John Archibald Campbell (lawyer)

John Archibald Campbell (photography around 1875)

John Archibald Campbell (born June 24, 1811 in Wilkes County , Georgia , † March 12, 1889 in Baltimore , Maryland ) was an American lawyer and politician of the Democratic Party , who was both a judge at the United States Supreme Court ) and was Deputy Secretary of War of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War .

Life

After attending school, he began to study at the University of Alabama in 1825 and temporarily attended the US Military Academy at West Point , which he left after the death of his father in July 1828. He then studied law in the law firm of former Georgia Governor John Clark and was admitted to the bar at the age of eighteen in 1829 by a special resolution of the Georgia House of Representatives .

He then practiced as a lawyer in Georgia before setting up as a lawyer in Montgomery . His political career began in 1836 when he was first elected to the Alabama House of Representatives as a Democratic candidate . In 1839 he opened a law firm in Mobile and was re-elected to the Alabama's House of Representatives in 1843. Among his staff in his law firm was Alexander McKinstry , who later became Lieutenant Governor of Alabama . In the years that followed, he was twice offered a position as a judge in the Alabama Supreme Court, both times denying his appeal.

Campbell while serving as a judge on the US Supreme Court

After the death of John McKinley on July 19, 1852, he was appointed on April 11, 1853 by US President Franklin Pierce as his successor as an associate judge at the US Supreme Court . Earlier, the appointment of Pierce's preferred candidate George Edmund Badger , a former US Secretary of the Navy and incumbent US Senator from North Carolina , had failed due to the refusal of the necessary approval in the US Senate .

On April 30, 1861, he resigned from his post as Associate Justice at the US Supreme Court and was appointed Deputy Secretary of War of the Confederate States of America by Jefferson Davis . He held this office until the end of the Civil War and took along with CS Senator Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter and Alexander Hamilton Stephens , the leader of the opposition in the CS Congress, on February 3, 1865 as a delegate to the unsuccessful Hampton Roads Conference Envoys from the Union to end the civil war. After the fall of Richmond , he was arrested in April 1865 and interned at Fort Pulaski for six months .

After his release, he founded a law firm in New Orleans and, as a lawyer, also held pleadings in numerous proceedings before the US Supreme Court, such as the so-called Slaughter-House Cases (1873) and in proceedings for the so-called reconstruction of the USA. After his death he was buried in the Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.

Background literature

• Henry G. Connor: John Archibald Campbell, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1853-1861 , 1920
• Robert Saunders, Jr .: John Archibald Campbell, Southern moderate, 1811-1889 , 1997, ISBN 0817308490

Web links

• John Archibald Campbell in nndb (English)
• John Archibald Campbell in the database of Find a Grave (English)
• openlibrary.org