Oliver Ellsworth
Oliver Ellsworth was a Founding Father of the United States, attorney, jurist, politician, and diplomat. Ellsworth was a framer of the United States Constitution, United States senator from Connecticut, and the third chief justice of the United States. Additionally, he received 11 electoral votes in the 1796 presidential election.
Born in Windsor, Connecticut, Ellsworth attended the College of New Jersey where he helped found the American Whig–Cliosophic Society. In 1777, he became the state attorney for Hartford County, Connecticut, and was selected as a delegate to the Continental Congress, serving during the remainder of the American Revolutionary War. He served as a state judge during the 1780s and was selected as a delegate to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, which produced the United States Constitution. While at the convention, Ellsworth played a role in fashioning the Connecticut Compromise between the more populous states and the less populous states. He also served on the Committee of Detail, which prepared the first draft of the Constitution, but he left the convention and did not sign the document.
His influence helped ensure that Connecticut ratified the Constitution, and he was elected as one of Connecticut's inaugural pair of senators, serving from 1789 to 1796. He was the chief author of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which shaped the federal judiciary of the United States and established the Supreme Court's power to overturn state supreme court decisions that were contrary to the United States Constitution. Ellsworth served as a key Senate ally to Alexander Hamilton and aligned with the Federalist Party. He led the Senate passage of Hamiltonian proposals such as the Funding Act of 1790 and the Bank Bill of 1791. He also advocated in favor of the United States Bill of Rights and the Jay Treaty.
In 1796, after the Senate rejected the nomination of John Rutledge to serve as Chief Justice, President George Washington nominated Ellsworth to the position. Ellsworth was near-unanimously confirmed by the Senate, and served until 1800, when he resigned due to poor health. Few cases came before the Ellsworth Court, and he is chiefly remembered for his discouragement of the previous practice of seriatim opinion writing. He simultaneously served as an envoy to France from 1799 to 1800, signing the Convention of 1800 to settle the hostilities of the Quasi-War. He was succeeded as chief justice by John Marshall. He subsequently served on the Connecticut Governor's Council until his death in 1807.
Youth and family life
Ellsworth was born in Windsor, Connecticut, to Capt. David and Jemima Ellsworth.Ellsworth's ancestors had lived in Windsor since the middle of the 17th century. Josiah Ellsworth, Oliver's great-grandfather, was born in about 1629 in Cambridgeshire, England. Josiah immigrated to Connecticut in 1646, although it is unclear if he did this on his own, he married a woman born in Massachusetts named Elizabeth Holcombe. Josiah's occupation is listed as "juror". He would pass away in 1689. Ellsworth's maternal grandmother's maternal grandfather was Lieutenant Daniel Pond. He was born in England in the 1620s or 1630s. He immigrated to Dedham, Massachusetts in the early 1650s, where he worked as a carpenter and a long-time selectman to support his growing family. He was in a militia, which is why he has the title of "Lieutenant". He died in 1697 or 1698. Beyond this, Ellsworth's ancestry can also be traced to Edward Heath, a collarmaker who was born in 1525 in Little Amwell, Hertfordshire, England.
Ellsworth entered Yale in 1762, but transferred to the College of New Jersey at the end of his second year. Along with William Paterson and Luther Martin he founded the "Well Meaning Club," which became the Cliosophic Society—now part of Whig-Clio, the nation's oldest college debating club. He received his A.B. degree in 1766, Phi Beta Kappa after 2 years. Soon afterward, Ellsworth turned to the law. After four years of study, he was admitted to the bar in 1771 and later became a successful lawyer and politician.
In 1772, Ellsworth married Abigail Wolcott, the daughter of Abigail Abbot and William Wolcott, nephew of Connecticut colonial governor Roger Wolcott, and granddaughter of Abiah Hawley and William Wolcott of East Windsor, Connecticut.
They had nine children including the twin brothers William Wolcott Ellsworth and Henry Leavitt Ellsworth. William married Noah Webster's daughter, served in Congress and was elected Governor of Connecticut. Henry became the first Commissioner of the United States Patent Office, the mayor of Hartford, president of Aetna Life Insurance and a major benefactor of Yale College. Henry was also instrumental in the creation of the U.S. Agriculture Department and oversaw the forced relocation of Cherokee Indians from Georgia to the Oklahoma Territory. He was a friend and backer of inventors Samuel Colt and Samuel F.B. Morse, and his daughter Annie Ellsworth proposed the first message transmitted by Morse over the telegraph, "What hath God wrought?"
Revolutionary War
Commissioned as a captain of the 3rd Connecticut Regiment of the Connecticut militia in 1773, Ellsworth was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1774 and led three regiments of light cavalry supporting the Continental Army in New York during the summer of 1776.Ellsworth built up a prosperous law practice and in 1777 he became Connecticut's state attorney for Hartford County. That same year, he was chosen as one of Connecticut's representatives in the Continental Congress. He served 1777–80 and 1781–83 on various committees, including the Marine Committee, the Board of Treasury, and the Committee of Appeals. Ellsworth was also active in his state's efforts during the Revolution, having served as a member of the Committee of the Pay Table that supervised Connecticut's war expenditures. In 1777 he joined the Committee of Appeals, which can be described as a forerunner of the Federal Supreme Court. While serving on it, he participated in the Olmstead case that brought state and federal authority into conflict. In 1779, he assumed greater duties as a member of the Council of Safety, which, with the governor, controlled all military measures for the state. His first judicial service was on the Supreme Court of Errors when it was established in 1785, but he soon shifted to the Connecticut Superior Court and spent four years on its bench.
Constitutional Convention
Ellsworth participated in the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as a delegate from Connecticut along with Roger Sherman and William Samuel Johnson. More than half of the 55 delegates were lawyers, eight of whom, including both Ellsworth and Sherman, had previous experience as judges conversant with legal discourse.Ellsworth took an active part in the proceedings beginning on June 20, when he proposed the use of "the United States" to identify the government under the authority of the Constitution. The words "United States" had already been used in the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation as well as Thomas Paine's The American Crisis. It was Ellsworth's proposal to retain the earlier wording to sustain the emphasis on a federation rather than a single national entity. Three weeks earlier, on May 30, 1787, Edmund Randolph of Virginia had moved to create a "national government" consisting of a supreme legislative, an executive, and a judiciary. Ellsworth accepted Randolph's notion of a threefold division but moved to strike the phrase "national government." Since then, the "United States" has been the official title used in the convention to designate the government. The complete name, "the United States of America," had already been featured by Paine, and its inclusion in the Constitution was the work of Gouverneur Morris when he made the final editorial changes in the Constitution.
Ellsworth played a major role in the adoption of the Connecticut Compromise. The convention was deadlocked over the question of representation in Congress, with the large states wanting proportional representation and the small states demanding equal representation for each state. During the debate, he joined his fellow Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman in proposing the bicameral Congress in which two members of the Senate would be elected by each state legislature, while membership in the House of Representatives would be apportioned among the states based on its share of the whole population of the states. The compromise was adopted by the Convention on July 16, 1787.
On the contentious issue of whether slaves would be counted as part of the population in determining representation of the states in Congress or would instead be considered property and so not be counted, Ellsworth voted for the eventual Three-Fifths Compromise. Later, stressing that he had no slaves, Ellsworth spoke twice before the convention, on August 21 and 22, in favor of slavery being abolished. He also played an important role in keeping the concept of judicial review out of the Constitution.
Along with James Wilson, John Rutledge, Edmund Randolph, and Nathaniel Gorham, Ellsworth served on the Committee of Detail, which prepared the first draft of the Constitution, based on resolutions that had already been passed by the convention. The Convention deliberations were interrupted from July 26 to August 6, 1787, while the committee completed its task.
Though Ellsworth left the Convention near the end of August and did not sign the complete final document, he wrote the Letters of a Landholder to promote its ratification. He also played a dominant role in Connecticut's 1788 ratification convention, when he emphasized that judicial review guaranteed federal sovereignty. It seems more than a coincidence that both he and Wilson served as members of the Committee of Detail without mentioning judicial review in the initial draft of the Constitution but then stressed its central importance at their ratifying conventions just a year preceding its inclusion by Ellsworth in the Judiciary Act of 1789.