Samuel Freeman Miller


 * ''For other people named Samuel Miller, see Samuel Miller

Samuel Freeman Miller (April 5, 1816 – October 13, 1890), was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1862–1890.

Born in Richmond, Kentucky, Miller was the son of a farmer. He received a medical degree in 1838 from Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky. While practicing medicine for a decade, he studied the law on his own and was admitted to the bar in 1847. He was for emancipation and supported the Whigs in Kentucky before moving to Iowa, a state more amenable to his views on slavery. Active in Hawkeye politics, he supported Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election. Lincoln appointed Miller to the Supreme Court in 1862.

His opinions strongly favored Lincoln's positions, upholding his suspension of habeas corpus and trials by military commission. After the war, his narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment--he wrote the opinion in the Slaughterhouse Cases-- unintentionally limited the effectiveness of the amendment. He later joined the majority opinions in United States v. Cruikshank and the Civil Rights Cases holding that the amendment did not give the United States government the power to stop private, as opposed to state-sponsored, discrimination against blacks. In Ex Parte Yarbrough,110 U.S. 651(1884), however, Miller held that the federal government had broad authority to act to protect black voters from violence by the Ku Klux Klan and other private groups. Miller also supported the use of broad federal power under the commerce clause to trump state regulations, as in Wabash v. Illinois.

After the 1876 presidential election between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden, Miller served on the electoral commission that awarded the disputed electoral votes to Hayes. Ulysses Grant considered Miller for the chief justice post, but instead chose Morrison Waite. In the 1880's, his name was floated as a Republican candidate for president.

Miller, a religious liberal, belonged to the Unitarian Church and served as President of the Unitarian's National Conference in 1884.

He died while still a member of the court, in Washington, D.C., and is buried in the Oakland Cemetery in Keokuk, Iowa.