In beginning his “Life of Washington,” Chief Justice Marshall states that Washington was born in 1732, “near the banks of the Potowmac,” in Westmoreland County, Virginia; mentions his employment by Lord Fairfax, the proprietor of the Northern Neck, as surveyor of his estates in the western part of that region; and adds that, in the performance of these duties, “he acquired that information respecting vacant lands, and formed those opinions concerning their future value, which afterwards contributed greatly to the increase of his private fortune.”
Thomas Marshall, the father of the Chief Justice, two years older than Washington, was also born in Westmoreland County, was a schoolmate of Washington, served with him both as surveyor of the Fairfax estates, and soon afterwards, as an officer in the French and Indian wars; and he, too, as time passed, found like advantage from his experience as a surveyor.
In 1753, Thomas Marshall was made agent of Lord Fairfax in the management of his estates. In the next year, he married Mary Isham Keith, daughter of a Scotch clergyman, whose wife was a descendant of William Randolph, of Turkey Island, the ancestor of the famous Virginia family of that name. Their son, John Marshall, the oldest of fifteen children, was born on September 24, 1755, in what was afterwards Fauquier County, at a little settlement then known as Germantown,—now Midland, on the Southern Railroad, a few miles south of Manassas. That was the year of Braddock’s defeat, and Thomas Marshall, like Washington, was in the service, as an officer.
In Marshall’s early childhood, his father’s household, situated in a frontier county, must have been agitated with the dreadful rumors, anxieties, and terrors of the troubles with the French and Indians. “So late,” he tells us in the “Life of Washington,” “as the year 1756, the Blue Ridge was the northwestern frontier; and [Virginia] found immense difficulty in completing a single regiment to protect the inhabitants from the horrors of the scalping-knife, and the still greater horrors of being led into captivity by savages who added terrors to death by the manner of inflicting it.” It was not until two years later that the capture of Fort Duquesne relieved Virginia from the frightful ravages that laid waste the region just west of the Blue Ridge.
When John Marshall was ten years old or more, his father left the level country and poor soil of eastern Fauquier, for the higher and more fertile region in the western part of the county, just under the Blue Ridge. At Midland all they can show you now, relating to Marshall, is a small, rude heap of bricks and rubbish,—what is left of the house where he was born; and children on the farm reach out to you a handful of the bullets with which that sacred spot and the whole region were thickly sown, before a generation had passed, after his death.
Marshall’s education was got from his father, from such teachers as the neighborhood furnished, and, for about a year, at a school in Westmoreland County, where his father and George Washington had attended, and where James Monroe was his own schoolmate. But most he owed to his father,—a man of good stock, of enterprise, experience, strong character and sense, himself of no mean education,—who, personally, took great pains with the training of his children. Marshall admired his father, and declared him to be a far abler man than any of his sons. From him and the teachers provided for him his son got a good knowledge of English history, literature, and poetry, and a fair acquaintance with the classics.
All Marshall’s later youth was passed in the mountain region of Fauquier County, under the Blue Ridge. Judge Story declared that it was to the hardy, athletic habits of his youth among the mountains, operating, we may well conjecture, upon a happy physical inheritance, “that he probably owed that robust and vigorous constitution which carried him almost to the close of his life with the freshness and firmness of manhood.”
The house that Marshall’s father built at Oakhill is still standing, an unpretending, small, frame building, having connected with it now, as a part of it, another house built by Marshall’s son Thomas. At one time the farm comprised an estate of six thousand acres.[1] Since 1865 it has passed out of the hands of the family. It is beautifully placed on high, rolling ground, looking over a great stretch of fertile country, and along the chain of the Blue Ridge, close by. To this region, where his children and kindred lived, about a hundred miles from Richmond, Marshall delighted to resort in the summer, all his life long. In the autumn of 1807, after the Burr trial, he writes to a friend, “The day after the commitment of Colonel Burr for a misdemeanor, I galloped to the mountains.” “I am on the wing,” he tells Judge Story in 1828, “for my friends in the upper country, where I shall find rest and dear friends, occupied more with their farms than with party politics.”
When Marshall was about eighteen years old he began to study Blackstone; but he quickly dropped it, for the troubles with Great Britain thickened, and, like his neighbors, he prepared for fighting.
He seems to have found a copy of Blackstone in his father’s house, as he had found there much other sterling English literature. It was then a new book, but already famous. Published in England in 1765-69, a thousand copies had been taken in this country;[2] and just now the first American edition was out (Philadelphia, 1771-72), in which the list of subscribers, headed by the name of “John Adams, barrister at law, Boston,” had also that of “Captain Thomas Marshall, Clerk of Dunmore County.” Dunmore County, now Shenandoah, was then a very new county, just over the Blue Ridge from Fauquier; and it is believed that there was but one Captain Thomas Marshall in those parts.
The earliest personal description of Marshall that we have belongs to this period. It is preserved in Horace Binney’s admirable address at Philadelphia, after Marshall’s death. He gives it from the pen of an eyewitness, a “venerable kinsman” of Marshall. News had come, in May, 1775, of the fighting at Concord and Lexington. The account shows us the youth, as lieutenant, drilling a company of soldiers in Fauquier County:—
“He was about six feet high, straight, and rather slender, of dark complexion, showing little if any rosy red, yet good health, the outline of the face nearly a circle, and within that, eyes dark to blackness,[3] strong and penetrating, beaming with intelligence and good nature; an upright forehead, rather low, was terminated in a horizontal line by a mass of raven-black hair, of unusual thickness and strength. The features of the face were in harmony with this outline, and the temples fully developed. The result of this combination was interesting and very agreeable. The body and limbs indicated agility rather than strength, in which, however, he was by no means deficient. He wore a purple or pale blue hunting-shirt, and trousers of the same material fringed with white. A round black hat, mounted with the buck’s tail for a cockade, crowned the figure and the man. He went through the manual exercise by word and motion, deliberately pronounced and performed in the presence of the company, before he required the men to imitate him; and then proceeded to exercise them with the most perfect temper.…
“After a few lessons the company were dismissed, and informed that if they wished to hear more about the war, and would form a circle about him, he would tell them what he understood about it. The circle was formed, and he addressed the company for something like an hour. He then challenged an acquaintance to a game of quoits, and they closed the day with foot-races and other athletic exercises, at which there was no betting.”
“This,” adds Mr. Binney, “is a portrait, to which in simplicity, gayety of heart, and manliness of spirit, in everything but the symbols of the youthful soldier, and one or two of those lineaments which the hand of time, however gentle, changes and perhaps improves, he never lost his resemblance.”
Marshall accompanied his father to the war as a lieutenant, and in a year or two became a captain. In leaving the father here, it may be said that three of his sons were with him in the war, and that he himself served with gallantry and distinction as a colonel. In 1780, he was at the South with General Lincoln, and being included in the surrender of that officer and on parole, visited Kentucky, not yet a State. After a few years he removed there with the younger part of his family, leaving Oakhill, as it seems, in the hands of his son John. He died in Kentucky in 1806, having survived to witness the successive honors of his son culminate in his becoming Chief Justice of the United States.[4]
It was in the autumn of 1775 that Marshall, as lieutenant in a regiment of minutemen, of which his father was major, marched down through the country to the seaboard to resist Lord Dunmore’s aggressions. They were clothed, we are told, in green home-spun hunting-shirts, having the words “Liberty or Death” in large letters on the breast, with bucks’ tails in their hats, and tomahawks and scalping-knives in their belts. The enemy at Norfolk feared, it is said, for their scalps, but they lost none.[5]
He was thus in the first fighting in Virginia, in the fall of 1775, at Norfolk; afterwards he served in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York; and again in Virginia toward the end of the war. He was at Valley Forge, in the fighting at the Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Stony Point, and Paulus Hook, between 1776 and 1779. He served often as judge advocate, and in this way was brought into personal relations with Washington and Hamilton. A fellow officer and messmate describes him, during the dreadful winter at Valley Forge, as neither discouraged nor disturbed by anything, content with whatever turned up, and cheering everybody by his exuberance of spirits and “his inexhaustible fund of anecdote.” He was “idolized by the soldiers and his brother officers.”
President Quincy gives us a glimpse of him at this period, as he heard him described at a dinner with John Randolph and a large company of Virginians and other Southern gentlemen. They were talking of Marshall’s early life and his athletic powers. “It was said in them that he surpassed any man in the army; that when the soldiers were idle at their quarters, it was usual for the officers to engage in matches of quoits, or in jumping and racing; that he would throw a quoit farther, and beat at a race any other; that he was the only man who, with a running jump, could clear a stick laid on the heads of two men as tall as himself. On one occasion he ran in his stocking feet with a comrade. His mother, in knitting his stockings, had the legs of blue yarn and the heels of white. This circumstance, combined with his uniform success in the race, led the soldiers, who were always present at these races, to give him the sobriquet of ‘Silver-Heels,’ the name by which he was generally known among them.”
Toward the end of 1779, owing to the disbanding of Virginia troops at the end of their term of service, he was left without a command, and went to Virginia to await the action of the legislature as to raising new troops. It was a fortunate visit; for at Yorktown he met the young girl who, two or three years later, was to become his wife; and he was also able to improve his leisure by attending, for a few months in the early part of 1780, two courses of lectures at the college, on law and natural philosophy. This was all of college or university that he ever saw; but later, from several of them, he received their highest honors. In 1802 the college of New Jersey (Princeton, where his oldest son, Thomas, was to graduate in 1803), in 1806, Harvard, and in 1815, the University of Pennsylvania, made him doctor of laws.[6] Marshall’s opportunity for studying law, under George Wythe, at William and Mary College, seems to have been owing to a change in the curriculum, made, just at that time, at the instance of Jefferson, governor of the State, and, in that capacity, visitor of the college. The chair of divinity had just been abolished, and one of law and police, and another of medicine, were substituted. On December 29, 1779, the faculty voted that, “for the encouragement of science, a student, on paying annually 1000 pounds of tobacco, shall be entitled to attend any school of the following professors, viz.: of Law and Police; of Natural Philosophy and Mathematics,” etc. Marshall chose the two courses above named; he must have been one of the very first to avail himself of this new privilege. He remained only one term. In view of what was to happen by and by, it is interesting to observe that this opportunity for education in law came through the agency of Thomas Jefferson.
The records of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at William and Mary College, where that now famous society had originated less than a year and a half before, show that on the 18th of May, 1780, “Captain John Marshall, being recommended as a gentleman who would make a worthy member of the society, was balloted for and received;” and three days later he was appointed, with others, “to declaim the question whether any form of government is more favorable to public virtue than a Commonwealth.” Bushrod Washington and other well-known names are found among his associates in this chapter, which has been well called “an admirable nursery of patriots and statesmen.”
It was in the summer of 1780 that Marshall was licensed to practice law.
During this visit to Virginia, as I have said, he met the beautiful little lady, fourteen years old, who became his wife at the age of sixteen, was to be the mother of his ten children,[7] and was to receive from him the most entire devotion until the day of her death in 1831. Some letters of her older sister, Mrs. Carrington, written to another sister, have lately been printed, which give us a glimpse of Captain Marshall in his twenty-fifth year. These ladies were the daughters of Jaquelin Ambler, formerly collector of customs at Yorktown, and then treasurer of the colony, and living in that town, next door to the family of Colonel Marshall. Their mother was that Rebecca Burwell, for whom, under the name of “Belinda,” Jefferson had languished, in his youthful correspondence of some twenty years before. The girls had often heard the captain’s letters to his family, and had the highest expectations when they learned that he was coming home from the war. They were to meet him first at a ball, and were contending for the prize beforehand. Mary, the youngest, carried it off. “At the first introduction,” writes her sister, who was but one year older, “he became devoted to her.” “For my own part,” she adds, “I felt not the smallest wish to contest the prize with her.… She, with a glance, divined his character, … while I, expecting an Adonis, lost all desire of becoming agreeable in his eyes when I beheld his awkward, unpolished manner and total negligence of person.” “How trivial now seem all such objections!” she exclaims, writing in 1810, and going on to speak with the utmost admiration of his relations to herself and all her family, and above all, to his wife. “His exemplary tenderness to our unfortunate sister is without parallel. With a delicacy of frame and feeling that baffles all description, she became, early after her marriage, a prey to extreme nervous affection, which, more or less, has embittered her comfort through her whole life; but this has only seemed to increase his care and tenderness, and he is, as you know, as entirely devoted as at the moment of their first being married. Always and under every circumstance an enthusiast in love, I have very lately heard him declare that he looked with astonishment at the present race of lovers, so totally unlike what he had been himself. His never-failing cheerfulness and good humor are a perpetual source of delight to all connected with him, and, I have not a doubt, have been the means of prolonging the life of her he is so tenderly devoted to.”
“He was her devoted lover to the very end of her life,” another member of his family connection has said. And Judge Story, in speaking of him after his wife’s death, described him as “the most extraordinary man I ever saw for the depth and tenderness of his feelings.”
A little touch of his manner to his wife is seen in a letter, which is in print, written to her from the city of Washington, on February 23, 1825, in his seventieth year. He had received an injury to his knee, about which Mrs. Marshall was anxious. “I shall be out,” he writes, “in a few days. All the ladies of the secretaries have been to see me, some more than once, and have brought me more jelly than I could eat, and many other things. I thank them, and stick to my barley broth. Still I have lots of time on my hands. How do you think I beguile it? I am almost tempted to leave you to guess, until I write again. You must know that I begin with the ball at York, our splendid assembly at the Palace in Williamsburg, my visit to Richmond for a fortnight, my return to the field, and the very welcome reception you gave me on my arrival at Dover, our little tiffs and makings-up, my feelings when Major Dick[8] was courting you, my trip to the Cottage [the Ambler home in Hanover County, where the marriage took place],[9]—the thousand little incidents, deeply affecting, in turn.”
This “ball at York” was the one of which Mrs. Carrington wrote; and of the “assembly at the Palace” she also gave an account, remarking that “Marshall was devoted to my sister.”
Miss Martineau, who saw him the year before he died, speaks with great emphasis of what she calls his “reverence” and his affectionate respect for women. There were many signs of this all through his life. Even in the grave and too monotonous course of his “Life of Washington,” one comes now and then upon a little gleam of this sort, that lights up the page; as when he speaks of Washington’s engagement to Mrs. Custis, a lady “who to a large fortune and a fine person added those amiable accomplishments which … fill with silent but unceasing felicity the quiet scenes of private life.” When he is returning from France, in 1798, he writes gayly back from Bordeaux to the Secretary of Legation at Paris: “Present me to my friends in Paris; and have the goodness to say to Madame Vilette, in my name and in the handsomest manner, everything which respectful friendship can dictate. When you have done that, you will have rendered not quite half justice to my sentiments.” “He was a man,” said Judge Story, “of deep sensibility and tenderness; … whatever may be his fame in the eyes of the world, that which, in a just sense, was his brightest glory was the purity, affectionateness, liberality, and devotedness of his domestic life.”
Marshall left the army in 1781, when most of the fighting in Virginia was over; and began practice in Fauquier County when the courts were opened, after Cornwallis’s surrender, in October of that year.
Among his neighbors he was always a favorite. In the spring of 1782 he was elected to the Assembly, and in the autumn to the important office of member of the “Privy Council, or Council of State,” consisting of eight persons chosen by joint ballot of the two houses of the Assembly. “Young Mr. Marshall,” wrote Edmund Pendleton, presiding judge of the Court of Appeals, to Madison, in November of that year, “is elected a councilor.… He is clever, but I think too young for that department, which he should rather have earned, as a retirement and reward, by ten or twelve years of hard service.” But, whether young or old, the people were forever forcing him into public life. Eight times he was sent to the Assembly; in 1788 to the Federal Convention of Virginia, and in 1798 to Congress.
Unwelcome as it was to him, almost always, to have his brilliant and congenial place and prospects at the bar thus interfered with, we can see now what an admirable preparation all this was for the great station, which, a little later, to the endless benefit of his country, he was destined to fill. What drove him into office so often was, in a great degree, that delightful and remarkable combination of qualities which made everybody love and trust him, even his political adversaries, so that he could be chosen when no one else of his party was available. In this way, happily for his country, he was led to consider, early and deeply, those difficult problems of government that distressed the country in the dark period after the close of the war, and during the first dozen years of the Federal Constitution.
As regards the effect of his earlier experience in enlarging the circle of a patriot’s thoughts and affections, he himself has said: “I am disposed to ascribe my devotion to the Union, and to a government competent to its preservation, at least as much to casual circumstances as to judgment. I had grown up at a time … when the maxim, ‘United we stand, divided we fall,’ was the maxim of every orthodox American; and I had imbibed these sentiments so thoroughly that they constituted a part of my being. I carried them with me into the army, where I found myself associated with brave men from different States who were risking life and everything valuable in a common cause; … and where I was confirmed in the habit of considering America as my country and Congress as my government.” It was this confirmed “habit of considering America as my country,” communicated by him to his countrymen, which enabled them to carry through the great struggle of forty years ago, and to save for us all, North and South, the inestimable treasure of the Union.
After Marshall’s marriage, in January, 1783, he made Richmond his home for the rest of his life. It was still a little town, but it had lately become the capital of the State, and the strongest men at the bar gradually gathered there. Marshall met them all. One has only to look at the law reports of Call and Washington to see the place that he won. He is found in most of the important cases. In his time no man’s name occurs oftener, probably none so often.
The earliest case in which the printed reports show his name is that of Hite v. Fairfax (4 Call’s Reports, 42), in May, 1786, and his argument seems to be fully reported. It was a very important case, and Marshall represented tenants of Lord Fairfax. There were conflicting grants on the famous “Northern Neck” of Virginia, an extensive region given by the crown to Lord Fairfax’s ancestor, whose boundaries had been in dispute. It comprised the land between the Potomac and the Rappahannock, “within the heads of the rivers … the courses of the said rivers, as they are commonly called or known by the inhabitants and descriptions of those parts, and Chesapeake Bay, together with the rivers themselves and all the islands within the banks of the rivers.” This description was finally admitted by the crown (in 1745) to include all the land between the head springs of the Potomac and those of the south branch of the Rappahannock. Bishop Meade[10] describes it as the region which, beginning on the Chesapeake Bay, lies between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers, and crossing the Blue Ridge, or passing through it with the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry, extends with that river to the heads thereof in the Alleghany Mountains, and thence by a straight line crosses the North Mountain and Blue Ridge at the headwaters of the Rappahannock, … “the most fertile part of Virginia.”
Marshall had now to meet a total denial of Lord Fairfax’s title. His argument of ten or twelve pages shows already the characteristics, the cogency, clear method, and neat precision of thought and speech, by which his later work was marked. “I had conceived,” he says, “that it was not more certain that there was such a tract of country as the Northern Neck than that Lord Fairfax was the proprietor of it.… Gentlemen cannot suppose that a grant made by the crown to the ancestor for services rendered or even for affection can be invalidated in the hands of an heir because these services and affections are forgotten, or because the thing granted has, from causes which must have been foreseen, become more valuable than when it was given. And if it could not be invalidated in the hands of the heir, much less can it be in the hands of the purchaser.” As regards the construction of the grant: “Whether Lord Fairfax’s grant extended originally beyond the forks of the rivers or not, will no more admit of argument than it ever could have admitted of a doubt. But whether it should be bounded by the north or south fork of the Rappahannock was a question involved in more uncertainty.… It is, however, no longer a question, for it has been decided.… That decision did not create or extend Lord Fairfax’s right, but determined what the right originally was. The bounds of many patents are doubtful; the extent of many titles uncertain: but when a decision is once made on them, it removes the doubt and ascertains what the original boundaries were.” In reference to a personal appeal in behalf of certain settlers, he says, “Those who explore and settle new countries are generally bold, hardy, and adventurous men, whose minds as well as bodies are fitted to encounter danger and fatigue; their object is the acquisition of property, and they generally succeed. None will say that the complainants have failed; and if their hardships and dangers have any weight in the court, the defendants share in them, and have equal claim to countenance; for they, too, with humbler views and less extensive prospects, have explored, bled for, and settled a till then uncultivated desert.”
Compare with this the like simple felicity and exactness of expression in his last reported utterance in court, when he was closing his great career as Chief Justice of the United States, forty-nine years later. He is refusing a motion for delay: “The court has taken into its serious and anxious consideration the motion made on the part of the government to continue the cause of Mitchel v. The United States to the next term. Though the hope of deciding causes to the mutual satisfaction of parties would be chimerical, that of convincing them that the case has been fully and fairly considered, that due attention has been given to the arguments of counsel, and that the best judgment of the court has been exercised on the case, may be sometimes indulged. Even this is not always attainable. In the excitement produced by ardent controversy, gentlemen view the same object through such different media that minds not unfrequently receive therefrom precisely opposite impressions. The court, however, must see with its own eyes, and exercise its own judgment guided by its own reason.… The opinion of the court will be delivered.”[11]
At first, he had brought from the army, and from his home on the frontier, simple and rustic ways which surprised some persons at Richmond, whose conception of greatness was associated with very different models of dress and behavior. “He was one morning strolling,” we are told, “through the streets of Richmond, attired in a plain linen roundabout and shorts, with his hat under his arm, from which he was eating cherries, when he stopped in the porch of the Eagle Hotel, indulged in a little pleasantry with the landlord, and then passed on.” A gentleman from the country was present, who had a case coming on before the Court of Appeals, and was referred by the landlord to Marshall as the best lawyer to employ. But “the careless, languid air” of Marshall had so prejudiced the man that he refused to employ him. The clerk, when this client entered the court-room, also recommended Marshall, but the other would have none of him. A venerable-looking lawyer, with powdered wig and in black cloth, soon entered, and the gentleman engaged him. In the first case that came up, this man and Marshall spoke on opposite sides. The gentleman listened, saw his mistake, and secured Marshall at once; frankly telling him the whole story, and adding that while he had come with one hundred dollars to pay his lawyer, he had but five dollars left. Marshall good-naturedly took this, and helped in the case. In the Virginia Federal Convention of 1788, at the age of thirty-three, he is described, rising after Monroe had spoken, as “a tall young man, slovenly dressed in loose summer apparel.… His manners, like those of Monroe, were in strange contrast with those of Edmund Randolph or of Grayson.”
In such stories as these, one is reminded, as he is often reminded, of a resemblance between Marshall and Lincoln. Very different men they were, but both thorough Americans, with unborrowed character and manners, and a lifelong flavor derived from no other soil.
At the height of Marshall’s reputation, in 1797, a French writer, who had visited Richmond lately, in speaking of Edmund Randolph, says, “He has a great practice, and stands, in that respect, nearly on a par with Mr. J. Marshall, the most esteemed and celebrated counselor of this town.” He mentions Marshall’s annual income as being four or five thousand dollars. “Even by his friends,” it is added, “he is taxed with some little propensity to indolence, but he nevertheless displays great superiority when he applies his mind to business.” Another contemporary, who praises his force and eloquence in speaking, yet says: “It is difficult to rouse his faculties. He begins with reluctance, hesitation, and vacancy of eye.… He reminds one of some great bird, which flounders on the earth for a while before it acquires impetus to sustain its soaring flight.” And finally, William Wirt, who was seventeen years Marshall’s junior, and came to the bar in 1792, when Marshall was nearly at the head of it, writing anonymously in 1804, describes him as one, “who, without the advantage of person, voice, attitude, gesture, or any of the ornaments of an orator, deserves to be considered as one of the most eloquent men in the world.” He attributes to him “one original and almost supernatural faculty, … of developing a subject by a single glance of his mind.… His eyes do not fly over a landscape and take in its various objects with more promptitude and facility than his mind embraces and analyzes the most complex subject.… All his eloquence consists in the apparently deep self-conviction and the emphatic earnestness and energy of his style, the close and logical connection of his thoughts, and the easy gradations by which he opens his lights on the attentive minds of his hearers.”
In 1789 he declined the office of District Attorney of the United States at Richmond,[12] in 1795 that of Attorney-General of the United States, and in 1796 that of Minister to France, all offered him by Washington. When President Adams persuaded him, in 1797, to go, with Pinckney and Gerry, as envoy to France, he wrote to Gerry of “General Marshall” (as he was then called, from his rank of brigadier general, since 1793, in the Virginia militia), “He is a plain man, very sensible, cautious, guarded, and learned in the law of nations.” The extraordinary details of that unsuccessful six months’ attempt to come to terms with France are found in Marshall’s very able dispatches and in the diary which he kept;[13] for, with the instinct of a man of affairs, he failed not to remember, with Thomas Gray, that “a note is worth a cartload of recollections.” His own part in the business was marked by great moderation and ability; and on his return, in 1798, he was received at Philadelphia with remarkable demonstrations and the utmost enthusiasm. A correspondent of Rufus King, writing from New York in July of that year, says, “No two men can be more beloved and honored than Pinckney and Marshall;” and again in November: “Saving General Washington, I believe the President, Pinckney, and Marshall are the most popular characters now in our country. There is a certain something in the correspondence of Pinckney and Marshall … that has united all heads and hearts in their eulogy.” It is understood that the American side of this correspondence was by Marshall. Gerry had allowed himself in a measure to be detached by the Directory from his associates, to their great displeasure. With them, in important respects, he disagreed.
Among those who paid their respects to Marshall, on his return from France, was Thomas Jefferson, the Vice-President, whose correspondence shows him at the time expressing the most unflattering opinion of the envoys. Jefferson wrote to Marshall the following note: “In after years,” says Mrs. Hardy, one of Marshall’s descendants,[14] “the Chief Justice frequently laughed over it, saying, ‘Mr. Jefferson came very near telling me the truth; the added un to lucky, policy alone demanded.’” The note ran thus: “Thos. Jefferson presents his compliments to General Marshall. He had the honor of calling at his lodgings twice this morning, but was so {un}^lucky as to find that he was out on both occasions. He wished to have expressed in person his regret that a pre-engagement for to-day, which could not be dispensed with, would prevent him the satisfaction of dining in company with Genl. Marshall, and, therefore, begs leave to place here the expressions of that respect which in company with his fellow-citizens he bears him.
“Genl. Marshall,
at Oeller’s Hotel, June 23d, 1798.”
In 1798 Adams offered to Marshall the seat on the Supreme Bench, made vacant by the death of James Wilson. He declined it; and it went to his old associate at William and Mary College, Bushrod Washington. Marshall did yield, however, to General Washington’s urgent request to stand for Congress that year. He held out long against Washington’s arguments, and only yielded, at last, when that venerated man called attention to his own recent sacrifice in accepting the unwelcome place of lieutenant-general of the army. When that went into the scale it was too much. Marshall was then on a visit to Mount Vernon, whither he had been invited in August or September, in company with Washington’s nephew, the coming judge.
On their way to Mount Vernon, the two travelers met with a misadventure which gave great amusement to Washington, and of which he enjoyed telling his friends. They came on horseback, and carried but one pair of saddlebags, each using one side. Arriving thoroughly drenched by rain, they were shown to a chamber to change their garments. One opened his side of the bags and drew forth a black bottle of whiskey. He insisted that he had opened his companion’s repository. Unlocking the other side, they found a big twist of tobacco, some corn bread, and the equipment of a pack-saddle. They had exchanged saddlebags with some traveler, and now had to appear in a ludicrous misfit of borrowed clothes.[15]
The election of Marshall to Congress excited great interest.[16] Washington heartily rejoiced in it. Jefferson, on the other hand, remarked that while Marshall might trouble the Republicans somewhat, yet he would now be unmasked. He had been popular with the mass of the people, Jefferson said, from his “lax, lounging manners,” and with wiser men through a “profound hypocrisy.” But now his British principles would stand revealed.
The New England Federalists were very curious about him; they had been alarmed and outraged, during the campaign, by his expressing opposition to the alien and sedition laws; but they were much impressed by him. Theodore Sedgwick wrote to Rufus King that he had “great powers, and much dexterity in the application of them.… We can do nothing without him.” But Sedgwick wished that “his education had been on the other side of the Delaware.” George Cabot wrote to King: “General Marshall is a leader.… But you see in him the faults of a Virginian.… He thinks too much of that State, and he expects that the world will be governed by rules of logic.” But Cabot hopes to see him improve, and adds, “He seems calculated to act a great part.” In the end, the Northern Federalists were disappointed in finding him too moderate. He held the place of leader of the House, and passed into the cabinet in May, 1800. On January 31, 1801, he was commissioned as Chief Justice.
