Macon Bolling Allen

Macon Bolling was born on the fourth of August 1816 at Indianapolis, in the Indiana Territory, the son of Black tenant farmers of the Wabash Valley settlement of free Black emigrants of the early statehood period. He was raised in the small free-Black community of antebellum central Indiana and was self-taught in reading and writing across his youth, in the absence of any state-sponsored Black school of the period.

He was apprenticed at sixteen in 1832 to the Indianapolis schoolmaster Asbury W. King and worked as a schoolteacher in the rural Black communities of central Indiana for the next eight years. He moved at twenty-four to Portland, Maine in 1840 — among the principal antebellum free-Black communities of the New England states — and adopted the surname Allen.

He entered in 1841 the law office of the Portland abolitionist attorney General Samuel Fessenden — the principal Maine attorney of the antislavery movement — as a clerk and student. He read the standard antebellum law-office curriculum across the following three years under Fessenden — Blackstone’s Commentaries, Kent’s Commentaries, Story’s Equity Jurisprudence and the principal Maine practice manuals.

He applied to the Worcester County, Maine bar examination in the early summer of 1844 — a bar admission then in the gift of the local bar committee on the strength of an oral examination by sitting attorneys. The Worcester County bar committee admitted him to practice on the third of July 1844 — the first African American admitted to a state bar in the United States, twenty-one years before the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and twenty-three years before the Fourteenth Amendment.

He was admitted in 1845 to the Maine state Supreme Judicial Court — the second African American admitted to a state appellate court in the United States — and applied at the same time for the position of Maine justice of the peace by gubernatorial commission.

He was commissioned by Governor Hugh J. Anderson on the third of July 1847 as the justice of the peace for Middlesex County, Maine — the first African American to hold judicial office in the United States.

He moved his practice to Charleston, South Carolina in 1868 in the post-bellum Reconstruction reorganisation of the Charleston bar and was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1869. He served as a probate judge of the Charleston County Probate Court from 1873 to 1875 — among the first Black probate judges of the post-Reconstruction American South.

He served Charleston as a judge of the Inferior Court at Charleston from 1875 to 1878 and as an attorney at the Lewis and Allen practice from 1878 to 1893.

He relocated to Washington, D.C. in 1894 at the urging of his son Arthur, and entered the federal employment of the United States Land Office as a clerk for the closing months of his life.

He died at Washington, D.C. on the fifteenth of October 1894 of natural causes, at seventy-eight.

He is honored here as the first Black American admitted to a state bar.