The Birthday of Eternity

John McLean, died April 4, 1861

"I contemplate the violence, bloodshed, and civil and fraternal war...with mingled emotions of sadness, alarm and mortification."

~ John McLean, 1856

John McLean died a week before the beginning of the Civil War.

Dred Scott

In the 1857 decision on Dred Scott v. Sandford, his strong dissenting views are believed to have forced the hand of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney into a harsher and more polarizing opinion than he originally planned. To the argument that "a colored citizen would not be an agreeable member of society", McLean responded, "This is more a matter of taste than of law."

Roger B. Taney

McLean, in his dissent to the decision, pointed out Taney's historical error: at the time of the Founding, several states had admitted free persons of the color to the suffrage, thereby recognizing them as citizens. Furthermore, being colored is not and has never been an inherent disqualifier for citizenship; after the Mexican War, the U. S. made citizens of "all grades, combinations, and colors."

According to McLean, neither the Constitution nor the Founders explicitly promoted slavery; rather, slavery was an institution imposed on the colonies by their mother country-and the Founders were careful to guard the Constitution's language against mentions of slavery. Justices McLean and Curtis argued, contra Taney, that every free person born on the soil of a state and who is a citizen of that state is also a citizen of the United States. Furthermore, they defended the Missouri Compromise's constitutionality; it was passed overwhelmingly by Congress and approved as constitutional by the President; until the Dred Scott decision, no one had thought of questioning its constitutionality-for that would also call into question the constitutionality of Congress's first act: the renewal of the Northwest Ordinance and its prohibition on slavery in the Northwest territories.

Because of his anti-slavery-extension positions, he was considered by the new Republican party as a candidate in 1856. Despite his efforts, the nomination went to John Fremont. In 1860, he tried again, winning twelve votes on the first ballot at the Republican convention in Chicago; Abraham Lincoln ultimately was nominated.

McLean was in good health until the last two years of his life, when illness sometimes kept him from the bench in both his circuit and on the Supreme Court. McLean served on the Supreme Court for nearly thirty-two years.

He took cold at the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln on March 4, 1861 and returned to Cincinnati. He died of pneumonia on April 4, 1861 at his residence in the Clifton neighborhood. He was 76 years old.

On April 6, more than 50 carriages gathered at the Cincinnati Court House and drove to his funeral in a pouring rain. He was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati.