Born: Tuesday, April 28th, 1863
Died: Thursday, November 19th, 1931
Birthplace: Roseburg, Oregon
Religion: Episcopalian
Education: University of Oregon, B.A.
Career: Colfax Mayor (1891-1893)
State Land Commissioner (1894-1897)
Superior Court (1900-1908)
President, Washington State Bar Association (1924)
Served: Thursday, December 3rd, 1908 to Sunday, June 1st, 1919
Chief Justice: Monday, January 13th, 1919 to Sunday, June 1st, 1919
Political Party: Democrat
Appointing Governor: Mead (Republican)
Stephen J. Chadwick was the son of Stephen Fowler and Jane Ann (Smith) Chadwick. His father, a member of a party of early pioneers, entered Oregon in 1851 by way of steamer from New York, mule train across the Panama Isthmus, and another steamer to San Francisco and Portland. With many others of that group, Chadwick’s forebears played prominent roles in early Oregon history. Stephen’s maternal grandfather had been a judge. His father was an attorney who later served as secretary of state and governor of Oregon. Stephen grew up in the company of prominent lawyers and politicians.The future jurist attended the juvenile department of Willamette University and then the University of Oregon. He tried newspaper work for a time but soon returned to the study of law. Chadwick was admitted to the bar in 1885, and with his friend Mark Fullerton crossed into Washington Territory to open an office in Colfax in southeastern Washington. In 1891 voters elected him mayor of Colfax, and he then served on the State Board of Land Commissioners from 1894 to 1897. In 1900 Whitman County residents elected the Democrat to the first of two terms on the county’s superior court. In 1908 he became only the second Democrat to win election to the supreme court, joining his old friend and law partner, Mark Fullerton. Judge Milo Root had resigned his court position late in 1908 and Governor Albert E. Mead appointed the already-elected Chadwick to complete the few remaining weeks of Root’s term.
Chadwick had a traditional view of the court’s role and proved reluctant to intervene in legislative concerns. For example, in Webster v. Superior Court in 1912 he wrote:
We have no power to negative [sic] the will of the legislature because we do not like the law. Within the limits of its constitutional warrant, the legislature is supreme; … for us to hold the public utilities act obnoxious to the constitution or as offensive to our own notions of governmental policy, would make this court the law-making body, in defiance of the will of the people to enact their own laws in legislative assemblies duly convened.
In 1913 Chadwick appeared to be in line for an appointment to the federal district court. Although called to Washington, D.C., to confer with President Woodrow Wilson, the appointment never materialized. Nonetheless, Chadwick was not content to remain in the relative obscurity of the state’s high bench. He resigned in 1919 to join the prestigious law firm of Hughes, McMicken, Ramsey, and Rupp in Seattle. He apparently chose Seattle in order to build a political following on the west side of the state. It was rumored that he planned to run for the U. S. Senate in 1920, although he did not. He waited out the 1926 campaign while his son, Stephen F. Chadwick, campaigned unsuccessfully for Congress. In 1928 the judge made a valiant run for the Democratic nomination for governor, missing by 7,000 votes. He relied too heavily on his west-side acquaintances, but in the words of one reporter, “hadn’t renewed them and hadn’t catered to new ones.” Chadwick served on the state Democratic council, was president of the state bar in 1924, grand master of the Masons of Washington, a member of the Washington Historical Society, the American Geographical Society, and the American Legion. He also chaired the state development committee of the chamber of commerce.
Judge Chadwick married Emma Plummer of Portland, Oregon, on March 2, 1887, and they became parents of four children: Claire Leslie, Harriet Jane, Stephen Fowler, and Elizabeth. The judge practiced law with his son in Seattle from 1929 until his death in 1931.
Judge Chadwick delivered an address to the Oregon Historical Society in 1930 in which he recalled his childhood. The talk sheds light on his personality and the early influences on his life:
I was born of pioneer parents, in the then village of Roseburg, Oregon, in 1863. My father was a pioneer of 1851. In that year several groups of people took passage on the steamer Empire City at New York, bound for the West Coast. When under way, it was ascertained that there were twenty-one of the number bound for Oregon. Among others was Samuel R. Thurston, first member of Congress from Oregon; Thomas Nelson, who had been appointed by President Fillmore as Chief Justice of Oregon; John B. Preston, Surveyor General, also appointed by President Fillmore; my father, A. C. Gibbs, and Zenas F. Moody, [all] of whom were afterwards governors of Oregon …
The party landed in Portland and scattered from there. My father first settled at Scottsburg where he became associated with Addison C. Gibbs … My father was the first postmaster of Scottsburg. When Roseburg was established, he moved to that place. He was the first County Judge of Umpqua County and was later a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1864 and 1868, in which year he carried the vote of the state for Horatio Seymour to Washington, D. C. My mother was the daughter of Judge Richard Smith and Patsy Ann Pitzer … She was born in Covington, Virginia.
After we moved to Salem, I was about the State House a great deal, and my father seems to have made it a point to introduce me to men, so that it was my privilege to know all of the men who had been governor of the State of Oregon and some who had been governor of the Territory, and all the judges and a great many of the prominent men in professional and business life. But of all the men I was privileged to meet, I believe that Joe Meek, the famous mountain man, made the deepest impression upon me. I must have been about nine or ten years of age. I had read some of the Beadle’s Dime Novels. This I had to do out in the barn or behind the wood pile- how innocent they seem now in the light of some of the filth that is current literature in these days. I had heard something of Joe Meek; he was a fascinating character. He won my heart, for he patted me on the head, saying, “Stephen, did you ever kill a bar?” I told him I had not. He said, “Some day we will go out and kill a bar.” The day never came, but Joe Meek became my hero.
Selected References
See Stephen F. Chadwick, “The Recollections of Stephen James Chadwick,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly (July 1964), pp. 11-18; Seattle Legal News, 7 Sept. 1929; C. W. Taylor, Eminent Judges and Lawyers of the Northwest (1954), p. 113; H. James Boswell, American Blue Book: Western Washington (1922), p. 17; Washington State Bar Association Proceedings (1911), pp. 107-118; Lloyd Spencer and Lancaster Pollard, A History of the State of Washington, vol. 3 (1937), p. 48.
The preceding biography is from Charles Sheldon's The Washington High Bench: A Biographical History of the State Supreme Court, 1889-1991, © 1992 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University. Reprinted here with permission and licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by The Temple of Justice Project.
