Friday’s A Closer Look is typically a judicial biography. This week we cover Justice Robert Trimble, who served on the court from 1826-1828.
Although Justice Robert Trimble served only two years on the Supreme Court before his death in 1828, Chief Justice John Marshall found the loss considerable. “He was distinguished for sound sense, uprightness of intention and legal knowledge,” Marshall wrote privately. “His superior cannot be found. I wish we may find his equal.”
New justices on the court typically had to pay their dues for a few years before Marshall gave them majority opinions (Justice Smith Thompson, who had joined the court in 1823, wrote three in the 1827 term, and Justice Bushrod Washington, the court’s senior associate justice, wrote two). Trimble, on the other hand, wrote nine in his first term, an “unexpectedly large share of opinions” at that time. Trimble was also the second of 11 Kentuckians to have served on the court, assuming the seat of Justice Thomas Todd, the first.
Trimble was born in November 1776 in Virginia. In 1779, his family left for Boonesborough, Kentucky, and amid the arduous journey, his uncle was shot and “at his own request … left to die alone” on the trail. Trimble’s first teacher was his grandfather, James McMillan. Trimble later taught school to pay for his education, and read law under George Nicholas, the “principal author” of the first Kentucky constitution.
Trimble was admitted to the bar in 1803 and built a “profitable” land litigation practice in Paris, Kentucky. He served a single term in the Kentucky House and never again ran for office. Per one early account, “the stormy life of a politician” was not “congenial to his disposition or taste.” He also passed on two chances to become a U.S. senator, which reportedly would have required only his consent.
Trimble was more willing to accept judicial posts, although the salaries were a recurring concern. He joined the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 1807 but resigned in December 1808, citing the financial loss from this job. (Sources disagree on whether he briefly served as the state’s chief justice in 1810 or declined this position.)
In 1817, President James Madison appointed Trimble to the federal district court in Kentucky. There, his nationalist rulings were largely unpopular – after he held in 1821 that a Kentucky debtor-relief law did not bind the federal courts, one newspaper editorial reminded him of what happened to Justice Samuel Chase. (For those not carefully reading our Closer Looks, Chase was impeached).
Before his death in 1826, Todd reportedly wanted Trimble to succeed him. President John Quincy Adams nominated Trimble in April 1826, in what was his only appointment to the court. Kentucky Sen. John Rowan led what Henry Clay described as “a violent opposition” to the nomination (Rowan and Trimble had a “personal feud” and “long standing difference of opinion”), but the Senate still confirmed Trimble – making him the first lower federal court judge to rise to a Supreme Court justice.
Trimble’s debut opinion, Montgomery v. Hernandez, arose from a Louisiana suit over a federal marshal’s bond. The marshal had failed to pay $3,126 from the court-ordered sale of a sailing ship. Trimble wrote that the court’s authority to review state court decisions “is very special and limited in its character,” adding that “[i]t is not every misconstruction of an act of Congress by a state court that will give this Court appellate jurisdiction” – effectively holding that a party had to specifically claim a right under federal law and have the state court rule against it.
What many consider to be his “best” and “ablest” opinion came the same term in Ogden v. Saunders, which asked whether a New York insolvency law could cancel debts from after the law’s passage. Trimble joined Justices Washington, William Johnson, and Thompson in holding that it could, while Marshall and Justices Joseph Story and Gabriel Duvall dissented. Writing separately (the justices issued “seriatim” opinions at the time), Trimble argued that a contract and its “obligation” were distinct. If the two terms meant the same thing, he wrote, the contracts clause would prevent laws hindering “the obligation of obligations,” which he contended would attribute to the framers “a useless and palpably absurd tautology.” In other words, according to Trimble, a contract’s binding force came from the law of the state where it was made, so a state could set the terms for future agreements (in contrast to contracts drawing their force from “universal law”). The decision “clarified state authority” by allowing states to pass their own bankruptcy and insolvency laws. Since Trimble generally sided with Marshall in favor of federal authority over the states, the vote was somewhat unusual for him.
After the 1828 term, Trimble returned to Kentucky, where a “bilious fever” he apparently had as a child recurred. He died in August 1828 at age 51 and was replaced on the bench by Justice John McLean. Story wrote that had Trimble lived another 10 years, “he would have gained a still higher rank.” Trimble County, Kentucky, was established in 1837 and named for him, as was a World War II ship, the SS Robert Trimble. As one historian concluded, Trimble’s two years on the court “produced much and promised even more.”
