Justice John McKinley
Alabama
This part of Florence remembers John McKinley, who helped found this town and then rose to the highest court in the land. Born in Virginia in seventeen eighty, McKinley came to the Tennessee Valley as a young lawyer and joined the Cypress Land Company, the group that bought up federal land and laid out Florence in eighteen eighteen. From there his political career climbed fast.
He served in the Alabama legislature, won a seat in the United States Senate, then served in the House of Representatives. In eighteen thirty-seven, President Martin Van Buren appointed him to the Supreme Court of the United States as an associate justice. McKinley sat on the court for fifteen years, including the years it heard the famous Amistad case about a shipload of enslaved Africans who seized their freedom.
He died in eighteen fifty-two.
