John Blair (November 1731–31 August 1800), member of the Convention of 1776, member of the Federal Convention of 1787, and associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, was the second of four sons and fourth of at least twelve children of John Blair (ca. 1687–1771) and Mary Munro Blair. He was born in Williamsburg, where his father served for more than twenty-five years as a member of the governor's Council and was four times acting governor of the colony. He attended the College of William and Mary and on 2 June 1753 was admitted to the Middle Temple in London, where he studied law and from which he was called to the bar on 20 May 1757. On 26 December 1756 in Edinburgh, Scotland, he married his cousin Jean Blair. They had at least one son and at least four daughters.
Early Legal Career
John Blair practiced law as a member of the bar of the General Court in Williamsburg from 1757 to 1770 and represented the College of William and Mary in the House of Burgesses from 1766 to 1770. He served on the House committee that in April 1768 produced strongly worded resolutions questioning the asserted right of Parliament to tax the colonies, and in May 1769 he presided over the burgesses during the sessions of the committee of the whole house that prepared an address to the king that condemned parliamentary policies with such force that Governor Botetourt dissolved the assembly. Botetourt appointed Blair clerk of the governor's Council in August 1770, and after the death of Blair's father in 1771, he succeeded him as deputy auditor of the royal revenue in Virginia. Blair gave up his law practice after he became clerk of the Council, and he held the clerk's and deputy auditor's offices until the royal government collapsed in 1775.
Virginia Revolutionary Convention
On 20 January 1776 the Virginia Convention of 1775–1776 named Blair one of three commissioners of admiralty to enforce the trade regulations that the Virginia convention had adopted. The two or three remaining faculty members of the College of William and Mary chose him on 8 April 1776 to represent them in the Convention of 1776, at which he served on the committee that prepared the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Virginia Constitution of 1776. The convention elected him to the Council of State, on which he served for a year and a half.
Virginia Judge
In October 1777 the General Assembly appointed Blair to the General Court. He served on the court for three years, and in 1779 and 1780 was its senior member. On 23 November 1780 the assembly elected him to the High Court of Chancery. During the years 1783–1785 Blair and his fellow chancellors Edmund Pendleton and George Wythe prepared an edition of the Virginia statutes that became known as the Chancellors' Revisal, although it was a compilation, not a revision, of the laws. As a member of the General Court and of the High Court of Chancery, Blair belonged ex officio to the Virginia Court of Appeals. One of the most influential decisions that court rendered during Blair's tenure was in Commonwealth v. Posey (1787) (4 Call), Virginia Reports, 8:109, in which Blair joined a majority of the judges in ruling that established precedents of the English common law, handed down before the American Revolution, should be accepted in the courts of Virginia.
An earlier but equally important case heard by Blair as a member of the Court of Appeals was Commonwealth v. Caton (1782) (4 Call), Virginia Reports, 8:5, which raised the issue of judicial review, asking whether the court's power extended to striking down legislative acts that it deemed unconstitutional. The published report of the case indicates that Blair concurred in Wythe's assertion of the right of judicial review, but according to Pendleton's notes Blair took no position on the issue. In May 1788, however, Blair implicitly endorsed judicial review when he joined the other judges of the Court of Appeals in a remonstrance to the General Assembly and declared that a statute that had increased the duties and responsibilities of the judges without a corresponding increase in their salaries infringed unconstitutionally on the independence of the judiciary. The judges requested that the assembly revise the law, and in December 1788, following a reorganization of the state's judiciary, the assembly appointed Blair one of the first judges of the new Court of Appeals.
Constitutional Convention
Blair was one of the Virginia delegates to the constitutional convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787. He did not speak on the floor of the convention insofar as the extant records disclose. He signed the Constitution of the United States and in 1788 represented York County in the Virginia ratification convention. He made no recorded speeches and voted for unconditional ratification, although he served on the committee that recommended amendments to the Constitution.
Judge of the U. S. Supreme Court
In the summer of 1789 President George Washington appointed Blair to the new United States Supreme Court. He was sworn in on 30 September 1789 as one of the first associate justices, but his frequent illnesses and the sickness of his wife, who died on 22 November 1792, caused him to miss many of the sessions of the Supreme Court during the early years, which fortunately were not busy ones. Blair presided at trials as a circuit court judge, holding court between 1789 and 1795 in twelve states. In an important Pennsylvania case, Collet v. Collet (1792) (2 Dallas), United States Reports, 2:294, Blair concurred in the opinions of the other circuit court judges that the state was free to enact a naturalization law even though the Constitution also granted Congress that power. In Essex, New Hampshire, Blair made his most important ruling as a circuit judge in Penhallow et al. v. Doane's Administrators (1795) (3 Dallas), United States Reports, 3:54, a decision subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court. At the trial and in his opinion on appeal, Blair ruled that by investing Congress with the power to make war, the states had also given it the authority to create a court of admiralty that could overturn decisions of the state admiralty courts. On appeal Blair agreed to reduce the damages he had awarded at the trial, but the Supreme Court affirmed his opinion about the power of Congress.
The most controversial case in which Blair participated while on the Supreme Court was Chisholm v. Georgia (1793) (2 Dallas), United States Reports, 2:419. He and the other justices ruled that the Constitution allowed a citizen of one state to bring suit in federal court against the government of another state. Blair based his opinion entirely on the wording of the Constitution and dismissed as irrelevant the political theories and legal history that some other judges used in reaching the same conclusion. The outcome of the case was so unpopular that in order to overturn it Congress proposed and the state legislatures quickly ratified the Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution.
Later Years
John Blair resigned from the Supreme Court on 25 October 1795 because of his poor health. Although he took little part in partisan politics, he was recognized as a Federalist. In May 1797 he served as foreman of a federal grand jury that met in Richmond and at the prompting of Justice James Iredell declared that the circular letters of Virginia congressman Samuel Jordan Cabell, which had denounced the election of John Adams to the presidency and deplored the possibility of war with France, were "a real evil" that tended "to encrease or produce a foreign influence ruinous to the peace, happiness and independence of the United States." The declaration outraged many prominent Virginia Republicans. John Blair died at his home in Williamsburg on 31 August 1800 and was buried in the churchyard of Bruton Parish church.
Sources Consulted:
Biography and family letters in Frederick Horner, The History of the Blair, Banister, and Braxton Families (1898), 64–79 (portrait); other biographies in Hugh Blair Grigsby, The Virginia Convention of 1776 (1855), 70–75, and J. Elliott Drinard, "John Blair, Jr., 1732–1800," Virginia State Bar Association Proceedings (1927): 436–449; Daphne Gentry and Brent Tarter, "The Blair Family of Colonial Williamsburg: A Research Note," Magazine of Virginia Genealogy 32 (1994): 103–112; Francis J. Grant, ed., Register of Marriages of the City of Edinburgh, 1751–1800 (1922), 65; David John Mays, ed., The Letters and Papers of Edmund Pendleton, 1734–1803 (1967), 2:416–427, 504–509; John P. Kaminski et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution: Ratification of the Constitution by the States, vols. 8–10: Virginia (1988–1993), 10:1539–1540, 1565; Supreme Court service, official letters, and 1797 grand jury episode (quotation in vol. 3:181) in Maeva Marcus et al., eds., Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789–1800 (1985–2007); portrait by Charles Willson Peale in Library of Congress; will in Peachy v. Henderson (1821) case file, Superior Court of Chancery, Staunton; date of death and age at death from gravestone inscription, Bruton Parish Churchyard and Church: A Guide to the Tombstones, Monuments, and Mural Tablets (1976), 52; obituary in Norfolk Herald, 4 Sept. 1800, reprinted in Richmond Virginia Gazette, and General Advertiser, 5 Sept. 1800, and Richmond Virginia Argus, 9 Sept. 1800.
Engraving in Horner, History of the Blair, Banister, and Braxton Families (1898), opp. 64.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Mark F. Fernandez.
How to cite this page:
Mark F. Fernandez, "John Blair (1731–1800)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998, (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Blair_John_1731-1800, accessed [today's date]).
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