William Johnson (1771–1834) was TJ’s first appointment to the United States Supreme Court, serving from 1804 until his death. The native South Carolinian graduated from the College of New Jersey in 1790, was admitted to the bar three years later, and served in the South Carolina House of Representatives, 1794–99, ending as speaker. Johnson sat on the state bench from 1799–1804, and he was also president of the College of South Carolina at the time of TJ’s appointment. On the Supreme Court he was a nationalist Republican, often dissenting from the Marshall majority but eventually making himself unpopular in South Carolina by opposing nullification. Johnson exchanged agricultural information and seeds with TJ in addition to political commentary and discussions of Johnson’s writing projects. His Sketches of the Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene, 2 vols. (Charleston, 1822; Poor, Jefferson’s Library description begins Nathaniel P. Poor, Catalogue. President Jefferson’s Library [1829] description ends , 4 [no. 136]), prompted TJ to encourage him, unsuccessfully, to write a political history of the early republic, and Johnson published a Eulogy on Thomas Jefferson in 1826 (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; Princetonians description begins James McLachlan and others, eds., Princetonians: A Biographical Dictionary, 1976–90, 5 vols. description ends , 1784–1790, pp. 494–507; BDSCHR description begins Walter B. Edgar and others, eds., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, 1974– , 5 vols. description ends , 4:322–5; Donald G. Morgan, Justice William Johnson: The First Dissenter [1954]; JEP description begins Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States description ends , 1:466, 467 [22, 26 Mar. 1804]).