Oliver Ellsworth

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Oliver Ellsworth (April 29, 1745 – November 26, 1807) was an American lawyer, judge, and diplomat.

He was a framer of the United States Constitution, a Connecticut senator from Connecticut, and the third Chief Justice of the United States.

In addition, Ellsworth gained 11 electoral votes in the 1796 presidential election. Ellsworth, a born in Windsor, Connecticut, attended the College of New Jersey, where he helped found the American Whig-Cliosophic Society.

He became the state attorney for Hartford County, Connecticut, in 1777, and was elected a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1777, during the American Revolutionary War.

During the 1780s, he served as a state judge and was named as a delegate to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, which established the United States Constitution.

Ellsworth, who was at the convention, was instrumental in the establishment of the Connecticut Compromise between the more populated states and the less populated states.

He served on the Committee of Detail, which drafted the first draft of the Constitution, but before signing the charter, he left the convention. His influence made sure Connecticut ratified the Constitution, and he was elected as one of Connecticut's first two senators, from 1789 to 1796.

He was the author of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which influenced the federal judiciary of the United States and established the Supreme Court's ability to reverse state supreme court decisions that were in violation of the United States Constitution.

Ellsworth served as a key Senate aide to Alexander Hamilton and allied with the Federalist Party.

He influenced the introduction of Hamiltonian bills including the Funding Act of 1790 and the Bank Bill of 1791.

He also endorsed the United States Bill of Rights and the Jay Treaty. President George Washington nominated Ellsworth to the position in 1796, after the Senate denied John Rutledge's nomination to serve as Chief Justice.

Ellsworth was unanimously confirmed by the Senate and served until 1800, when he resigned due to poor health.

Few cases appeared before the Ellsworth Court, and he is primarily remembered for his scathing of seriatim opinion writing, which has long been popular.

He served from 1799 to 1800, and then signed the Quasi-War treaty to resolve the hostilities of the Quasi War.

John Marshall succeeded him as the chief justice.

He served on the Connecticut Governor's Council until his death in 1807.

Youth and family life

Ellsworth was born in Windsor, Connecticut, to Capt. Jemima and Jemima Ellsworth (née Leavitt) Ellsworth. He graduated Yale in 1762 but later joined the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) at the University of New Jersey in his second year. He founded the "Well Meaning Club" with William Paterson and Luther Martin (both of whom attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787), which later became the Cliosophic Society, and now part of Whig-Clio, the country's oldest college debating club. He obtained his A.B. Phi Beta Kappa, a degree obtained in 1766, after two years. Ellsworth was converted to the statute shortly afterward. He was admitted to the bar in 1771 and later became a respected advocate and politician after four years of study.

Ellsworth married Abigail Wolcott, the niece of Connecticut colonial governor Roger Wolcott, and granddaughter Abiah Hawley and William Wolcott of East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1772. They had nine children, including twin William Wolcott Ellsworth, who married Noah Webster's daughter and became Connecticut governor; and Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, who became Connecticut's first commissioner; and a major benefactor of Yale College. Oliver Ellsworth was the grandfather of Henry L. Ellsworth's son Henry W. Ellsworth.

Supreme Court and later life

Ellsworth was nominated by President George Washington to be the Chief Justice of the United States on March 3, 1796, but the position had been vacant by John Jay. (Jay's replacement, John Rutledge, had been refused by the Senate in December the previous year, and Washington's next contender, William Cushing, had declined the post in February.) He was confirmed by the United States Senate (21–1) immediately and took the prescribed judicial oath on March 8, 1796.

During Ellsworth's brief tenure as the Supreme Court, no significant cases were heard before the Supreme Court. However, four cases where the Supreme Court had no formal involvement in maintaining a federal carriage levy were treated implicitly; Hollingsworth vs. Virginia (1796), the first use by the Court of the Constitution in a civil, not civil, context; and New York vs. Connecticut (1799), the first time the court heard controversies between two states' Supreme Courts under Article III of the United States Constitution, triggered disputes between two states.

Ellsworth's greatest legacy as Chief Justice is his dissatisfaction with the old school of seriatim opinion writing, in which each Justice wrote a separate opinion and delivered the court's decision. Ellsworth instead encouraged the Court's consensus to be represented in a single written opinion, a tradition that continues to this day.

In the 1796 presidential election, Ellsworth received 11 electoral college votes from three states. Thomas Pinckney, who as a result of this loss of the vice presidency to Thomas Jefferson, was voted in favor of Thomas Jefferson.

In 1799, President Adams sent Ellsworth United States Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of France, whose job was to resolve differences with Napoleon's government over US shipping limits that might have resulted in military conflict between the two countries. The deal that was accepted by Ellsworth sparked indignation among Americans for being too generous to Napoleon. In addition, Ellsworth died from a serious illness resulting from his travel across the Atlantic, causing him to resign from the court in late 1800, while still in Europe.

Despite being barred from national service following his return to America in early 1801, he served on the Connecticut Governor's Council for a second time. In 1803, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ellsworth died in Windsor on November 26, 1807, at the age of 62. He is buried at the Palisado Cemetery, behind the First Church of Windsor.

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