Noah Haynes Swayne

Supreme Court service John McLean was one of two dissenters in the Dred Scott case. He sought the Republican nomination for President in 1860, losing to Abraham Lincoln. However, he recommended to Lincoln on a number of occasions that Swayne be nominated to replace him on the court. This proved timely; McLean died in April 1861, shortly after Lincoln's inauguration. As the American Civil War began, Swayne campaigned for the vacant seat, lobbying several Ohio members of Congress for their support. As the Oyez Project notes: "Swayne satisfied Lincoln's criteria for appointment: commitment to the Union, slavery opponent, geographically correct."

It is also believed that Swayne had represented fugitive slaves in court. So nine months after McLean's death, Swayne was nominated, on January 21, 1862. The nomination was confirmed by the United States Senate on January 24, 1862, with Swayne receiving his commission the same day. Three days later, on January 27, he took the judicial oath, thereby becoming the 35th justice of the Supreme Court.

In the Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873) – a pivotal decision on the meaning of Section 1 of the relatively new Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution—Swayne dissented with justices Salmon P. Chase, Stephen Johnson Field, and Joseph Bradley. Field's dissent was important, and presaged later decisions broadening the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, four years later Swayne joined the majority in Munn v. Illinois, with Field still dissenting. His main distinction was his staunch judicial support of the president's war measures: the Union blockade (Prize Cases, 67 U.S. 635 (1862)); issuance of paper money (i.e., greenbacks in the Legal Tender Cases); and support for the presidential prerogative to declare martial law (Ex Parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866)).

He is most famous for his majority opinion in Springer v. United States, 102 U.S. 586 (1881), which upheld the Federal income tax imposed under the Revenue Act of 1864.

In Gelpcke v. City of Dubuque, 68 U.S. 175 (1864), Swayne wrote the majority opinion, repudiating a claim that the Iowa constitution could impair legal obligations to bondholders. When contracts are made on the basis of trust in past judicial decisions those contracts could not be impaired by any subsequent construction of the law. "We shall never immolate truth, justice, and the law, because a state tribunal has erected the altar and decreed the sacrifice." According to Lurie, he strongly supported "the contractual rights of railroad bond holders, even in the face of repudiation sanctioned both by the Iowa state legislature and state supreme court. Obligations sacred to law are not to be destroyed simply because 'a state tribunal has erected the altar and decreed the sacrifice.'"

Another of Justice Swayne's sons, Noah Swayne, was a lawyer in Toledo and donated the land for Swayne Field, the former field for the Toledo Mud Hens baseball team.

After his death in 1884, Justice Swayne is buried at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Chief Justice Edward Douglass White and justice-designate Edwin M. Stanton (President Ulysses S. Grant's nomination of Stanton was confirmed by the Senate, but Stanton died before he could be sworn in) are also buried there.

A collection of Swayne's legal papers, pre-dating his service as a Justice, is housed at the Ohio Historical Society, and correspondence with him is also located at other repositories.