Jeremiah Sullivan Black — Pennsylvania's Champion of Constitutional Liberty

The birthplace marker here honors Jeremiah Sullivan Black, born January tenth, eighteen ten, one of the nineteenth century's most formidable American legal minds. Black rose from rural Pennsylvania to serve as Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, then as United States Attorney General under President Buchanan, and finally as Secretary of State in the tumultuous months before the Civil War.

Black refused to sanction secession but equally refused to endorse armed coercion, a stance that made him a controversial figure then and a studied one now. After the war he emerged as a fierce defender of civil liberties, opposing the use of military tribunals to try civilians, a position the United States Supreme Court ultimately endorsed in Ex Parte Milligan in eighteen sixty-six. The quote on his marker endures: 'To live unmolested is not a political privilege, but a natural, absolute and indefeasible right.'