Justices. The Justices responsible for the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits now all hailed from northern states.[76]
In 1866, after the war had ended, Congress once more reorganized the circuits and the Court, again with the objective of limiting the influence of the former Confederate and other slaveholding states. The statute reduced the number of circuits to nine and mandated a gradual reduction of the number of seats on the Court from ten to seven, via attrition.[77] Congressional Republicans sought to reduce the size of the Court in order to prevent President Andrew Johnson, a foe of Reconstruction, from nominating Justices to fill any vacancies.[78]
The judicial power of the United States was even more profoundly transformed in this period by a series of statutes enlarging the federal courts’ jurisdiction. As one historian writes, “[i]n no comparable period of our nation’s history have the federal courts, lower and Supreme, enjoyed as great an expansion of their jurisdiction as they did in the years of Reconstruction, 1863 to 1876.”[79] Although Congress did on a few notable occasions strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction in specific sets of cases,[80] the broader movement was toward expanding the judicial power of the United States.[81] The most important reforms were in three areas: first, removal jurisdiction, which allowed certain cases that began in state court to be taken to federal court;[82] second, the habeas corpus power, permitting federal courts to issue writs on behalf of prisoners held by state authorities in violation of federal law;[83] and third, federal question or “arising under” jurisdiction.[84]
This growth in jurisdiction was accompanied by substantive legislation from Congress that created new federal rights and causes of action, many of which were aimed at protecting the rights of African-Americans.[85] As a result of these reforms, the inferior federal courts “became the primary and powerful reliances for vindicating every right given by the Constitution, the laws, and treaties of the United States.”[86]
Despite Congress’s expansion of federal jurisdiction during the post-Civil War era, the Court issued a series of decisions that significantly limited the reach of both civil rights legislation and the Reconstruction Amendments. In the Slaughter-House Cases, the Court interpreted the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment narrowly, holding that the Clause covered only certain rights of national citizenship that did not include the economic protections claimed by the plaintiffs, a group of white butchers in New Orleans.[87] Three years later, the Court reaffirmed this constrained view of the Fourteenth Amendment in United States v. Cruikshank, a case arising out of the infamous Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, in which a mob of white vigilantes killed between 60 and 150 African-
