HENRY BILLINGS BROWN

Henry Billings Brown (born South Lee, Massachusetts, March 2, 1836; died Bronxville, New York, September 4, 1913) was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from January 5, 1891 to May 28, 1906. He is perhaps best known today as the author of the opinion for the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, the famous decision that upheld the legality of racial segregation in public transportation.

Brown grew up in a New England merchant's family. He graduated from Yale in 1856, and received some formal legal training both at Yale and at Harvard, although he did not earn a law degree. His early law practice was in Detroit, where he specialized in admiralty law (i.e., shipping law on the Great Lakes). Brown hired a substitute to take his place in the Union Army during the Civil War. He served as U.S. Attorney and in 1875 was appointed to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Brown authored a treatise on admiralty law, a work still used as a reference in Black's Law Dictionary. He was a Republican prior to joining the court, but was not known for excessive partisanship. President Benjamin Harrison appointed Brown to the U.S. Supreme Court on December 23, 1890.

Brown was generally a moderate justice, unwilling to allow government interference with business. He did, however, support the federal income tax in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895). Brown left diaries written from his college days until his appointment as a federal judge in 1875. They can be found in the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library. His diaries suggest that Brown was personally likable (but ambitious), depressed and often full of doubt about himself. Near the end of his years on the Court he largely lost his eyesight. He died of heart failure. Brown is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit.

In 1864 Brown married Caroline Pitts, the daughter of a wealthy Detroit lumberman; they had no children. She died in 1901; in 1904, he married a close friend of his first wife, the widow Josephine E. Tyler.

Sources:
Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States
The Political Graveyard
Submitted by Deborah Crowell