Henry Billings Brown


Henry Billings Brown was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 29 December 1890 to 28 May 1906. A respected lawyer and U.S. District Judge in Detroit, Michigan, before ascending to the high court, Brown authored hundreds of opinions in his 31 years as a federal judge, including the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which upheld the legality of racial segregation in public transportation and implicitly provided approval for the system of Jim Crow laws until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Early career

Family and education

Brown was born in South Lee, Massachusetts, the son of Mary Tyler and Billings Brown, and grew up in Massachusetts and Connecticut. His was a New England merchant family. He attended Monson Academy, Monson, MA and entered Yale College at 16. There he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and was elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree there in 1856. Among his undergraduate classmates were Chauncey Depew, later a U.S. Senator from New York, and David Josiah Brewer, who became Brown's colleague on the Supreme Court. Depew roomed across the hall from Brown for three years in Old North Middle Hall, and remembered "a feminine quality which led to his being called Henrietta, though there never was a more robust, courageous and decided man in meeting the problems of life" After a yearlong tour of Europe, Brown studied law with Judge John H. Brockway in Ellington, Connecticut, but his refusal to participate in a local religious revival made life there unpleasant for him. He left Ellington to pursue legal studies, with a year at Yale Law School, and a semester at Harvard Law School.

Legal activities in Detroit

Admitted to the Michigan Bar in 1860, Brown's early law practice was in Detroit, Michigan, where he specialized in admiralty law as it applied to shipping on the Great Lakes. In addition to his private law practice, at times between 1861 and 1868 Brown served as Deputy U.S. Marshal, Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, and to fill an opening was appointed judge of the Wayne County Circuit Court in Detroit, although he only served briefly in that position and lost an election for a full term. He then became a partner specializing in admiralty law in the firm of Newberry, Pond & Brown, and practiced there for seven years. In 1872 Brown failed in an attempt to win the Republican nomination for a congressional seat.

Personal life

In 1864, Brown married Caroline Pitts, the daughter of a wealthy Michigan lumber merchant. They had no children. He did not serve in the Union Army during the Civil War, but like many well-to-do men instead hired a substitute soldier to take his place.
Brown kept diaries from his college days until his appointment as a federal judge in 1875. Now held in the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library, they suggest that he was both genial and ambitious, but also depressed and doubtful about himself. As a child Brown attended his family's Congregational Church, and when married to his first wife he accompanied her to a Presbyterian Church, but he was generally uninterested in religious matters.

Federal judicial service

District court service

Appointment

The death of Brown's father-in-law left Brown and his wife financially independent, so he was willing to accept the relatively low salary of a federal judge. On 17 March 1875 Brown was nominated by President Ulysses Grant to a seat on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan left vacant by the death of John Wesley Longyear. Brown was confirmed by the United States Senate two days later and immediately received his commission.

Publishing and teaching

Brown edited a collection of rulings and orders in important admiralty cases from inland waters, and later compiled a case book on admiralty law for lectures at Georgetown University. He also taught admiralty law classes at the University of Michigan Law School from 1860 to 1875, and medical jurisprudence at the Detroit Medical College from 1868 to 1871. Brown received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan in 1887, and from Yale University in 1891.

Supreme Court

Appointment

After lobbying by Brown and by the Michigan congressional delegation, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Brown, a Republican, to the Supreme Court of the United States on 23 December 1890, to a seat vacated due to the death of Justice Samuel F. Miller. Brown was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on 29 December 1890, and received his commission the same day. In an autobiographical essay, Brown commented "While I had been much attached to Detroit and its people, there was much to compensate me in my new sphere of activity. If the duties of the new office were not so congenial to my taste as those of district judge, it was a position of far more dignity, was better paid and was infinitely more gratifying to one's ambition."

Jurisprudence

As a jurist, Brown was generally against government intervention in business, and joined the majority opinion in Lochner v. New York striking down a limitation on maximum working hours. He did, however, support the federal income tax in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., and wrote for the Court in Holden v. Hardy, upholding a Utah law restricting male miners to an eight-hour day.
''Plessy v. Ferguson''
Brown is best known, and widely criticized, for the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which he wrote the majority opinion upholding the principle and legitimacy of "separate but equal" facilities for American blacks and whites. In his opinion, Brown argued that the recognition of racial difference did not necessarily violate constitutional principle. As long as equal facilities and services were available to all citizens, the "commingling of the two races" need not be enforced. Plessy, which provided legal support for the system of Jim Crow Laws, was effectively overruled by the Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. When issued, Plessy attracted relatively little attention, but in the late 20th century it came to be vilified, and Brown along with it.
Insular Cases
Justice Brown authored the Court's 1901 opinion in DeLima v. Bidwell and Downes v. Bidwell, two of the Insular Cases, considering the status of territories acquired by the U.S. in the Spanish–American War of 1898.
''Hale v. Henkel''
Brown expounded for the majority the powers accorded to the grand jury in Hale v. Henkel, a 1906 case where the defendant—a tobacco company executive—refused to testify to the grand jury on several grounds in a case based upon the Sherman Antitrust Act. This opinion, said to be among his best, was rendered 12 March 1906, only 10 weeks before his retirement.

Personal life in Washington, D.C.

In 1891 he paid $25,000 to the Riggs family for land at 1720 16th Street, NW, in Washington, D.C., hired architect William Henry Miller, and built a five-story, 18-room mansion for $40,000. He would live in this house, later known as the Toutorsky Mansion, until his death. Ironically—in light of Brown's racial attitudes—the house is now the embassy of the Republic of the Congo. Brown's wife Caroline died in 1901. Three years later, Brown married a close friend of hers, the widow Josephine E. Tyler, who survived him.

Retirement

Near the end of his years on the Court, Brown largely lost his eyesight. He retired from the Court on 28 May 1906 at the age of 70.

Death

Brown died of heart disease on 4 September 1913 at a hotel in Bronxville, New York. He is buried next to his first wife in Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit.

Legacy

Decisions concerning minority groups

Despite Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown as a judge did not invariably vote against the interests of minority litigants. For example, in Ward v. Race Horse Brown was the sole dissenter when the Court held that tribal hunting rights granted under an 1869 treaty with the Bannock Indians must yield to a state law prohibiting them. As to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Brown voted with the majority in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that a child born in the United States of Chinese parents was a U.S. citizen under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Brown also voted with the majority in Wong Wing v. United States, in holding that Chinese persons allegedly in the United States illegally may not be imprisoned at hard labor without a trial pending deportation. Even his Plessy decision, negative as it was, recognized the theoretical equality of African-Americans under the law with white persons.

Abilities

Brown has been remembered as "a capable and solid, if unimaginative, legal technician."
One of his friends offered the faint praise that Brown's life "shows how a man without perhaps extraordinary abilities may attain and honour the highest judicial position by industry, by good character, pleasant manners and some aid from fortune."

Liberty Ship

A Liberty ship named after him, the Henry B. Brown, was launched in 1943 and scrapped in 1965.

Brown's non-judicial bibliography