Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

passing the Judiciary Act of 180120 in February. If Jefferson or Burr prevailed, who knew when the Federalist interest might again have the power to act? Taking advantage of the hour, then, the Congress approved, and President Adams signed, a bill that increased the number of federal judicial officers, strengthened and expanded the circuit courts, and reduced the number of Supreme Court justices from six to five, thus depriving any Republican president of at least one appointment. “The Judiciary bill has been crammed down our throats without a word or letter being suffered to be altered,” wrote Senator Stevens Thomson Mason of Virginia, a Republican.21 Jefferson believed the law, coming so late in Adams’s term, was a “parasitical plant engrafted at the last session on the judiciary body” and that the Federalist appointees to the new positions had “retired into the judiciary as a stronghold … and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased.”22,23 Such appointees became colloquially known as Adams’s “midnight judges,” and there were “midnight appointments” to lesser offices as well.24