1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Matthews, Stanley

MATTHEWS, STANLEY (1824–1889), American jurist, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on the 21st of July 1824. He graduated from Kenyon College in 1840, studied law, and in 1842 was admitted to the bar of Maury county, Tennessee. In 1844 he became assistant prosecuting attorney of Hamilton county, Ohio; and in 1846–1849 edited a short-lived anti-slavery paper, the Cincinnati Herald. He was clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives in 1848–1849, a judge of common pleas of Hamilton county in 1850–1853, state senator in 1856–1858, and U.S. district-attorney for the southern district of Ohio in 1858–1861. First a Whig and then a Free-Soiler, he joined the Republican party in 1861. After the outbreak of the Civil War he was commissioned a lieutenant of the 23rd Ohio, of which Rutherford B. Hayes was major; but saw service only with the 57th Ohio, of which he was colonel, and with a brigade which he commanded in the Army of the Cumberland. He resigned from the army in 1863, and was judge of the Cincinnati superior court in 1863–1864. He was a Republican presidential elector in 1864 and 1868. In 1872 he joined the Liberal Republican movement, and was temporary chairman of the Cincinnati convention which nominated Horace Greeley for the presidency, but in the campaign he supported Grant. In 1877, as counsel before the Electoral Commission, he opened the argument for the Republican electors of Florida and made the principal argument for the Republican electors of Oregon. In March of the same year he succeeded John Sherman as senator from Ohio, and served until March 1879. In 1881 President Hayes nominated him as associate justice of the Supreme Court, to succeed Noah H. Swayne; there was much opposition, especially in the press, to this appointment, because Matthews had been a prominent railway and corporation lawyer and had been one of the Republican “visiting statesmen” who witnessed the canvass of the vote of Louisiana^[1] in 1876; and the nomination had not been approved when the session of Congress expired. Matthews was renominated by President Garfield on the 15th of March, and the nomination was confirmed by the Senate (22 for, 21 against) on the 12th of May. He was an honest, impartial and conscientious judge. He died in Washington, on the 22nd of March 1889.

1. It seems certain that Matthews and Charles Foster of Ohio gave their written promise that Hayes, if elected, would recognize the Democratic governors in Louisiana and South Carolina.