Malvina Shanklin Harlan

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Malvina French Shanklin Harlan (1839–1916), known as Mallie, was the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan and the grandmother of Justice John Marshall Harlan II. She wrote a memoir, Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854–1911, completed in 1915 and published in 2001.

She was born in Indiana and grew up in Evansville, attending girls’ seminaries until she was 16. She met John Marshall Harlan at a dinner near her home in 1854 and married him on December 23, 1856, when she was 17 and he was 23. Her family held anti-slavery views, and some were uneasy about her marrying into a slaveholding family. She chose to adapt to her husband’s world, following her mother’s advice that his interests would become hers.

After their wedding, they moved to Kentucky, and the family gave them a slave as a wedding gift. She later noted the close bond between slaves and their masters. One slave was reportedly a half-brother of her husband. Although Harlan initially supported slavery, he joined the Union Army in 1861 and, despite later opposing the Emancipation Proclamation, became a strong advocate for civil rights and earned the nickname “The Great Dissenter” for his dissents on civil liberties.

Her memoir, finished in 1915, stayed unpublished for decades. It appeared in 2001 in the Journal of Supreme Court History at the urging of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg and the Historical Society first approached publishers before deciding to publish the full manuscript in the journal. A New York Times review helped raise interest, and the work was later published as a book by Random House with a foreword by Ginsburg, annotations by Linda Przybyszewski, and an epilogue on the Harlan family.

The memoir covers the years from when she met her future husband in 1854 until his death in 1911. The Harlands were Presbyterians and had six children: Edith (who died after marriage), Richard (a Presbyterian minister and college president), James S. (a lawyer who became Attorney General of Puerto Rico and later chaired the Interstate Commerce Commission), and John Maynard (a lawyer, Chicago alderman, and mayoral candidate). Their son John Marshall Harlan II served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1955 to 1971.