Howell Edmunds Jackson

Howell Edmunds Jackson lived from April 8, 1832 to August 8, 1895 and was an American attorney, politician and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1893 until his death in 1895. His brief tenure is remembered chiefly for his dissenting opinion in Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust Co., in which he argued that a federal income tax was constitutional. Republican President Benjamin Harrison appointed Jackson, a Democrat, to the Court after the death of Justice Lucius Q. C. Lamar, wanting a well regarded, friendly replacement he could get confirmed before Democratic senators could stall past the end of his own term; the Senate unanimously confirmed Jackson just before Harrison left office in 1893. Born in Paris, Tennessee, Jackson earned a law degree from Cumberland Law School, was admitted to the bar in 1856, and after the Civil War, in which he had initially opposed secession but took a position in the Confederate civil service, returned to legal practice before an unsuccessful run for the Tennessee Supreme Court and election to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1880; when the legislature deadlocked over a United States Senate seat he emerged as a bipartisan consensus candidate, and President Grover Cleveland later appointed him to the federal circuit court for the Sixth Circuit. Shortly after assuming his Supreme Court seat Jackson developed tuberculosis, authored only forty six opinions, many in patent disputes and other minor cases, and though he left Washington hoping a better climate would help his health, he returned after the other eight justices split 4 to 4 in Pollock and ended up casting the deciding dissenting vote in that landmark income tax case; he died on August 8, 1895, only eleven weeks after the ruling was handed down.