Justice Peter Vivian Daniel
Today’s Justice of the Day is: PETER VIVIAN DANIEL. Justice Daniel was born on this day, April 24, in 1784.
Justice Daniel was born in Stafford County, Virginia, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He attended Princeton University, though he never graduated.
Justice Daniel worked in private practice in Richmond, Virginia in 1808, before starting a three year-long term as a Member of the Virginia House of Delegates the following year. He became a Member of the Virginia Privy Council in 1812, and began serving as Lieutenant Governor of Virginia in 1818, before leaving both positions the year before he was appointed by President Andrew Jackson to be a Judge (replacing the man who he would later succeed as a member of the SCUS) of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (which the United States Senate would confirm), where he would ultimately remain until his elevation to the Supreme Court.
Justice Daniel was nominated by President Martin Van Buren on February 26, 1841, to a seat vacated by Justice Philip Pendleton Barbour. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on March 2, and received his commission the following day. Justice Daniel took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on or around January 10, 1842, and served out his entire tenure on the Taney Court. His service was terminated on May 31, 1860, due to his death.
Justice Daniel is not particularly well-remembered today, like nearly every Member of the SCUS from the 19th century. His most famous act likely is, regrettably, his decision to join the odious opinion of the Court in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), wherein a nearly-unanimous SCUS tried to effectively forestall the then-coming Civil War by resolving just about every single slavery question in favor of the South, threatening the abolitionist principles of not just the nation’s then-newest territories, but also those of the North itself.