(b. Prince Georges County, Md., 6 Dec. 1752; d. Prince Georges County, 6 March 1844; interred at family estate, Glen Dale, Prince Georges County); associate justice, 1811–1835. Although he held the office for almost twenty‐five years, Duvall is one of the least important justices ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Born into an affluent Huguenot family in Maryland, Duvall was well educated, trained in the law, and admitted to the bar in 1778. He married Mary Bryce on 24 July 1787, and after her death three years later he married Jane Gibbon on 5 May 1795; she died in 1834.
Duvall strongly supported the movement for independence and for the next quarter of a century held a number of important state positions. He was selected to be a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, but for unknown reasons, he declined to serve. In 1796 he became chief justice of the General Court of Maryland. He also was a supporter of Thomas Jefferson during the 1790s serving in Congress and helping to organize the state for the Democratic‐Republicans in the election of 1800. In 1802 Jefferson appointed him the first comptroller of the United States Treasury.
President James Madison appointed Duvall to the Supreme Court in 1811 as a replacement for Samuel Chase, also from Maryland. In his constitutional decisions, Duvall invariably supported John Marshall and Joseph Story, even following the chief justice in his dissent in Ogden v. Saunders (1827). The only important case in which Duvall did not go along with Marshall was in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), but his reasons are unknown; the record only indicates that he dissented without an opinion. He did, however, write knowledgeable and able opinions in a number of minor cases involving commercial and maritime law.
Duvall had strong antislavery leanings (see Slavery). He disagreed with a Supreme Court ruling in Mima Queen and Child v. Hepburn (1813), which excluded hearsay evidence from a case in which two blacks claimed they were free. Duvall argued “that the reason for admitting hearsay evidence upon a question of freedom is much stronger than in the case of pedigrees or in controversies relative to the boundaries of land. It will be universally admitted that the right to freedom is more important than the right to property” (pp. 298–299).
In his old age, Duvall, who was sickly and deaf, was something of an embarrassment to the Court. Despite his condition he delayed his resignation for nearly a decade until it became clear that President Andrew Jackson intended Roger B. Taney, a fellow Marylander, to be Marshall's successor as chief justice (see Disability of Justices).
Bibliography
- Irving, Dillard,
Gabriel Duvall , in The Justices of the United States Supreme Court (1780–1969), edited by Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel, vol.1 (1969), pp. 419–429
— Richard E. Ellis
