[257] Ibid. 422-423. In Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, 1 Wheat. 304 (1816), Justice Story had traversed some of these same grounds. He, too, began with the general assumptions that the Constitution was established by the people of the United States and not by the States in their sovereign capacities, that the Constitution is to be construed liberally, and that the National Government is supreme in relation to its objects; and had concluded that the Supreme Court had authority to review State court decisions under the express provisions of articles III and VI, and also from the necessity that final decision must rest somewhere and from the importance and necessity of uniformity of decisions interpreting the Constitution. Many years later in Ableman v. Booth, 21 How. 506, 514-523 (1859), where the Wisconsin Supreme Court, like the Virginia Courts earlier, had declared an act of Congress invalid and disregarded a writ of error from the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Taney on grounds both of dual sovereignty and national supremacy was even more emphatic in his rebuke of State pretensions. His emphasis on the indispensability of the federal judicial power to maintain national supremacy, to protect the States from national encroachments, and to make the Constitution and laws of the United States uniform all combine to enhance the federal judicial power to a degree beyond that envisaged even by Marshall and Story. As late as 1880 the questions presented in the foregoing cases were before the Court in Williams v. Bruffy, 102 U.S. 248 (1880), which again involved the refusal of a Virginia court to enforce a mandate of the Supreme Court. By the act of December 23, 1914, 38 Stat. 790, the 25th section of the Judiciary Act of 1789 which was carried over with modifications into the Revised Statutes, § 690; 28 U.S.C. § 344 was amended so as to provide for review of State court decisions on certiorari whether the federal claim is sustained or denied. These provisions are now contained in 28 U.S.C.A. 1257 (1948).
The first case involving invalid State legislation arose under a treaty of the United States. Ware v. Hylton, 3 Dall. 199 (1797). In Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386 (1798), the Court sustained a State statute as not being an ex post facto law. The first case in which a State statute was held invalid as a violation of the Constitution was Fletcher v. Peck, 6 Cr. 87 (1810), which came to the Supreme Court by appeal from a United States circuit court and not by a writ of error under section 25. Famous cases coming to the Court under section 25 were Sturges v. Crowninshield, 4 Wheat. 122, McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, and Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518. All three were decided in 1819 and the State legislation involved in each was held void.
[258] That the great majority of the most influential members of the Convention of 1787 thought the Constitution secured to courts in the United States the right to pass on the validity of acts of Congress under it cannot be reasonably doubted. Confining ourselves simply to the available evidence that is strictly contemporaneous with the framing and ratifying of the Constitution, we find the following members of the Convention that framed the Constitution definitely asserting that this would be the case: Gerry and King of Massachusetts, Wilson and Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, Martin of Maryland, Randolph, Madison, and Mason of Virginia, Dickinson of Delaware, Yates and Hamilton of New York, Rutledge and Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, Davie and Williamson of North Carolina, Sherman and Ellsworth of Connecticut. See Max Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention (Yale Univ. Press, 1913); I, 97 (Gerry), 109 (King); II, 73 (Wilson), 76 (Martin), 78 (Mason), 299 (Dickinson and Morris), 428 (Rutledge), 248 (Pinckney), 376 (Williamson), 28 (Sherman), 93 (Madison); III, 220 (Martin, in "Genuine Information"). The Federalist: Nos. 39 and 44 (Madison), Nos. 78 and 81 (Hamilton). Elliot's Debates (ed. of 1836), II, 1898-1899 (Ellsworth), 417 and 454 (Wilson), 336-337 (Hamilton); III, 197, 208, 431 (Randolph), 441 (Mason), 484-485 (Madison); IV, 165 (Davie). P.L. Ford, Pamphlets on the Constitution, 184 (Dickinson, in "Letters of Fabius"). Ford, Essays on the Constitution, 295 (Robert Yates, writing as "Brutus"). True these are only seventeen names out of a possible fifty-five, but they designate fully three-fourths of the leaders of the Convention, four of the five members of the Committee of Detail which drafted the Constitution (Gorham, Rutledge, Randolph, Ellsworth, and Wilson) and four of the five members of the Committee of Style which gave the Constitution final form (Johnson, Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Madison, and King). Against them are to be pitted, in reference to the question under discussion, only Mercer of Maryland, Bedford of Delaware, and Spaight of North Carolina, the record in each of whose cases is of doubtful implication.
It should be noted, however, that there was later some backsliding. Madison's record is characteristically erratic. His statement in The Federalist No. 39 written probably early in 1788, is very positive: The tribunal which is to ultimately decide, in controversies relating to the boundary between the two jurisdictions, is to be established under the general government. Yet a few months later (probably October, 1788) he seemed to repudiate judicial review altogether, writing: "In the State Constitutions and indeed in the Federal one also, no provision is made for the case of a disagreement in expounding them; and as the Courts are generally the last in making the decision, it results to them by refusing or not refusing to execute a law, to stamp it with its final character. This makes the Judiciary Department paramount in fact to the Legislature, which was never intended and can never be proper." 5 Writings (Hunt ed.), 294. Yet in June, 1789, we find him arguing as follows in support of the proposals to amend the Constitution which led to the Bill of Rights: "If they are incorporated into the Constitution, independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights; they will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the Legislature or Executive; they will be naturally led to resist every encroachment upon rights expressly stipulated for in the Constitution by the declaration of rights." Ibid. 385. Nine years later as author of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, he committed himself to the proposition that the final power in construing the Constitution rested with the respective State legislatures, a position from the logical consequences of which he spent no little effort to disengage himself in the years of his retirement. Another recidivist was Charles Pinckney, who in 1799 denounced the idea of judicial review as follows: "On no subject am I more convinced, than that it is an unsafe and dangerous doctrine in a republic, ever to suppose that a judge ought to possess the right of questioning or deciding upon the constitutionality of treaties, laws, or any act of the legislature. It is placing the opinion of an individual, or of two or three, above that of both branches of Congress, a doctrine which is not warranted by the Constitution, and will not, I hope, long have many advocates in this country." Wharton, State Trials, 412. The great debate in Congress in the first session of the 7th Congress over the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801 speedily developed into a debate over whether judicial review of acts of Congress was contemplated by the Constitution. In the Senate Breckenridge of Kentucky, author of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1799, contended for the equal right of the three departments to construe the Constitution for themselves within their respective spheres, and from it deduced the exclusive right of the legislature to interpret the Constitution in what regards the lawmaking power and the obligation of the judges to execute what laws they make. But the feeble disguise which this doctrine affords legislative sovereignty made it little attractive even to Republicans, who for the most part either plainly indicated their adherence to the juristic view of the Constitution, or following a hint by Giles of Virginia, kept silent on the subject. The Federalists on the other hand were unanimous on the main question, though of divergent opinions as to the grounds on which judicial review was to be legally based, some grounding it on the "arising" and "pursuant" clauses, some on the precedents of the Pension and Carriage cases, some on the nature of the Constitution and of the judicial office, some on the contemporary use of terms and the undisputed practice under the Constitution of all constitutional authorities. Moreover, said The Federalist orators, judicial review was expedient, since the judiciary had control of neither the purse nor the sword; it was the substitute offered by political wisdom for the destructive right of revolution; to have established this principle of constitutional security, a novelty in the history of nations, was the peculiar glory of the American people; the contrary doctrine was monstrous and unheard of. The year following Marshall concluded the debate, and rendered decision, in Marbury v. Madison. See Edward S. Corwin, The Doctrine of Judicial Review (Princeton University Press. 1914), 49-59; and Court Over Constitution (1938), Chap. 1. "The glory and ornament of our system which distinguishes it from every other government on the face of the earth is that there is a great and mighty power hovering over the Constitution of the land to which has been delegated the awful responsibility of restraining all the coordinate departments of government within the walls of the governmental fabric which our fathers built for our protection and immunity."—Chief Justice Edward Douglass White when Senator from Louisiana. Cong. Record, 52d Cong., 2d sess., p. 6516 (1894). "I do not think the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare an Act of Congress void. I do think the Union would be imperiled if we could not make that declaration as to the laws of the several States." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Collected Legal Papers (New York, 1920), 295-296.
[259] The Federalist No. 78.
[260] 3 Dall. 386, 399 (1798).
[261] 2 Dall. 409 (1792).
[262] 1 Stat. 243 (1792).
[263] 3 Dall. 171 (1796).
[264] 1 Cr. 137 (1803).