When Rachel Shelden was researching her first book on the social lives of federal politicians in pre-Civil War-era Washington, D.C., she kept coming across accounts of Supreme Court justices fraternizing with members of Congress and the executive branch.

“I kept seeing the justices everywhere,” said Shelden, director of Penn State’s George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center and associate professor of history. “They were at all the dinners, all the parties. They were always invested in what was going on with congressmen. Naively, I thought this was unusual, until I started researching more about it.”

Thirteen years of work later, Shelden has produced her latest book, “The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History,” a thorough examination of the overtly partisan activities of court justices during the first century of American democracy published by the University of North Carolina Press’ W. Hodding Carter III Books trade imprint.

While conventional wisdom tends to view today’s Supreme Court as largely standing apart — at least in theory — from the political activities of the other two branches of the federal government, Shelden argued in the book that the court was very much a political institution “both by design and in practice” from its establishment up until the final years of the 19th century.

“The court was designed to have justices who were representative of the country — what they called ‘judicial representation’ at that time,” Shelden said. “Each justice served as representative of one region of the country — one circuit — and in each region, Americans really guarded what they thought of as their right to having a justice on the Supreme Court that hailed from and reflected the values of their circuit.”

Representation was not just a theory, Shelden said, but operated in practice through “circuit riding,” in which each justice had a specific region of the country where they served and presided over federal trials.

“Circuit riding forced them to work closely with local communities,” she said. “Justices went out on circuit and had to be responsible to those people. And circuit riding lasted for 100 years for good reason — people wanted it.”

The practice of judicial representation was possible because Supreme Court justices were not considered the final authority on the Constitution. That role, Shelden said, belonged to the people.

“Today, we are very uncomfortable with the idea of constitutional uncertainty, but the founding generations were much more uncomfortable with the idea that an unelected judicial body would have that kind of authority,” she said. “This was an experiment in constitutional governance that had never really succeeded before, and so people were constantly negotiating and debating what the Constitution ought to be.”

Because they didn’t have final constitutional authority, justices could take part in constitutional conversations outside the courtroom, including writing opinion pieces in newspapers and helping to craft legislation, Shelden said.

They also actively participated in electoral politics, including supporting friends and colleagues and even running for office themselves. According to Shelden, 19 of the court’s first 51 justices were presidential candidates, including five during the 1860 election — “a possibility that we can’t even fathom now,” she said.

Shelden devoted each chapter of the book to one or two Supreme Court justices engaged in uniquely political activities, including the court’s longest-serving chief justice, John Marshall, who was much more of a “political animal” than he was later portrayed to be, Shelden said.

“He was very good at his job on the court, but he also was very invested in newspaper politics and the personal politics of networks on circuit. But for some reason, we can’t get rid of the myth that he separated the Supreme Court from the political world,” she said.

Some of Shelden’s other profile subjects include Justice John McLean, who ran for president on multiple occasions, and Thomas Todd, a Kentuckian who was the first justice from what was then known as “the West.” She also details Justice Smith Thompson’s campaign for governor of New York in 1828, during which he never left the bench, and Justice Salmon P. Chase’s instrumental role in writing Reconstruction legislation.

The creation of the Circuit Courts of Appeals in 1891 and several other developments, including the solidification of two distinct political parties, effectively put an end to the political court, Shelden said.

“There was a fluid political world throughout the 19th century in which parties would grow and die very easily,” she said. “But then in the 1880s and 1890s, with the growth of the secret ballot, party discipline, primaries — all those things come together to form a long-lasting binary between Democrats and Republicans that had never really existed before.”

One thing Shelden said she hopes readers take away from the book is that the justices of this era “weren’t just politicians by other means.”

“Justices absolutely engaged in real legal analysis, but because they joined the bench after serving most of their career in politics, they also had clear political positions,” she said. “So, most Americans knew what to expect when constitutional issues — issues that affected the shape of their government — came before the court.”

The past is very much “a foreign country,” and the Supreme Court of the 19th century was very different from the court of today, Shelden said. Still, she noted, there are probably some lessons the current justices could learn from the book.

“The early American justices had regular interaction with the people and an understanding of their role as being representative of a community,” she said. “This history reminds us that the court has not always been isolated in Washington, and it doesn’t have to be so removed from the people today.”

Shared from the Penn State Liberal Arts newswire: https://www.psu.edu/news/liberal-arts/story/professors-new-book-examines-political-tendencies-early-supreme-court?utm_audience=Combined&utm_source=newswire&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=liberal%20arts%20headlines%20issue&utm_content=11-03-2026-16-04&utm_term=Stories%20-%201

Check out the latest article by R. Elliot Martin on Muster, titled, “Streaming the War: Elizabeth Van Lew, the Richmond Underground, and Amazon Prime’s The Grey House”:

Amazon Prime Video’s recent Civil War drama series The Gray House presents a fictionalized account of Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew and her Richmond Underground espionage network. The ensemble cast features leading actors Daisy Head as Van Lew, Mary-Louise Parker as her mother Eliza, Amethyst Davis and Christopher McDonald respectively as historical spies Mary Richards and Thomas McNiven, and standout performances from Hannah James and Paul Anderson as the fictional characters Clara, a local prostitute, and villainous Constable Stokely Reeves. James also appeared in the PBS series Mercy Street (2016), which likewise told a complex story set in Civil War-era Alexandria, Virginia featuring multi-dimensional characters. However, unlike Mercy Street, HBO’s The Good Lord Bird (2019) and Steven Spielberg’s epic Lincoln (2012), the producers of The Gray House chose instead to film the episode series in Romania. This artistic license reflects the inauthenticity of the series, despite its efforts to remain faithful to the actual history.

While The Gray House borrows heavily from the historical record, it takes the usual filmmakers’ liberties with the facts to an extreme degree. Although many of the stories told in the show are based on at least a kernel of truth, the series relies extensively on problematic historical source material that often obscures the complexities of the real history at hand. Still, the show cannot be easily dismissed since it presents a variety of realistic historical stories about Van Lew and her network in an entertaining if fanciful format.

Read the full article here!

---

The goal of Muster is to foster connections between The Journal of the Civil War Era and its readership, building relationships and offering stimulating conversations about American history in the period between 1820 and 1880. It offers an online space to explore new ideas, discuss relevant issues in the field, and connect with other scholars and enthusiasts.

Heather Menefee completed her PhD in Native American and U.S. history at Northwestern University, where she was a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies, a T.H. Breen Fellow in History, and a former Presidential Fellow. Her dissertation, “‘That We May Live Upon the Earth Again’: Kinship in Daḳota Maḳoc̣e, 1815-1939,” demonstrates how conflicting settler and Dakota conceptualizations of kinship shaped the political development of the United States and the Dakota oyate (nation) throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Her research interests include transformations of Indigenous sovereignty and U.S. citizenship since the early nineteenth century, Dakota history, the relationship of federal Indian policy to U.S. imperialism, John Trudell’s political philosophy, and histories of the Great Lakes. As a non-Native historian, Heather is committed to supporting the return of Dakota land and the health of the Dakota language.

She earned an MA in American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill in 2019, and a BA (summa cum laude) from Northwestern in 2015 with an ad hoc major in Native American Studies. abolition, or language revitalization, on or beyond campus. She enjoys the White Sox, choral singing, studying languages, and befriending other people’s dogs. Heather’s family’s donkey is named Jackson and lives in Georgia, where he protects cows from coyotes. She is thrilled to join the Richards Center as a postdoctoral fellow and welcomes anyone to reach out. 

Erica Duncan received her PhD in History, with specializations in African Diaspora and early North America histories from New York University (NYU). Her research and interests are in histories of race, gender, childhood, the body, slavery, and freedom. Erica’s dissertation, “Contested Childhoods: Black Children and the Making of Freedom in South Carolina and the Bahamas, 1700-1833,” draws on the interdisciplinary methods of Black feminisms, childhood studies, and critical disability studies to piece together the lives of enslaved children of African descent. By following the lives of those captured and traded in West Africa, South Carolina, and the Bahamas, she locates a vital aspect of the Black Atlantic in the networks of care that attempted to protect these children and re-articulate what a Black childhood meant to their communities.  She argues their assertions of Black childhoods both critiqued the systems that dispossessed them and became an essential freedom practice.

Prior to NYU, Erica earned an M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA and a B.A. in African American Studies and Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. Erica’s research has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Gilder Lehrman Institute, OAH, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and NYU, among others. 

Isaac J. Guzmán is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His dissertation, “Slavery and Power: Slave Drivers in Colonial and Antebellum South Carolina,” is a history of power in South Carolina slavery that spans the late seventeenth century up to the Civil War. Centering the experiences of slave drivers, enslaved Black men responsible for managing plantations alongside white slaveowners, overseers, and white mistresses, Guzmán examines how power was organized, negotiated, and reproduced under slavery. By reconceptualizing the driver as a slave with power, his scholarship complicates the themes of agency and resistance that shape studies of U.S. slavery, revealing how drivers both refused and reproduced the structures of bondage.

His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the South Caroliniana Library, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Social Science Research Council. 

Taylor is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on religion, race, and U.S. imperialism and colonialism in 19th century America. His dissertation, “Between Faith and Force: Black U.S. Army Chaplains in the Age of Empire, 1865-1915,” recasts Reconstruction as a struggle over religious sovereignty that, for many African Americans, became entangled within larger processes of U.S. imperialism. The project centers the stories of the first five Black Christians to serve as Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal chaplains in the U.S. Regular Army from 1884 to 1920. After liberating themselves from slavery, they embarked on a mission to remake the world as Black religious agents of the U.S. imperial state in the South, the Caribbean, the trans-Mississippi West, and the Pacific world. Their story further reveals the complicated stakes of making modern, racialized subjectivities beyond the borders of former slave states in the long Civil War Era.

Taylor’s work has been supported by the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and the Reed-Smith Travel Research Fund.

Timothy Williams is an associate professor of history at the University of Oregon with interests in 19th Century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, intellectual and cultural history, book history, gender, education, and prisons and prisoners. He is the author of Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and editor (with Evan A. Kutzler) of Prison Pens: Gender Memory, and Imprisonment in the Writings of Mollie Scollay and Wash Nelson, 1863-1866 (University of Georgia Press, 2018). Currently, he is writing a book about Civil War prisoners and their influence on the era’s intellectual history and literature.

In the last Journal of the Civil War Era Muster post, Lindsey R. Peterson highlights how digital scholarly collections can help historians recover lost histories from the Civil War era.

Archives and special collections have long connected users with the raw materials of our history. Researchers visiting our reading rooms encounter the past one page, photograph, and reel at a time. With collections so important to our cultural heritage, history, and future, we’ve been asking: How can university libraries expand access to these materials, help users understand them, and prepare the next generation of scholars and professionals?

When the University of South Dakota Libraries hired me, part of that vision was to deepen the library’s commitment to archival access while also creating meaningful, hands-on professional development opportunities for humanities students. One powerful way archives and libraries are doing both is through digital scholarly editing.

But what exactly are scholarly editions, and how do they differ from collections in digital libraries?

Read more

Congratulations to Antwain K. Hunter (Ph.D. 2015) and Assistant Professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who’s book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865, is on the 2026 Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award shortlist!!

Dr. Hunter’s book was one of fourteen books chosen from 158 eligible submissions. Books are judged based on their scholarship and accessibility, with an eye toward identifying exceptional works that spark dialogue within and across social and racial groups. These books also represent the Museum’s core belief that understanding the history of African Americans is integral to understanding our collective American history.

Antwain K. Hunter is a historian of slavery and freedom in North America, with a current focus on the Carolinas. His first book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865, explores the legal and community dynamics of free and enslaved Black people’s firearm use. Hunter highlights how they pragmatically used their weapons in a variety of beneficial ways, including subsistence hunting, self-defense, agricultural labor, and rebellion. Further, individual enslavers—backed by the legislature and county courts—tried to use Black people’s armed labor for their own benefit and protect themselves from perceived threats. This examination of race, firearms, and the law offers a compelling look at the American past and better contextualizes the present.

Each summer, the Richards Center sends Penn State undergraduate students to intern at Gettysburg National Military Park, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, where they get hands-on experience in public history.

These internships are both demanding and unique, allowing the students to develop programming based on their interests while also receiving specialized training in anything from mapping technology to historic weaponry. The internships also highly competitive. This year’s interns were selected through a rigorous process.

“This summer’s interns competed with dozens of other students for these roles,” said Sasha Coles, Richards Center Assistant Director for Undergraduate Internships. “The site staff and I were impressed with their application materials, letters of recommendation, and interviews. Their strong academic records and previous experience with collaborative projects, customer service, and independent research will serve them well in these positions.”

These opportunities are made possible through the generous support of Larry and Lynne Brown, Matthew Isham, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Meet the six students who will be spending their summer honing their skills and history knowledge!

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress Intern

Harpers Ferry National Historical Park Interns

Gettysburg National Military Park interns