Judge Black
In the years after the Civil War, few figures wielded more influence in Washington than Jeremiah Sullivan Black.
He was known as “Judge Black” for his tenure on the bench in Pennsylvania, but the moniker would have been appropriate even if he had never wielded a gavel.
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Jeremiah S. Black. Library of Congress photo.
Tall, stern, and given to lacing his rhetoric with Biblical quotations, Black radiated gravitas and moved comfortably in the rough-and-tumble political world of post-Civil War Washington. A partisan Democrat who had served in the Cabinet of James Buchanan, Black counted friends on both sides of the aisle – including rising House Republican star James A. Garfield of Ohio.
Black and Garfield were both members of the Protestant Campbellite denomination (today known as the Christian Church – Disciples of Christ). Together, they made their mark in civil liberties law by successfully representing Indiana copperhead Lambden P. Milligan before the Supreme Court in a case that established the supremacy of civilian courts over military tribunals.
In 1868, Black had another client – Henry S. McComb, who was suing Oakes Ames over the distribution of Credit Mobilier stock. The case put Black squarely in the middle of the biggest political scandal Washington would see for decades – and his fingerprints are all over the story.
Almost four years later, in the summer of 1872, McComb testified that Ames had sold Credit Mobilier stock to members of Congress on advantageous terms. McComb had a list of lawmakers Ames to whom Ames claimed to have sold the stock – and he had letters from Ames in which the congressman confided that he was placing the shares strategically to magnify the interests of Credit Mobilier’s parent company, the Union Pacific railroad.
Black was behind the leak of this explosive testimony to Albert M. Gibson of the New York Sun. He advised Garfield as to his political and legal exposure after the Ohioan was linked publicly to the scandal. He sat in as the committee formed to investigate the stock sales held its initial meetings behind closed doors. When that committee rendered its judgment – that Ames should be expelled for selling the shares to his colleagues while the lawmakers who bought the stock were innocent of wrongdoing – it echoed the assessment made confidentially by Black to Garfield in the earliest days of the controversy.
Although there is reason to believe that Black’s zealous advocacy made McComb occasionally uncomfortable, the Delaware-born railroad speculator had nothing but praise for his attorney. At one point he dubbed Black the “noblest Roman of them all!”
Ames and his allies would no doubt have agreed with this sentiment, albeit for entirely different reasons. McComb surely intended to be complimentary, but the phrase, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, describes the leading conspirator in the killing of the Roman dictator. The Credit Mobilier scandal, Ames and his supporters believed, amounted to nothing more than character assassination.
Read more about Jeremiah Black, Henry S. McComb, Oakes Ames and others in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, by Robert B. Mitchell. Coming this fall from Edinborough Press.
