Amish Mennonites and the U.S. Supreme Court:
110 Years Before Yoder

by Steve Nolt

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In 1972 public attention focused on the Amish as never before. That year the church well-known for separation from the world found itself in the very halls of American political power -- the United States Supreme Court. As defendants in the landmark case Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Amish heard the Court consider, and then grant, the legality of Amish schools.

In the near-quarter century since then, the Yoder ruling has continued to attract public notice and academic comment. Judges have cited the ruling in hundreds of other legal decisions. Subsequently, Amish persons appeared as parties in two other Supreme Court cases, though neither attracted the same popular interest as the school judgement. At the time, some observers thought Yoder represented the first Amish foray into the courtroom, although more knowledgeable parties knew that educational concerns had brought the Amish and the judiciary together as early as 1914.

In fact, Wisconsin v. Yoder did not mark the first time Amish Mennonite parties appeared before the American high court. One hundred and ten years earlier Supreme Court justices heard a case brought to them by two Amish Mennonite brothers, Peter and Christian Farni, of Woodford County, Ill. That case was almost certainly the earliest encounter between the high bench and any of the nation's Amish or Mennonite residents. Although the case, Farni v. Tesson, did not involve dicey issues of religious freedom or command national attention, it provides one window into the world of early Amish Mennonite activity in the judicial world. More importantly, its records provide important insights into the economic life of a frontier Amish Mennonite community.

Background
In 1830 the first Amish Mennonites settled along the Illinois River near Fort Clark (now Peoria). Within several years, a sizable Amish Mennonite community grew up in what became Woodford, Tazewell, and McLean Counties, with related settlements in adjacent Livingston and Bureau Counties. By 1834 families had taken up land along the Mackinaw River, a Illinois tributary. The household of Christian Farni (1800-1882) was likely the first to arrive there, though other families soon joined them--including that of Christian's brother, Peter (1797-1873). Natives of the Lorraine, France, the brothers had each sojourned in Pennsylvania and Ontario before moving to Illinois.

Both men played prominent roles in their new Midwestern home, providing both spiritual and economic leadership in community life. Peter was an Amish elder (bishop), and Christian, a minister. Moreover, the two were noted entrepreneurs and agriculturalists. Shortly after moving to the banks of the Mackinaw, they opened a saw mill, to which they later added equipment for grinding corn and grain. Meanwhile, Christian (and to a lesser degree, Peter) built up a major farming operation. Indeed, the cross-roads village which grew up around the Farni's southern Woodford County mill and homesteads came to be known as "Farnisville." Along with Slabtown, the village on the Mackinaw's opposite bank, Farnisville grew into a rural commercial center.

During the 1840s and 50s, Midwestern American agriculture underwent an important shift from subsistence farming to cash cropping. The Farnis' grist mill catered to this emerging trend. Meanwhile, frontier communities inevitably developed ties with regional metropolitan centers such as St. Louis and Chicago. Although apparently secluded from the wider commercial world, rural villages were often closely bound to such "central cities" through contracts, mortgages, and trade routes.

Given these developments, it was hardly surprising that around 1856 two St. Louis-based, French-born investors approached Farnisville with a scheme to draw the economic bonds between frontier farmers and the metropolitan marketplace more tightly. The businessmen, Charles de Boutcam and Paul Carrey, suggested building a distillery, which, in cooperation with the Farni grist mill, would produce whiskey from local grain for market in St. Louis. The two Frenchmen promised a large inheritance from Europe to support the venture, but needed some local money to get things started. The Farnis agreed to back the plan, and a sizable "brick and frame steam- distillery" rose along the Mackinaw. Apparently the firm operated quite profitably, at first. In only two or three years, the distillery did $50,000 worth of business.

Nevertheless, trouble loomed. The French inheritance never materialized, though the Farnis continued to hope it would. Actually, things were much worse than the brothers realized. The two Frenchmen had borrowed far beyond their means and experienced chronic shortages of cash. The Panic of 1857, which struck suddenly in the fall of that year, caused the distillery to collapse. It also uncovered the many financial ties which bound the lives of hinterland residents and St. Louis interests.

A Legal Maze
As the distillery's urban creditors tried to foreclose, the Frenchmen persuaded the Farnis to post a $17,000 penal bond to forestall proceedings, while they appealed to the court for more mercy and time. The Farnis again agreed, but soon discovered that de Boutcam and Carrey had fled the country leaving the brothers holding the debt-ridden distillery, and saddled with a pending bond due to five parties.

In the fall of 1858, one of the distillery's creditors, St. Louis banker Edward P. Tesson, bought the distillery for a fraction of its value at a Woodford County sheriff sale. The Farnis now had no assets -- only liabilities -- from the failed enterprise. Tesson wasted no time in trying to recover those debts. In December of that year he sued the Farnis in federal circuit court for debt of $17,000 and damages amounting to $10,000.

The Farnis now found themselves looking for other metropolitan contacts -- this time in the form of legal help. The two worked mostly with Samuel W. Fuller, a Chicago attorney who represented them through most of the litigious maze. At one point Christian Farni apparently also consulted Springfield, Ill., lawyer Abraham Lincoln. Although his work for them was rather limited, Lincoln did make at least one appearance on their behalf.

The trial proceeded quickly. In June 1859 the federal jury ruled against the brothers, awarding Tesson the debt he sought, as well as $7,394.92 in damages. The Farnis, however, were not about to give up so easily. They had yet to exhausted their legal options. They decided to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court on a writ of error -- that is, they did not contend the facts of the case, but rather the manner in which it was heard. They claimed that the case lacked federal jurisdiction, and that it really belonged in state court. If the Farnis owed anything, they argued, they owed it to all the parties named in their original penal bond, including an Illinois resident. The appeal process took a year and a half.

By December 1861, the high court was finally ready to hear the Farnis' arguments. In addition, the justices reviewed 138-pages of briefs filed by lawyers for both sides, along with documents from the lower courts. The opinion, issued the following spring and written by Justice Robert C. Grier, sided with the Amish Mennonite parties. The justice scolded Tesson for stripping the other bond-holders' names from his suit so as to improperly claim federal jurisdiction and receive the entire award.

Yet the Farnis' troubles were far from over. Although the court had ruled in their favor, the brothers had simply won the right to be tried again in state court. Tesson immediately refiled his claim, this time including the other parties named in the bond, in Woodford County Circuit Court. But the case was not heard until December 1867. At that point, the jury sided with the Farnis, so the plaintiffs filed a writ of error to the Illinois State Supreme Court. That bench eventually agreed with them, and in June 1870, sent the case back to the lower court to be reconsidered. The case languished on the Woodford County docket until 1873, when its venue changed in Peoria. The final ruling came in October 1878 in favor of the creditors for the sum of $17,000 in debt and $17,000 in damages.

By then, however, Peter Farni and one of the creditors were dead, Christian had moved to Kansas, and Tesson was bankrupt himself. It is unclear how the tangled judgement was ever resolved.

Summary
The case itself provides a number of curious illustrations of Amish Mennonites and 19th-century litigation. On the one hand, the Farnis played a much more aggressive and assertive role in fighting a suit than many observers might expect from Amish Mennonites living in a milieu of nineteenth-century nonresistant piety and humility theology.

On the other hand, when the brothers appeared in court "in their own proper person," they did follow traditional Anabaptist dictates in affirming the truth, rather than swearing oaths. Perhaps most surprising to some, the Farnis seem to have received no official censure from their church. In fact, they continued functioning as local, and even national church leaders during their court room activities. In 1864 Christian attended the annual Amish Mennonite Diener-Versammlung in Goshen, Indiana. The meeting records no objection to his presence nor any comment on his recently concluded Supreme Court entanglements or his pending state trial.

Interesting as these insights into Amish Mennonite attitudes and actions are, the legal documents which survive from these cases provide more important source data in the form of rare information on the economic activities and connections of nineteenth-century Amish Mennonite frontier settlements. The surviving paperwork helps illustrate the degree to which rural Amish Mennonite communities were involved in broader Midwestern patterns linking frontier economies and regional metropolitan centers.

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--Steve Nolt lives in South Bend, Ind., where he is studying American history at the University of Notre Dame.

Note
A more detailed account of the Farnis' entrepreneurial activities and Farnisville connections to the wider commercial world will appear, with documentation, in future issues of Illinois Mennonite Heritage, the periodical of the Illinois Mennonite Historical and Genealogical Society.

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Mennonite Historical Bulletin, July, 1995