Peter Vivian Daniel (April 24, 1784 – May 31, 1860) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the

Supreme Court of the United States The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all Federal tribunals in the United States, U.S. federal court cases, and over Stat ...

Early life and education

Peter Vivian Daniel was born in 1784 at "Crow's Nest", a plantation in Stafford County,

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...

, to the former Frances Moncure (of the

First Families of Virginia The First Families of Virginia, or FFV, are a group of early settler families who became a socially and politically dominant group in the British Colony of Virginia and later the Commonwealth of Virginia. They descend from European colonists who ...

) and her plantation-owning husband Travers Daniel, who began serving the first of several terms in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1790. This boy was named to honor his paternal grandfather. He was descended from Raleigh Travers, who had twice served in the House of Burgesses representing Lancaster County, Virginia before resigning in 1670. Private tutors educated Daniel at home before he entered the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) at the age of 18. He returned to Virginia after one year and studied law under former Virginia governor and U.S. attorney general

Edmund Randolph Edmund Jennings Randolph (August 10, 1753 September 12, 1813) was a Founding Father of the United States, attorney, and the seventh Governor of Virginia. As a delegate from Virginia, he attended the Constitutional Convention and helped to cre ...

Personal life

Daniel married Randolph's daughter, Lucy, in 1811, after moving to Richmond. Before her death in November 1847, they had Peter Vivian Daniel Jr. (1818–1889) and daughters Elizabeth Randolph Daniel (1814–1879) and Ann Lewis Moncure (1820–1905). His second wife, the Pennsylvania-born widow Elizabeth Hodgson Harris (1824–1857) died tragically when a lit candle accidentally set her clothing afire, leaving Daniel grief-stricken. Their daughter Mary (1854–1863) barely survived her father, but their son Travers Daniel (1856–1911) did have children. Throughout his life, Daniel owned slaves, although he did not operate a plantation. In the 1810 and 1820 censuses, he owned five slaves, In the 1830 census, he owned three slaves in Richmond and leased out another five in Henrico County (four males and an elderly woman). In the 1840 census, he owned seven slaves. In the 1850 federal census, his grown lawyer son Peter Daniel Jr. lived at home with his father and unmarried sisters, as well as two white servants, and the family owned five slaves. In the final year of his life, Judge Daniel owned one 65 year old mulatto man.

Virginia lawyer and official

In 1807 Daniel was admitted to the Virginia bar and began a private legal practice in Falmouth across the

Rappahannock River The Rappahannock River is a river in eastern Virginia, in the United States, approximately in length.U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed April 1, 2011 It traverses the enti ...

from Fredericksburg. In November 1808, Daniel became involved in a dispute with a Fredericksburg businessman, John Seddon, and both parties agreed to a duel. Since dueling was prohibited in Virginia, the Daniel-Seddon duel was fought in Maryland. Daniel wounded Seddon during the duel, although he himself was unscathed, and Sedden died of his wound shortly after returning to Virginia. The duel did not crimp Daniel's career. In 1809, Stafford County voters elected him to the

Virginia House of Delegates The Virginia House of Delegates is one of the two houses of the Virginia General Assembly, the other being the Senate of Virginia. It has 100 members elected for terms of two years; unlike most states, these elections take place during odd-numbe ...

, and re-elected him once, so he served in that part-time position first alongside his relative John Moncure and then with William Brent. Daniel championed states' rights principles embodied in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, and promoted agrarian issues and strict construction of the federal Constitution.encyclopediavirginia Daniel moved to Richmond by 1810 and in 1812 his former colleagues elected him to the advisory Virginia Council of State (privy council), and would re-elect him, so he served until 1835, three years after adoption of the Virginia Constitution of 1832. In 1818 Daniel was elected Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, retaining his Council seat. During the 1830s, he was a member of the Richmond Junto, a powerful group of the Jacksonian Democrats and slaveholders, and strongly supported both

Andrew Jackson Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. Before Presidency of Andrew Jackson, his presidency, he rose to fame as a general in the U.S. Army and served in both houses ...

and

Martin Van Buren Martin Van Buren ( ; ; December 5, 1782 – July 24, 1862) was the eighth president of the United States, serving from 1837 to 1841. A primary founder of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, he served as Attorney General o ...

. Daniel was described as a "personal friend" of Jackson. In 1830, Daniel ran unsuccessfully for governor of Virginia.

Judicial service

U.S. District Court

On April 6, 1836, President Jackson nominated Daniel to a seat on the

United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (in case citations, E.D. Va.) is one of two United States district courts serving the Commonwealth of Virginia. It has jurisdiction over the Northern Virginia, Hampton Roa ...

vacated by Philip P. Barbour, who had been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The

United States Senate The United States Senate is a chamber of the Bicameralism, bicameral United States Congress; it is the upper house, with the United States House of Representatives, U.S. House of Representatives being the lower house. Together, the Senate and ...

confirmed the appointment on April 19, 1836, and Daniel received his commission the same day. While Daniel sat on the District Court he was against latitudinarian judicial constructs, or the practice of District Court Justices also riding the Circuit Court system.

U.S. Supreme Court

On February 26, 1841, outgoing President

, a Democrat, nominated Daniel as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, again to succeed Barbour (who had died). As Daniel's nomination to the Court was made during the final days of Van Buren's term, and with his elected successor

William Henry Harrison William Henry Harrison (February 9, 1773April 4, 1841) was the ninth president of the United States, serving from March 4 to April 4, 1841, the shortest presidency in U.S. history. He was also the first U.S. president to die in office, causin ...

of the Whig party due to take office on March 4, 1841, Senate Whigs opposed confirmation. Nonetheless, Daniel was confirmed by a wide 25–5 margin on March 2, 1841. His service on the Supreme Court began on January 10, 1842, and ended May 31, 1860, upon his death. Daniel was the most frequent dissenter in the Taney Court with nearly two-thirds of his opinions going against the majority. Of the seventy-four opinions he wrote, fifty were dissents. His political views were reactionary and made the other justices around him seem moderate in comparison. He was arguably the strongest supporter of slavery on the Taney Court, and he also disagreed with the amount of power that was given to the

federal government A federation (also called a federal state) is an entity characterized by a political union, union of partially federated state, self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a #Federal governments, federal government (federalism) ...

. He wrote a concurrence in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) which upheld the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Daniel wrote: He also joined the majority in '' Jones v. Van Zandt'' (1847) and wrote another concurring opinion a decade later in '' Dred Scott v. Sandford'', to state that "the African negro race never have been acknowledged as belonging to the family of nations." Justice Daniel authored only one significant opinion, ''West River Bridge Co. v. Dix''
47 U.S. (6 How.) 507 (1848)
in his eighteen years on the nation's highest court.

Death

Daniel died on May 31, 1860, in Richmond, Virginia at the age of 76, leaving behind five children but having survived two wives. He would be buried at Hollywood Cemetery beside his first wife, and soon joined by his daughter Mary, by his second wife, and eventually by his namesake son. Although his son Peter V. Daniel Jr. became a lawyer, his political heir may have been a boy for whom he had served as guardian and then mentored as a lawyer. Raleigh Travers Daniel won election as Henrico County's Commonwealth Attorney several times in the 1830s and 1840s as well as during the Civil War, would help found the Conservative Party and win election as Virginia's attorney general in 1873.