Named for the “Great Chief Justice” of the United States and ardent Federalist John Marshall, John Marshall Harlan was born into a prominent Kentucky family with Whig Party affiliations. Harlan was the first U.S. Supreme Court justice to earn a law degree, which he received from Transylvania University in 1853, after graduating from Centre College in 1850. Harlan joined his father’s Frankfort, Kentucky, law practice and his father’s political party. The elder Harlan was a slaveholder and crony of the Whig leader Henry Clay, who supported gradual emancipation. John Marshall Harlan inherited James Harlan’s paternalistic attitude toward slavery as well as some of his father’s slaves. He would have inherited his father’s position among the Whigs had the party not come apart in the 1850s over the issue of whether slavery should be allowed to expand into the American territories. Instead, father and son joined the nativist Know-Nothings, a short-lived political party in the 1850s that was fueled by fear that the nation was being overrun by Irish Catholic immigrants.