James Moore Wayne
(b. Savannah, Ga., 1790; d. Washington, D.C., 7 July 1867; interred Laurel Grove Cemetery, Savannah), associate justice, 1835–1867. James Moore Wayne was the son of Richard Wayne and Elizabeth Clifford, members of Georgia's aristocracy. Educated in the northeast, he was a local politician with a national perspective, and a slaveholder who during the Civil War supported the cause of union.
Wayne graduated from the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1808. He studied law in Connecticut under Judge Charles Chauncey of New Haven, and in 1810 returned to Georgia where he was admitted to the bar and entered private practice a year later.
Though he saw no action, Wayne interrupted his legal career to serve as a captain with a Georgia militia unit during the War of 1812. After the war, he reentered private practice and embarked upon a peripatetic political career. Between 1815 and 1819, Wayne served as a member of the legislature, a member of Savannah's Board of Aldermen, and then mayor. In 1819 the state legislature elected him judge of the Savannah Court of Common Pleas, which handled misdemeanors and small civil claims. In 1822 Wayne became a judge of the superior court, the trial court of general jurisdiction. In 1828 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. A loyal supporter of President Andrew Jackson, Wayne was reelected three times. When Associate Justice William Johnson of South Carolina died in 1834, President Jackson rewarded Wayne's loyalty with Johnson's seat.
Justice Wayne's particular expertise was admiralty, and in this area he adopted an expansive view of federal power. In Waring v. Clarke (1847), for example, he ruled that the federal admiralty power extended to sea waters flowing by tide or otherwise into ports and rivers.
In Commerce Clause cases, Justice Wayne tracked a course mindful of the states' police powers but nonetheless jealous of federal power. In City of New York v. Miln (1837), Wayne concurred in a decision forcing ship captains to report on and to post bond for immigrant passengers who might become public charges. Wayne concurred without opinion in the License Cases (1847), involving taxes levied upon ship captains for each immigrant carried, but in the Passenger Cases (1849), he delivered a concurring opinion that the commerce power was vested exclusively in Congress. In Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852), involving a local pilotage law, Wayne restated his view of the exclusivity of federal power over interstate and foreign commerce and dissented from Justice Benjamin R. *Curtis's formula recognizing state power to regulate those aspects of commerce that were essentially local and not demanding of national uniformity.
As a southerner and slaveholder, Justice Wayne regularly ruled in favor of slave interests (see Slavery). Consistent with his vision of the supremacy and the expansiveness of federal power, in Ableman v. Booth (1859), Wayne was part of a unanimous Court that turned back Wisconsin's effort to interpose the power of its state courts between a federal court and those arrested for violations of the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Similarly, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), Wayne concurred that federal power regarding the subject of fugitive slaves was exclusive.
It was in Scott v. Sandford (1857) that the conflict between Justice Wayne's view of the expansiveness of federal power over slavery and his desire to conserve the institution came to judicial fruition. The only justice to concur in Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's opinion, Justice Wayne agreed foursquare with the position that under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, Congress had no power to prohibit the introduction of slavery into the territories, nor to declare as free those slaves brought into the territories (see Due Process, Substantive).
Unlike many other southern federal officeholders, including Justice John A. Campbell of Alabama, Justice Wayne did not resign to join the South during the Civil War. The Confederacy branded him a traitor and confiscated his property in Georgia. Wayne voted to uphold President Abraham Lincoln's declaration of a naval blockade of Southern ports during the war, in the Prize Cases (1863), but after the war, he voted in Cummings v. Missouri (1867) and Ex parte Garland (1867) to strike down the test oaths.
Bibliography
- Alexander A. Lawrence, James Moore Wayne, Southern Unionist (1943)
— Raymond T. Diamond
