1822, September 4: By the end of his life, Spencer Roane had seen an era change.

Roane continued his struggle against the Supreme Court until his death. In order to end the Court’s destructive designs, he endorsed an amendment to the Constitution, proposed in December 1821 in Congress, that would have made the United States Senate, instead of the Court, the forum for review of state court decisions involving constitutional questions. The proposed amendment aroused little interest, however, and most of Virginia’s aging leaders did not even offer their support – a fact that bothered Roane. “Jefferson and Madison hang back too much in this great crisis,” he confided to a friend. Yet Roane himself could not wage the war much longer, and in the spring of 1822, at age sixty, he became ill. He died on 4 September of the same year.

 

Source: “The Consolidation of State Judicial Power: Spencer Roane, Virginia Legal Culture, and theSouthern Judicial Tradition” by Timothy S. Huebner; The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 102, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 47-72.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/4249410