Philip Pendelton Barbour

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US Supreme Court justice from 1836 to 1841

Philip Pendleton Barbour (May 25, 1783 – February 25, 1841) was the tenth speaker of the United States House of Representatives and an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States . He is the only individual to serve in both positions.

Born in Gordonsville, Virginia , Barbour established a legal career in Gordonsville after studying at the College of William & Mary . Several members of Barbour's family, including his brother, James Barbour , went on to hold prominent political office. Barbour won election to the House of Representatives in 1814 as a member of the Democratic-Republican Party . He served a single term as Speaker from 1821 to 1823 and declined to seek re-election to Congress in 1824. Barbour returned to Congress in 1827 as an ally of Andrew Jackson .

Barbour served in Congress until 1830, when he accepted appointment as a judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia . President Jackson appointed Barbour to the Supreme Court in 1835 to fill a vacancy caused by the resignation in 1835 of Gabriel Duvall . Barbour served on the Court until his death in 1841. On the Court, Barbour generally supported Jacksonian principles and states' rights .

Early and family life

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Barbour was born near Gordonsville , Orange County, Virginia , as the son of a planter, Thomas Barbour, who was a legislator, neighbor and early political sponsor of James Madison . He was named for his ancestor Philip Pendleton, through whom he was related to Edmund Pendleton , a politician and judge. The family was one of the First Families of Virginia , descended from a Scottish merchant who married a Miss Taliaferro and made his home in nearby Culpeper County, Virginia .

Like his brother James Barbour , Philip attended common and private schools before beginning formal legal studies under jurist St. George Tucker in Williamsburg, Virginia , but financial circumstances forced Tucker to end this arrangement in 1799.

He soon moved to Kentucky to make his fortune, where after a year reading law, he was admitted to the bar, and began practicing law in Bardstown . After another year, friends persuaded him to return to Virginia and resume his studies at the College of William & Mary, so in 1802, he began practicing law near his family home in Gordonsville .

In 1804, Barbour married a local planter's daughter, Frances Johnson, with whom he had one son named Sextus Barbour . Barbour was a slave owner.

Political and early judicial career

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Barbour practiced law for eight years before he started his public life as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates from 1812 to 1814. When U.S. Representative John Dawson died, Barbour won the special election to fill the seat, and served as a Jeffersonian Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives from September 19, 1814 to March 4, 1825, reaching the office of Speaker from 1821 to 1823. Barbour entered politics as the nation witnessed a political shift in which former state's rights activists such as current President James Madison , Henry Clay , and his brother James, now a U.S. Senator, began supporting nationalistic policies. Throughout this shift in power, Philip Barbour remained a strong advocate of Jeffersonian "Old Republican " principles of states' rights and maintaining a strict construction of the Constitution.

First term in Congress

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Barbour's reputation for constitutional conservatism grew with his opposition to the Bonus Bill of 1817. The Bill permitted the federal funding of internal improvement projects such as building roads like that being constructed to connect Buffalo, New York to New Orleans, Louisiana, through Washington. Barbour viewed federally funded internal projects as outside the sphere of Congress' powers and therefore unconstitutional and undermining state sovereignty. Barbour viewed states as sovereign, political communities, independent of an overarching political dynasty and free to secede from the Union if the federal government infringed on the rights of the states, an argument that he employed when countering restrictions to Missouri's admission to the Union as a slave state.

Barbour also defended Missouri's ban on free Black Americans entering the state. To those who argued that this ban was a violation of Article IV of the Constitution , he replied that banning free Black Americans was no different than banning destitute white men who would become a burden on the state. He argued that the term "citizen" did not apply to Black Americans, whether free or not.

His opposition to national restrictions on slave states served to foment his passion for states' rights but also develop his pro-slavery argument in politics. As a Congressman, Barbour was the first prominent politician to openly contest the constitutionality of protective tariffs.

Cohens v. Virginia

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In _Cohens v. Virginia _ (1821), Congressman Barbour represented the Commonwealth of Virginia to argue the issue of the Supreme Court's jurisdiction to hear the case, in which two men from Baltimore were convicted for selling D.C. lottery tickets in Virginia. Barbour unsuccessfully argued that the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction, since the law banning the sale of foreign lottery tickets was not meant to affect Virginia, rendering this a purely local issue. He also maintained that the suit was barred by the Eleventh Amendment , which prohibits suit against a state without its consent. However, Chief Justice Marshall held that the Court had jurisdiction based on the Supremacy Clause, Art. VI, cl. 2. This case strengthened Barbour's reputation as an Old Republican leader in a political system in which Virginian influence was waning and power was s

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