Melancholy Justice: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Gilded Age MICHAEL A. ROSS In the late 1880s, after serving for almost three decades on the United States Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Freeman Miller was a melancholy man. He was in his early seventies, and both his personal and professional life pained him. His wife and daughter no longer spoke to one another, his son-in-law had recently died from alcoholism, and he was broke and feared that if he died his wife would be left destitute. On the Court he felt isolated, surrounded by younger Justices who gravitated to the formalistic doctrines of his ideological rival Justice Stephen J. Field. And despite his having written over 600 majority opinions, it remained unclear what his judicial legacy would be.1 Miller knew that he might be remem bered for his majority opinion in the famous Slaughter-House Cases—butthat decisionhad already had effects that he did not intend. And on many other issues that mattered to him, par ticularly those that impacted the indebted river towns of the Trans-Mississippi West, he had failed to convince his fellow Justices as to the merits of his arguments. All he had to show for his labors in those cases were a string of poignant but bitter dissents.2 Like many other Americans who wit nessed the jarring economic transformations of the Gilded Age, Miller also feared for the future ofhis country. Although he recognized that the Industrial Revolution had resulted in great benefits for society, he worried that the nation had become dangerously divided be tween the haves and the have-nots. In Amer ica’s large metropolises, he wrote in 1888, “the palaces ofthe rich are surroundedbythe hovels of the poor; the glaring lights of gas and elec tric lamps illuminating for the wealthy their hours ofhilarity and festivity shine down upon the tenements of the lowly and the poverty stricken, and while the more favored few have all that is best in life..., another much larger class of beings a few hundred yards away, or across the street, may be languishing in misery, burdened by poverty, and tortured by disease MELANCHOLY JUSTICE: SAMUEL FREEMAN MILLER 135 Although an optimist in his youth, Samuel Miller grew more melancholy with age. Toward the end of his life he felt isolated on the Court, his wife and daughter did not speak, and he had serious money worries. His biggest concern, however, was for the future of the country. for which they have not the means to provide the remedy.”3 It was, Miller believed, an ex plosive situation. Miller’s late-life malaise was particularly striking because as a young man he had been irrepressibly optimistic about America. Born in 1816 on a hard scrabble Kentucky farm, Miller came of age in the era of self-made men and women. He grew up in the shadow of the illustrious KentuckyWhigpolitician Henry Clay—the great champion ofan American sys tem that allowed men to rise in life, no mat ter how humble their beginnings. It was Clay who first coined the term “self-made man.” Miller shared Clay’s vision and believed that the United States was the most democratic, so cially fluid, and economically progressive na tion on earth. It was a society that guaranteed the right to rise. As evidence, Miller only had to look to his own ascent in life. As a teenager, he rejected the hard farming life of his par ents, went to medical school at Transylvania University, worked for a time as a doctor in the Kentucky hill country town of Barbourville, and then abandoned medicine for law, which he correctly saw as a faster route to financial and social prominence. He studied law books owned by Silas Woodson, a lawyer with whom he shared an office, and was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1846. In 1849, he moved to Keokuk, Iowa, which was then a steamboat boomtown, and quickly became one of the most prominent lawyers in the state.4 During the antebellum period, the one glaring flaw Miller saw in the American sys tem was slavery, the retrograde institution that denied the...