Robert Cooper Grier

Robert Cooper Grier (March 5, 1794 – September 25, 1870) was an American jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States. A Jacksonian Democrat from Pennsylvania who served from 1846 to 1870, Grier weighed in on some of the most important cases of the 19th century. As one of two Northern members of the majority in the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, Grier concurred that African Americans were not and were never meant to be citizens of the United States and that the property rights of slaveholders were clearly protected in the U.S. Constitution, after being pressured by President-elect James Buchanan to join the Southern majority in an attempt to prevent the appearance that the decision was made along sectional lines. In 1863, Grier wrote the majority opinion in the Prize Cases, upholding Abraham Lincoln's presidential power to institute Union blockades of Confederate ports, which granted the Union Army a strategic advantage in the American Civil War. Early life and education Grier was born in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania to Elizabeth Cooper Grier and Isaac Grier, a Presbyterian minister and School teacher, who tutored him until he entered Dickinson College. Grier graduated from Dickinson in only one year, receiving a B.A. in 1812, and remained there as an instructor until taking a position at a school run by his father. He succeeded his father as headmaster in 1815.