1833-1905
Wheeler H. Peckham was born in Albany, New York, in 1833, the son of Rufus W. Peckham, Sr., who served on the Court of Appeals from 1870 to 1873, the year of his untimely death at sea in a mid-ocean collision. Wheeler’s younger brother, Rufus W. Peckham, Jr., a Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1896 to 1909, also served on the Court of Appeals from 1887 to 1895.
Wheeler Peckham attended Union College but did not graduate due to ill health. He studied law under his father and was one of the earliest students to attend Albany Law School. Peckham was admitted to the Bar in 1854 and became a partner in his father’s law firm. After practicing law in Minnesota for several years, he moved to New York City in 1864 and eventually became a partner in Miller, Peckham & King.[1] Peckham gained a reputation as a superior trial and appellate lawyer while representing many corporate and railroad interests. He also took an interest in politics and the reform wing of the Democratic Party. In 1868, he appeared before the United States Supreme Court in a pioneering case concerning taxation of securities issued by the federal government. His adversary in that case, Charles O’Conor, the “acknowledged head of the bar of the State” at the time, was so impressed with Peckham’s legal abilities that he later ensured his dual appointment as Special Deputy Attorney General and Special Deputy District Attorney charged with prosecuting Boss Tweed.[2]
Peckham’s “able conduct of these cases won for him a national reputation.”[3] In addition to the criminal proceedings against Tweed he also participated in the civil lawsuit that secured a $6 million judgment for recovery of stolen public funds.
In 1883, Governor Grover Cleveland appointed Peckham to fill the vacant position of New York County District Attorney following the death of incumbent John McKeon. Peckham resigned after only eight days, however, citing ill health. Years later, the New York Times attributed Peckham’s resignation to his discomfort with “opportuning office hunters,”[4] while Presiding Justice Edward Patterson of the Appellate Division, First Department, in a memorial address delivered to the New York City Bar Association in 1906, said that Peckham found the duties of the office “distasteful” and his “sensitive nature” was “saddened and grieved by constant contact with the seamy side of life and the dramas of the criminal courts.”[5]
Late in 1893, President Cleveland nominated Peckham to serve as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Peckham’s nomination fell victim to the long-running political feud between Cleveland and Senator David B. Hill, the former New York State Governor and leader of the Tammany Hall machine wing of the state’s Democratic Party.[6] In February 1894, Senator Hill, as he had done recently with Cleveland’s previous nominee, William B. Hornblower, invoked the custom of “senatorial courtesy” (requiring Presidents to consult with their home-state senators before making judicial nominations) to help defeat Peckham’s nomination by a margin of 41 to 32.
Senator Hill had plenty of reasons to dislike Peckham, including Peckham’s support of Hill’s Republican opponent for Governor in 1888.[7] Peckham also led a “relentless and unremitting” crusade against Hill’s lieutenant, former State Deputy Attorney General Isaac H. Maynard, for the latter’s role in the Stolen Senate of 1891.[8] In December 1891, Peckham’s younger brother, Judge Rufus Peckham, Jr., had issued a unanimous decision and order of the Court of Appeals declaring illegal a Democratic senate candidate’s election return. Maynard, who was aware of the decision, did not inform the State Board of Canvassers, which certified the illegal return and seated the candidate, thus giving control of the New York State Senate to the Democrats. To add insult to injury, Maynard was appointed to a vacancy on the Court of Appeals several weeks later by Democratic Governor Roswell P. Flower. As President of the New York City Bar Association from 1892 to 1894, Peckham led the movement that defeated Tammany Hall’s effort to elect Maynard to a full term on the Court of Appeals in 1893. Shortly before the election he delivered an eloquent address at a large rally at Cooper Union.
If Maynard is elected, it will mean that elections are not hereafter to be decided by popular vote, ascertained in the matter provided by law, but by the skill of the knave and the fraud of the cheat, and next thereafter by the man who commands the greatest physical force.[9]
Later in 1894, Hill stepped down from the Senate to run again for the governorship. He was overwhelmingly defeated by his Republican opponent, Levi Morton, and President Cleveland thus encountered no further obstacles when in 1895 he decided to nominate the younger Peckham brother to the next vacancy on the Supreme Court.
From 1873 onwards, Peckham was one of the undisputed leaders of the New York Bar, always at the forefront of good government and legal reform causes.
To write of Mr. Peckham’s lifework means the writing of a history of the reform movement in this city in the last half hundred years. Ever since the defeat and punishment of the Tweed ring he has been intimately and actively connected with every serious effort to give New York a clean and efficient government.[10]
Behind a crusty surface “that protected his supersensitive temperament from too close contact with the outside world . . . was hidden a kind heart and a fair mind.”[11]
Wheeler H. Peckham died at his New York City office on September 27, 1905.
[1] “Wheeler H. Peckham Dies in His Office,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 1905.
[2] Hon. Edward Patterson, Memorial of Wheeler Hazard Peckham, May 8, 1906, at 8-9, available at Memorial of Wheeler Hazard Peckham – Edward Patterson – Google Books.
[3] History of the Bench and Bar of New York Vol. 2, New York History Co., 1897, at 304.
[4] New York Times, Sept. 28, 1905.
[5] Patterson, at 10.
[6] Ellis, Frost, Syrett & Carman, A Short History of New York State, Cornell Univ. Press, 1957, at 369-73.
[7] New York Times, Sept. 28, 1905.
[8] Patterson, at 11; see also “To Protest Against Maynard,” New York Times, Oct. 24, 1893.
[9] New York Times, Sept. 28, 1905.
[10] Id.
[11] Id.