filled by Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. President Lincoln would go on, with the help of a Republican Senate, to fill five Supreme Court seats, including one that had been newly created.

1865–1895: Power Struggle

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the pro-Reconstruction “Radical Republicans” took the most extreme step ever taken by the Senate to prevent a president from nominating Supreme Court justices. When Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, the Court consisted of ten justices, five of them Lincoln appointees. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was a Union loyalist but still a Southern Democrat at heart, weak on Reconstruction and mistrusted by the Radical Republicans who ran Congress. So when Justice John Catron died in May 1865 and Justice James Wayne died in July 1867 — bothAndrew Jackson appointees — the Senate refused to consider any Johnson appointees to the Court. Henry Stanbery, nominated in April 1866 to replace Catron, was never voted on by the Senate.

Instead, Senate Republicans passed the Judicial Circuits Act of 1866, which Johnson signed into law in July. Under its terms, the Court would be reduced by attrition from ten justices to seven. The act wasn’t motivated entirely by obstruction — Chief Justice Chase supported it as a way to raise the justices’ pay — but after Republican Ulysses S. Grant was elected in 1868, Congress the following April passed the Circuit Judges Act, which restored the Court to nine justices (where it has stayed ever since) and gave President Grant an immediate appointment.

Intraparty battles provided much of the