David B. Neagle (1847–1925): Shooting Led to Landmark Supreme Court Ruling

David Butler Neagle lived a life that mirrored the turbulence of the American frontier—by turns heroic, controversial, and deeply human. A man who once shaped national law through his defense of a Supreme Court Justice would later find himself mired in scandal, feuds, and bitterness. His story embodies the uneasy transition between the Wild West’s code of personal honor and the formal rule of federal authority.

Born in Boston to Irish immigrants, Neagle grew up in a period of restless expansion. He ventured west as a young man, finding work in California’s mining camps and learning the rough-edged self-reliance that would define him. By the 1880s, he had become a deputy U.S. marshal in the District of California, known for his courage and quick temper. That temper—at times a mark of bravery, at others a flaw—would shape both his greatest and darkest moments.

Neagle came to national attention in 1889 when he was assigned to protect Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field, who was then hearing cases on circuit in California. The threat to Field was not imaginary. His former colleague, ex–Chief Justice David S. Terry, had once drawn a Bowie knife in court after Field held his wife, Sarah Althea Hill, in contempt during the sensational Sharon v. Hill proceedings. Terry, who decades earlier had killed Senator David C. Broderick in the infamous 1859 duel near Lake Merced, was an imposing figure of both intellect and violence. [Read about the San Francisco mayor who refused to stop the duel HERE].

By 1889, Terry and his wife openly threatened Field’s life. When Field was scheduled to ride circuit in northern California, Attorney General William H. Miller directed the U.S. Marshals Service to ensure his protection. Neagle—already known for his resolve—was assigned as his bodyguard.

On August 14, 1889, as Field and Neagle stopped for breakfast at the Lathrop railroad station, Terry approached from behind and struck Field across the face. Fearing another attack and believing Terry was reaching for his knife, Neagle drew his revolver and fired two shots, killing Terry instantly. The killing triggered an immediate clash between state and federal authorities. California officials arrested Neagle for murder, but the federal government argued that he had acted in the line of duty. The case, In re Neagle (1890), became a constitutional milestone: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal officers could not be prosecuted under state law for actions taken in the execution of their federal responsibilities.

Though vindicated in law, Neagle’s later life was anything but peaceful. The notoriety of the Lathrop incident followed him for years, alternately praised as a hero and reviled as a killer. His post-marshal years found him working as a private investigator and security man, often skirting the edge of the law. His reputation for volatility and self-importance drew both admiration and enemies.

By the mid-1890s, newspaper accounts depict Neagle as a man embroiled in quarrels with journalists and rivals. In August 1896, The San Francisco Call reported that he had been arrested for assaulting a reporter who had written critically about him, accusing the journalist of libel and threatening him with violence. Days later, the paper ran further accounts describing Neagle’s legal troubles and his growing sense of persecution, claiming he had become “a man soured by the world” who still carried the swagger of his badge long after losing his post.

Perhaps most startling was his public feud with Wyatt Earp, another lawman of national fame. In 1896, newspapers reported that Earp had threatened to kill Neagle during a dispute in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. The quarrel—apparently sparked by accusations of betrayal and conflicting loyalties within the city’s underworld—revealed the combustible pride of two men accustomed to frontier justice. Neagle, though aging and past his prime, still faced his rivals with defiance, insisting that no man would intimidate him.

These later episodes painted a picture of a complex, aging lawman haunted by his past. Neagle’s sense of honor remained acute, but his ability to navigate a changing world diminished. The swagger that once served him in dusty saloons or tense railroad depots had become self-destructive in the era of modern courts and newspapers.

Neagle's modest death announcment

When Neagle died in Oakland on November 28, 1925, his obituary noted his role in one of the most important constitutional cases in American history but said little of his final decades. His funeral was modest; his name had largely faded from public memory, overshadowed by the mythic reputations of other lawmen like Earp. Yet the decision in In re Neagle endures as a cornerstone of federal supremacy and judicial protection, invoked whenever state law threatens to encroach upon federal duty.

David B. Neagle remains a paradox: a man of immense personal courage and equally formidable flaws, whose single act of duty reshaped American constitutional law but who spent much of his later life at odds with the very civil order he helped defend. His story captures the uneasy frontier between violence and justice, pride and duty, heroism and hubris.

Sources: San Francisco Call, August 5, 8 & 13, 1896; Oakland Tribune, November 30, 1925; Daily Californian, August 11, 1896; HistoryNet; Federal Judicial Center; U.S. Marshals Service; Wikipedia; Find a Grave; The Tombstone Epitaph