11/03/2003

Even Lincoln's individual Supreme Court justices are now getting biographies. This looks interesting:

Lincoln's sole criterion when choosing new justices, however, was whether they would uphold his vigorous assertion of extraordinary war powers...

He was therefore not aware that his nominee, Samuel Miller, was the "melancholy legal voice of a lost Republicanism" one that functioned as an "anti-bond warrior." To Miller (and his strain of Republicanism) bondholders were "parasites" and the moral equivalent of slaveholders.

What would Salmon Chase and Jay Cook have thought of that?