Jonathan Jasper Wright became the first Black justice on any state supreme court — and held the seat as Reconstruction collapsed around him.
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Jonathan Jasper Wright needs to be remembered.
———
In February 1870 the South Carolina General Assembly met in Columbia to fill a vacant seat on the state Supreme Court. 
The men who voted were Black and white, freedmen and former masters, sitting in the same chamber for the first time in the history of the state. They chose a thirty-year-old lawyer from Pennsylvania named Jonathan Jasper Wright. When he took the oath, he became the first Black man to sit on any state supreme court in the United States.
No one would follow him for almost a hundred years.
He did not get there by accident, and he did not stay there in peace.
The Person
Wright was born free on February 11, 1840, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. His parents had been enslaved and had gotten out. The family farmed in Springville, in the northeast corner of the state, and a local minister who hated slavery took the boy in hand and taught him for three years. He went to an academy near Ithaca, New York, and finished in 1860. Then he taught school and read law in a lawyer’s office in Wilkes-Barre, the way men became lawyers then.
In 1864 he asked to be admitted to the Pennsylvania bar. They turned him down. The record does not spell out the reason, but everyone understood it. He was Black, and the bar was white. So he took a job with the American Missionary Association, and in 1865 it sent him south to Beaufort, South Carolina, to teach Black Union soldiers and the people coming up out of slavery.
He went back to Pennsylvania once more. In 1866, with a federal civil rights law now at his back, he asked again, and this time they let him in. He became the first Black attorney admitted to the bar of Pennsylvania.
He did not stay to enjoy it. He returned to Beaufort and went to work for the Freedmen’s Bureau, giving the law to people who had never been allowed to own it. In ten months of 1867 he handled more than two thousand cases.
He said his work was to vindicate the cause of the downtrodden.
He meant it as a job description.
The Context
South Carolina after the war was a place remaking itself. Black men could vote and hold office. In 1868 Wright was a delegate and a vice-president of the convention that wrote a new state constitution, and he helped build the parts about courts, public schools, and the homestead that a poor family could not be made to sell. That fall the voters of Beaufort County sent him to the state Senate, one of the first Black legislators the state had ever had.
This was Reconstruction at its high tide. For a few years the law in South Carolina tried to do something it had never done, which was to treat the formerly enslaved as full citizens with standing to sue, to contract, to own, and to be heard. The Supreme Court of the state sat at the top of that effort.
When a seat opened in 1870, two Black men wanted it. One was William Whipper, a radical Republican who wanted the law pushed hard and fast. The other was Wright, who was thought the steadier and more conservative of the two. The Assembly chose Wright. The Charleston paper wrote that he now held the highest position any colored man had held in the United States.
The Decision
Wright took the seat. That was the first decision, and it was not a small one. To sit on that bench as a Black man was to make himself the most visible target of every white South Carolinian who wanted the old order back. He sat beside two white colleagues and went to work. Over nearly seven years he wrote some eighty opinions, clear and careful and built on common law. Scholars would later call his one of the finest legal minds of the era.
He was not a firebrand on the bench. He was a formalist, a man who believed the law’s authority came from following it exactly.
In Burgess v. Carpenter he moved South Carolina away from the old master-and-servant rules of slavery and treated a Black farm laborer as a man who had signed a contract, not a servant who belonged to someone. That was the law doing what emancipation promised. But in Russell v. Cantwell he refused a freedman a remedy for a wrong done before the war, holding that the new rights did not reach backward into the time of slavery, and warning of a flood of litigation if they did.
He governed by the book.
Sometimes the book held the door open, and sometimes it did not.
Then the book itself came under attack, and the second decision arrived — the one that mattered.
The election of 1876 was won by terror. White paramilitary companies called Red Shirts rode the back roads, stuffed the ballot boxes, and kept Black men from the polls at gunpoint. When it was over, two men claimed the governorship. Daniel Chamberlain, the Republican, and Wade Hampton, the Democrat and the Redeemers’ champion. Two legislatures met. The whole question of who governed South Carolina ran toward the Supreme Court, where Wright sat.
It reached him in a case called Ex parte Norris. Wade Hampton had pardoned a prisoner, and to honor the pardon was to admit that Hampton was the lawful governor. The court split. By two to one it upheld the pardon and, with it, Hampton’s claim to the office. Wright dissented. He would not sign his name to the thing that ended Reconstruction in his state.
The Democratic press came for him at once. One paper asked whether it was right, Wright, to take your salary with your left hand while you denied the governor’s right with your right.
The line was clever. It was also a threat.
The Aftermath
Hampton took the governor’s chair, and the men around him had no intention of leaving a Black justice on the highest court in the state. In May 1877 the new Democratic majority opened an investigation into Wright. They held ten days of hearings behind closed doors. A witness said Wright had taken a bribe to change a vote. They could not prove it. The bribery charge fell apart in their hands, so they reached for another one, and the impeachment resolution they finally produced rested on a charge of drunkenness.
Wright fought at first. He said he would defend his name and his record. Then he counted the votes in a legislature owned by his enemies and saw there was no defending anything.
He resigned in 1877. He was not a man caught in a scandal. He was a man removed because the people who had taken the state could not abide what his presence on the bench still said.
He went to Charleston and opened a law office at 84 Queen Street. He took in young men and taught them the law in his own rooms. He helped build the law department at Claflin College and trained the next generation of Black lawyers when almost no one else would. His lungs were going by then. He died of tuberculosis in February 1885. He was forty-five years old. They buried him in Charleston, and for a long time afterward his name carried the smear they had put on it, and his very portrait went missing from the world.
It took a century to set it right. In 1998 the South Carolina Supreme Court hung a recovered portrait of Wright in its building and put a stone on his grave. A chief justice of the state called his election to the court a high point in a life of public service.
The men who drove him out are a footnote.
The man they drove out is on the wall.
The Meaning
Wright was not the most radical man on the scene, and the honest account does not pretend he was. Whipper would have pushed harder. Wright wrote opinions that narrowed the reach of the freedman’s new rights as often as he wrote ones that widened them.
His was the courage of staying, not the courage of charging.
But staying was the whole of it. He put on the robe in a state that did not want him to wear it, and he kept it on while the men with the guns and the ballot boxes took the state back. When the case came that could have bought him peace — sign the pardon, bless the new governor, go along — he dissented. He governed by the book while his opponents tore the pages out.
That is a quality worth keeping in front of us.
Authority is easy to hold when the order that grants it is sound.
It is hard to hold when that order is collapsing and every pressure says bend.
Wright did not bend, and they made him pay for it, and then they tried to erase that he had ever sat there at all.
He had.
Jonathon Jasper Wright needs to be remembered.
———
Sources: “Obligations Impaired: Justice Jonathan Jasper Wright and the Failure of Reconstruction in South Carolina,” Michigan Journal of Race & Law (2018); University of South Carolina School of Law, Coleman Karesh Law Library, “All for Civil Rights”; Brennan Center for Justice, “Jonathan Jasper Wright: America’s First Black State Supreme Court Justice” (2022); South Carolina Encyclopedia; South Carolina Historical Society.
———
Charles C. Jett is the author of the Courage and Consequence series. A Naval Academy graduate and former nuclear submarine officer, he writes on history, character, and the decisions that test them at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.
Leave a Reply