Anatomy of a Presidential Campaign from the Supreme Court Bench: John McLean, Levi Woodbury, and the Election of 1848

Abstract

Imagine The Washington Post headline: “In the next presidential election, the most promising candidates for a nomination in­ clude Elena Kagan for the Democrats and Samuel Alito for the Republicans.” The idea sounds preposterous today, and yet, in the 1848 election, two associate justices of the Supreme Court, representing different par­ tisan constituencies, were front-runners for a presidential nomination: John McLean of Ohio and Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire. Nor was their experience unique: in the first one hundred years of the nation, nearly a quarter of Supreme Court justices considered or were considered for a presidential run, with candidates from every major political party. These presidential campaigns did not represent judicial corruption, nor were they simply about ambition or vanity; judges ran for president because enough Americans be­ lieved they would be good candidates. Polit­ ical leaders, partisan newspapers, and even other judges advocated for the benefits of particular justices as presidential nominees. In fact, the idea of a Supreme Court jus­ tice becoming president seemed completely unremarkable to politicos; political support­ ers treated judges the same way they did governors, congressmen, or cabinet members who ran for office. Party leaders traded daily letters analyzing, promoting, or detracting from the candidacies of these men with only an occasional reference to their positions on the Bench. A few noted modest hesitation about a judge’s impartiality, but the vast majority of partisans expressed no concern about the idea of a Supreme Court justice as a presidential candidate. The sheer ordinariness of running a Supreme Court justice for president was representative of how Americans understood