Journal of Supreme Court History

Between 1862 and 1865, as the Union Army began to turn the tide in the American Civil War and emancipation increasingly became a reality, African American attorney John S. Rock set his sights on admission to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. On at least nine occasions, Rock wrote to Senator Charles Sumner on the topic. Rock, a constituent of Sumner's from Massachusetts, proved persistent in seeking admission, and Sumner would figure prominently in lending him support. Eventually, on February 1, 1865, the justices admitted Rock, thus making him the first African American to gain admission to the Supreme Court bar. Rock's efforts validated his claim, announced in February 1862 before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, that "free people of color have succeeded in spite of everything, every hurdle, every obstacle set before them."¹ This essay captures Rock's persistent struggle to overcome these obstacles.

Rock's life embodied this staunch, clear statement of self-sufficiency despite the odds. Born free in 1825 in Salem County, New Jersey, Rock achieved remarkable success. He became a schoolteacher at age nineteen, schoolmaster at twenty, dentist at age twenty-two, and a physician at twenty-seven. Well-educated and well-traveled, Rock received medical treatment for tuberculosis-related issues while in France, where the surgeons who treated him advised that he abandon the practice of medicine. Indefatigable in his efforts and diverse in his interests, Rock turned his attention to the law, and in 1861 he passed the Massachusetts bar at age thirty-six, thus beginning a legal practice in his home state.

Whatever ambitions Rock may have entertained about attaining admission to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court when he became a lawyer, the justices seemed to have erected an insurmountable barrier. In 1857, the Court held in Dred Scott v. Sandford that [End Page 139]

Black people, whether enslaved or free, had no rights. In the infamous words of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, American Blacks

had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.²

The 7-2 pro-slavery decision elicited strong opposition from the free Black community throughout the North. In Massachusetts, a hotbed of abolitionism, one anti-slavery activist lamented the "darkness" of the Court's ruling.³

Written in 1862, in the midst of war, Rock's first few letters to Sumner expressed the harsh realities of racism and commended the senator for his commitment to abolitionist principles. Rock's first known letter to Sumner, dated June 1862, criticized the legal requirement of the freedom pass, a document free Blacks had to carry when travelling in the South. Rock especially took issue with the fact that the practice continued in the nation's capital, even after federal law had ended slavery there a few months earlier. As Rock put it: "Is it not a shame that even in Washington[,] now when the District [of Columbia] is free[,] a man is still obliged to get some responsible person to vouch for his freedom or to go his security?"⁴ In another letter a few weeks later, Rock commended Sumner for his principled stance against slavery: during the course of the debate over the future of slavery in Kansas in 1856 Sumner had labelled slavery a "harlot" on the floor of the Senate. Indeed, his "Crime Against Kansas" speech had become famous for the reaction it provoked, as South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks subsequently had beaten Sumner over the head with his cane, rendering him unconscious...