and had not the town interposed [the Princes] would have lost the whole.”5 A prominent cit­ izen, Bronson allegedly hired Royall Tyler, a future chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, and Stephen R. Bradley, a future Ver­ mont senator, as his counsel. The Princes were said to have engaged Isaac Tichenor, a future governor of the state, to defend their claim.6 In his article, Sheldon...