Howell E. Jackson

Howell E. Jackson (born April 8, 1832, Paris, Tenn., U.S.—died Aug. 8, 1895, near Nashville, Tenn.) was an American lawyer and associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1893–95).

Jackson practiced law in the towns of Jackson and Memphis, Tenn., until the outbreak of the American Civil War, during which he served the Confederacy as a receiver of sequestered property. He gained prominence in his practice after the war and in 1880 was elected to the legislature as a Democrat. When factional disputes prevented the legislature from agreeing on any Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Jackson’s name was proposed by a Republican member, and he won on the first ballot. In 1886 he was appointed by President Grover Cleveland as a federal judge of the sixth circuit; and in 1891 he became the first presiding judge of the new Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati, Ohio, where he served with great distinction. When a vacancy occurred on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1893, President Benjamin Harrison, certain that the incoming Democratic Senate would not confirm a Republican, named Jackson. Jackson developed tuberculosis shortly after being named and participated only slimly in the court’s work.