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 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.P.P. Cynn, Philip Pendleton Barbour in John P. Branch Historical Papers of Randolph Macon College (June 1913) pp. 66-67
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.Cynn p. 68
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 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 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.Polgar, P.J., 2023. Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction.
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 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 shifting between parties with the election of Andrew Jackson as the seventh President of the United States.
Jacksonian Democratic-Republican Party Andrew Jackson's election in 1828 led to the bifurcation of the Old Republican Party into the Jacksonian Democratic Republicans and the opposing National Republicans. Jackson formed the Democratic party on the foundation of Old Republican principles, such as Jefferson's displeasure with Hamilton's National Bank. During his two terms, President Jackson destroyed the Second Bank of the United States, and advocated for individual liberty, states' rights, and slavery.
State judge and second term in Congress Barbour declined to run for re-election in 1824 and turned down an offer from Thomas Jefferson to become the professor of law at the University of Virginia in 1825. Instead, he accepted election by Virginia legislature as a judge of the General Court of Virginia succeeding the late Hugh Holmes. Barbour served for two years as a state judge.
In 1827, Barbour returned to his seat in the House of Representatives as a Jacksonian. For the first two years of his second stint in the House, he was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
In 1829, Barbour became one of the first Jeffersonian Old Republicans to join the Jacksonian Democrats in opposition to the National Bank. He fought to expose the Second Bank of the United States as a private enterprise, endowed with federal funds while only masquerading as a government institution. Although his anti-Bank campaign did not take hold, Barbour's advocacy for state sovereignty, the removal of the National Bank, and the legalization of slavery in territories such as Missouri earned him favor with President Andrew Jackson.
Also in 1829, while continuing to serve as a U.S. Representative, Barbour became a delegate for the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829-1830, and the Convention elected him their second president, after the Convention's first president, James Monroe, had to withdraw due to failing health on December 8. As such, Barbour (with distinguished Virginians such as Monroe, James Madison, and John Marshall) helped restrict discussion of slavery's role in the Commonwealth, and limited the rancorous assembly's debates to issues of representation and suffrage (Virginia had been one of the last states to allow only landowners to vote, and slaveholders had disproportionate power). The resulting constitution was adopted in 1830, despite the votes against it from the state's northern and western areas (much of which ultimately split off to become West Virginia during the American Civil War decades after Barbour's death).
Federal district judge and the 1832 campaign season Barbour also turned down offers of a chancellorship and the post of U.S. Attorney General before finally resigning his congressional seat October 15, 1830 to accept President Jackson's appointment to become judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Jackson appointed Barbour by recess appointment on October 8, 1830, to a seat on that court vacated by George Hay. Barbour was formally nominated on December 14, 1830, and two days later he was confirmed by the Senate, and received his commission, serving thereafter until March 17, 1836.Federal Judicial Center – Biographical Directory of Federal Judges
In 1832, Democrats unhappy with the selection of Martin Van Buren as their party's vice-presidential nominee held a convention in Virginia, at which they nominated Jackson for president and Barbour for vice president. Barbour eventually withdrew his candidacy and endorsed the Jackson-Van Buren ticket, but the alternative Democratic ticket still appeared on the ballot in several Southern states. Barbour also refused nominations for judge of the court of appeals, for Governor, and for United States Senator.
Although it was unknown whether Barbour could gain favor with voters outside Virginia, Barbour's campaigning on the Democratic ticket illuminated the similarities in parties and gained favor for the Democratic party. Voters reasoned that, if a man like Barbour, loyal to his party even when his fellow Virginians chose different principles, could switch to the Democratic party, then the Democrats must hold the same values. By joining the Jacksonian Democratic Party, Barbour entrenched Old Republican principles into a new political dynasty, therefore continuing the legacy of Jefferson and further validating the strength of Democratic principles. This was similar to Lincoln's argument that secession should not occur due to the state of perpetual Union that had existed since the first draft of the Constitution before the term "Union" was first used to describe the North during the Civil War. Therefore, Barbour's resignation allowed the second party system to coalesce by unifying the Democratic Party on the ideologies of war in the American system through the national reform retrenchment and economy, and a restoration of republican constitutionalism.
United States Supreme Court Appointment In 1835, Chief Justice Marshall's death and Justice Gabriel Duvall's resignation created two vacancies on the Supreme Court. President Jackson, at the end of his second Presidential term, nominated Judge Barbour to fill Duvall's vacancy. Nationalists feared Jackson's appointment of Barbour because Barbour's anti-administration Congressional legacy and Democratic beliefs suggested that he would attempt to undermine the federal supremacy achieved during the Marshall Court. This fear made the finalization of the decision an arduous process with two attempts at delaying the Senate's decision. On March 15, 1836, the Senate approved the appointment of Barbour by a vote of 30-11.
Tenure Barbour served on the Supreme Court for five years. He heard 155 cases, for which he authored one major opinion and two dissents. His passion for states' rights, strict constructionism, and limits on federal power helped shape the legacy of the Taney Court.