Oliver Ellsworth

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Oliver Ellsworth
Portrait by Ralph Earl, 1785
3rd Chief Justice of the United States
In office March 8, 1796 – December 15, 1800
Nominated by	George Washington
Preceded by	John Rutledge
Succeeded by	John Marshall
United States Senator from Connecticut
In office March 4, 1789 – March 8, 1796
Preceded by	Seat established
Succeeded by	James Hillhouse
Personal details
Born	(1745-04-29)April 29, 1745 Lieutenant Colonel
Unit	3rd Connecticut Regiment
Battles/wars	American Revolutionary War

Oliver Ellsworth (April 29, 1745 – November 26, 1807) was a

His influence helped ensure that Connecticut ratified the Constitution, and he was elected as one of Connecticut's inaugural pair of senators, serving from 1789 to 1796. He was the chief author of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which shaped the federal judiciary of the United States and established the Supreme Court's power to overturn state supreme court decisions that were contrary to the United States Constitution. Ellsworth served as a key Senate ally to Alexander Hamilton and aligned with the Federalist Party. He led the Senate passage of Hamiltonian proposals such as the Funding Act of 1790 and the Bank Bill of 1791. He also advocated in favor of the United States Bill of Rights and the Jay Treaty.

In 1796, after the Senate rejected the nomination of John Rutledge to serve as Chief Justice, President George Washington nominated Ellsworth to the position. Ellsworth was unanimously confirmed by the Senate, and served until 1800, when he resigned due to poor health. Few cases came before the Ellsworth Court, and he is chiefly remembered for his discouragement of the previous practice of seriatim opinion writing. He simultaneously served as an envoy to France from 1799 to 1800, signing the Convention of 1800 to settle the hostilities of the Quasi-War. He was succeeded as chief justice by John Marshall. He subsequently served on the Connecticut Governor's Council until his death in 1807.

Ellsworth was born in Windsor, Connecticut, to Capt. David and Jemima (née Leavitt) Ellsworth.^[1]

Ellsworth's ancestors had lived in Windsor since the middle of the 17th century.^[2] Josiah Ellsworth, Oliver's great-grandfather, was born in about 1629 in Cambridgeshire, England. Josiah immigrated to Connecticut in 1646, although it is unclear if he did this on his own, he married a woman born in Massachusetts named Elizabeth Holcombe. Josiah's occupation is listed as "juror". He would pass away in 1689.^[3] Ellsworth's maternal grandmother's maternal grandfather (his great-great grandfather) was Lieutenant Daniel Pond. He was born in England in the 1620s or 1630s. He immigrated to Dedham, Massachusetts in the early 1650s, where he worked as a carpenter and a long-time selectman to support his growing family. He was in a militia, which is why he has the title of "Lieutenant". He passed away in 1697 or 1698.^[4][5][6] Beyond this, Ellsworth's ancestry can also be traced to Edward Heath, a collarmaker who was born in 1525 in Little Amwell, Hertfordshire, England (a settlement near Ware).^[7]

Ellsworth entered

In 1772, Ellsworth married Abigail Wolcott, the daughter of Abigail Abbot and William Wolcott,

Commissioned as a captain of the 3rd Connecticut Regiment of the Connecticut militia in 1773, Ellsworth was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1774 and led three regiments of light cavalry supporting the Continental Army in New York during the summer of 1776.^{[11][12][13][14]}

Ellsworth built up a prosperous law practice and in 1777 he became Connecticut's state attorney for

Ellsworth participated in the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as a delegate from Connecticut along with Roger Sherman and William Samuel Johnson. More than half of the 55 delegates were lawyers, eight of whom, including both Ellsworth and Sherman, had previous experience as judges conversant with legal discourse.

Ellsworth took an active part in the proceedings beginning on June 20, when he proposed the use of "the United States" to identify the government under the authority of the Constitution. The words "United States" had already been used in the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation as well as Thomas Paine's The American Crisis. It was Ellsworth's proposal to retain the earlier wording to sustain the emphasis on a federation rather than a single national entity. Three weeks earlier, on May 30, 1787, Edmund Randolph of Virginia had moved to create a "national government" consisting of a supreme legislative, an executive, and a judiciary. Ellsworth accepted Randolph's notion of a threefold division but moved to strike the phrase "national government." Since then, the "United States" has been the official title used in the Convention to designate the government. The complete name, "the United States of America," had already been featured by Paine, and its inclusion in the Constitution was the work of Gouverneur Morris when he made the final editorial changes in the Constitution.

Ellsworth played a major role in the adoption of the

Along with James Wilson, John Rutledge, Edmund Randolph, and Nathaniel Gorham, Ellsworth served on the Committee of Detail, which prepared the first draft of the Constitution, based on resolutions that had already been passed by the Convention. The Convention deliberations were interrupted from July 26 to August 6, 1787 while the committee completed its task.

Though Ellsworth left the Convention near the end of August and did not sign the complete final document, he wrote the Letters of a Landholder to promote its ratification. He also played a dominant role in Connecticut's 1788 ratification convention, when he emphasized that judicial review guaranteed federal sovereignty. It seems more than a coincidence that both he and Wilson served as members of the Committee of Detail without mentioning judicial review in the initial draft of the Constitution but then stressed its central importance at their ratifying conventions just a year preceding its inclusion by Ellsworth in the Judiciary Act of 1789.^{[citation needed]}

Along with William Samuel Johnson, Ellsworth served as one of Connecticut's first two United States senators in the new federal government. He identified with the emerging

Once the Judiciary Act was adopted by the Senate, Ellsworth sponsored the Senate's acceptance of the Bill of Rights promoted by Madison in the House of Representatives. Significantly, Madison sponsored the Judiciary Act in the House at the same time. Combined, the Judiciary Act and Bill of Rights gave the Constitution the "teeth" that had been missing in the Articles of Confederation. Judicial Review guaranteed the federal government's sovereignty, whereas the Bill of Rights guaranteed the protection of states and citizens from the misuse of this sovereignty by the federal government. The Judiciary Act and Bill of Rights thus counterbalanced each other, each guaranteeing respite from the excesses of the other. However, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1865, seventy-five years later, the Bill of Rights could be brought to bear at all levels of government as interpreted by the judiciary with final appeal to the Supreme Court. Needless to say, this had not been the original intention of either Madison or Ellsworth.

Ellsworth was the principal supporter in the Senate of

On March 3, 1796, Ellsworth was nominated by President George Washington to be Chief Justice of the United States, the seat having been vacated by John Jay. (Jay's replacement, John Rutledge, had been rejected by the Senate the previous December, and Washington's next nominee, William Cushing, had declined the office in February.). He quickly was confirmed by the United States Senate (21–1), and took the prescribed judicial oath on March 8, 1796.^[17][18]

No major cases came before the Supreme Court during Ellsworth's brief tenure as chief justice. However, four cases the Court issued rulings on were of lasting importance in American jurisprudence:

between two states.

Ellsworth's chief legacy as Chief Justice is his discouragement of the previous practice of seriatim opinion writing, in which each Justice wrote a separate opinion in the case and delivered that opinion from the bench. Ellsworth instead encouraged the consensus of the Court to be represented in a single written opinion, a practice which continues to the present day.^[19]

Ellsworth received 11

electoral college votes from three states in the 1796 presidential election. Those votes came at the expense of Thomas Pinckney, who as a result, lost the vice presidency to Thomas Jefferson.^[20]

Ellsworth is perhaps most notable for administering the oath of office to John Adams during his presidential inauguration on March 4, 1797.^[21]

President Adams appointed Ellsworth United States Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of

special envoy to France.^[22]

Later life and death

Though he retired from national public life upon his return to America in early 1801, he did remain somewhat active in state politics.^[23][24] He later served once more on the Connecticut Governor's Council, which he was on until his death.^[25] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1803.^[26]

Ellsworth died at his home in Windsor on November 26, 1807, at the age of 62. He is buried at the Palisado Cemetery, behind the First Church of Windsor.^[27]

Although the cause and manner of his death is largely unspecified, it is believed that his trips crossing the Atlantic Ocean damaged his health and that he never fully recovered, ultimately leading to his death in 1807.^[28]

Legacy

In 1847, John Calhoun praised Ellsworth as the first of three Founding Fathers (with Roger Sherman and William Paterson) who gave the United States "the best government instead of the worst and most intolerable on the earth."^[29]

In 1800, Ellsworth, Maine, was named in his honor.^[30]

John F. Kennedy authored the Encyclopædia Britannica's article on Ellsworth. This was Kennedy's only contribution to the Encyclopedia.^[31][32]

See also

• Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States
• List of justices of the Supreme Court of the United States
• List of United States chief justices by time in office
• List of United States Supreme Court justices by time in office
• United States Supreme Court cases during the Ellsworth Court

References

Books cited

• The Life of Oliver Ellsworth, William Garrott Brown, 1905 – repr. by Da Capo Press, 1970
• The Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth, William R. Casto, University of South Carolina Press, 1995
• Oliver Ellsworth and the Creation of the Federal Republic, William R. Casto, Second Circuit Committee on History and Commemorative Events, 1997
• The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. by Max Farrand, 4 vols., Yale University Press, 1911, 1966
• James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, James Brown Scott, Oxford University Press, 1918
• The United States of America: A study in International Organization, James Brown Scott, Oxford University Press, 1920.
• 1787 Constitutional Convention: The First Senate of the United States 1789–1795, Richard Streb, Bronx Historical Society, 1996
• Connecticut Families of the Revolution, American Forebears from Burr to Wolcott, Mark Allen Baker, The History Press, 2014

Further reading

• Abraham, Henry J. (1992). Justices and Presidents: A Political History of Appointments to the Supreme Court (3rd ed.). Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press.
  ISBN 0-19-506557-3
  .
• Buchanan, James M., Oliver Ellsworth, Third Chief Justice, Journal of Supreme Court History: 1991, Supreme Court Historical Society.
• Cushman, Clare (2001). The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789–1995 (2nd ed.). (Supreme Court Historical Society,
  ISBN 1-56802-126-7
  .
• Flanders, Henry. The Lives and Times of the Chief Justices of the United States Supreme Court Archived July 27, 2020, at the Wayback Machine. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1874 at Google Books.
• Frank, John P. (1995). Friedman, Leon; Israel, Fred L. (eds.). The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions. Chelsea House Publishers.
  ISBN 0-7910-1377-4
  .
• Hall, Kermit L., ed. (1992). The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press.
  ISBN 0-19-505835-6
  .
• Martin, Fenton S.; Goehlert, Robert U. (1990). The U.S. Supreme Court: A Bibliography. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Books.
  ISBN 0-87187-554-3
  .
• Urofsky, Melvin I. (1994). The Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary. New York:
  ISBN 0-8153-1176-1
  .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Oliver Ellsworth.

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Oliver Ellsworth

• Oliver Ellsworth at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a publication of the Federal Judicial Center.
• United States Congress. "Oliver Ellsworth (id: E000147)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• Oliver Ellsworth at Michael Ariens.com.
• National Archives biography
• Oliver Ellsworth Homestead
• Princeton Companion: Oliver Ellsworth
• The Ellsworth Court at Supreme Court Historical Society.

U.S. Senate
Preceded by New seat	U.S. senator (Class 1) from Connecticut 1789–1796 Served alongside: William Johnson, Roger Sherman, Stephen Mitchell, Jonathan Trumbull	Succeeded by James Hillhouse
Legal offices
Preceded by John Rutledge	Chief Justice of the Supreme Court 1796–1800	Succeeded by John Marshall