Early Life
John McLean was born on March 11, 1785, in Morris County, New Jersey. After moving frequently in his early childhood, he eventually settled in the town of Ridgeville, Ohio in the late 1790s. The numerous relocations made receiving a formal education difficult, and as such McLean was forced to primarily educate himself.
In 1803 McLean moved to Cincinnati, where he studied law under leading Ohio attorney Arthur St. Clair Jr. McLean was admitted to the bar in 1807 and began a private practice. That same year, he founded the weekly Democratic-Republican newspaper The Western Star, which is still in publication today.
Early Career
McLean began his political career in 1812 when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He served for four years, at which time he was nominated to serve as a judge on the Ohio State Supreme Court. In 1822, President James Monroe appointed McLean as a commissioner of the Federal Land Office and the following year repositioned him Postmaster General. In this position, McLean led the immense expansion of the Post Office in the western states.
Supreme Court
In the late 1820s President Andrew Jackson offered McLean the positions of both Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy, to which he declined. Instead, he accepted President Jackson’s offer to serve as Justice on the United States Supreme Court. McLean officially began his post on March 7, 1829, filling the vacant seat of Justice Robert Trimble.
Justice McLean associated himself with nearly every political party at various times during his tenure on the Supreme Court. This theme is highlighted by the fact that he was considered as a presidential candidate a number of different times, for a number of different parties, during the next several decades.
Justice McLean’s wrote his first major opinion on the Supreme Court in the 1834 Wheaton v. Peters case regarding copyright protection. McLean maintained that no post-publication common law copyright law exists in the U.S., for public works are in the public domain. In this hearing, the Court also established that there could be no copyright can exist in the Court’s own judicial decisions.
As a long-time opponent of slavery, Justice McLean voiced strong opinions in several slavery cases during his time on the Court. The most of significant of these opinions came in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford hearing. In the minority opinion, McLean argued that a slave became free when his owner took him into a state in which slavery was not established as legal. Several years earlier, in the 1842 Prigg v. Pennsylvania case, McLean upheld the right of free states to protect runaway slaves from illegal capture.
Death
McLean became the last surviving member of the Monroe and Adams Cabinets. He died on April 4, 1861 in Cincinnati, Ohio, at the age of 76.
