In 1851, Supreme Court Justice Peter Daniel found himself on a canal boat traveling from Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The justice was “riding circuit”: traveling to Arkansas and Mississippi, then making up the Ninth Circuit, to preside over cases in the U.S. circuit courts. Justice Daniel did not particularly enjoy his company on the boat, describing his fellow passengers as “some of the most vulgar and filthy in the world, women more disgusting if possible by their want of cleanliness than the men.” The washing facilities were not to his liking either, consisting of two dirty basins and a single towel meant to be shared by all of the men. During the two-day journey, Daniel neither slept nor changed his clothes, and limited his ablutions to wiping his face with a handkerchief.
Daniel’s experience, while certainly unenviable, was mild compared to the horrors endured by some of his predecessors while riding circuit, especially in the Court’s earliest years. In 1792, Justice James Iredell was riding in a horse-drawn chair known as a gig when his horse tried to run off, resulting in the justice crashing into a tree and being thrown to the ground, whereupon one of the wheels ran over his leg. Justice Samuel Chase fell through the ice and nearly drowned while trying to cross the frozen Susquehanna River on foot in 1800. Other justices wrote of journeys covering thousands of miles, in all kinds of bad weather, over rough roads and raging rivers. They routinely endured illness and fatigue on their travels and, once at their destinations, were housed in meager public accommodations at their own expense. Justice William Cushing once had to stay in a room with twelve other men, while others sometimes found themselves sharing beds with strangers.
Although travel conditions improved throughout the nineteenth century, circuit riding remained arduous. Before the opening of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, Justice Stephen Field had to take a steamship to Panama, travel by rail across the isthmus, and then get on another ship to reach the courts of his circuit on the west coast. Even continuous trips on the railroad could be hazardous. On one such journey, Field was attacked in a station dining room by a former state-court colleague turned bitter rival whose wife he had ruled against while sitting on a U.S. circuit court in California. A U.S. marshal protecting Field shot and killed the man. Field was arrested as an accomplice to murder but the charges were quickly dropped. (The marshal was eventually exonerated as well, on the basis that he was acting in the course of his professional duties.)