There is more to be said of Marshall’s private and personal life. After he went on the bench, his principal non-judicial work, in the nature of public service, seems to have been writing the “Life of Washington,” with the later revision and reconstruction of that work, and his activity in a few matters of not too partisan a sort, such as were likely to engage the attention of a public-spirited citizen.

In 1813, at a meeting of the citizens of Richmond, he was appointed member of a Committee of Vigilance, to aid in defending the city against attack from the British. On June 28 he made a report, for a sub-committee, that it was inexpedient to undertake to fortify the city. After stating the topographical and other reasons for such an opinion, the report goes on thus: “Your committee are too conscious of their destitution of professional skill to advance with any confidence the opinion they have formed; but the resolution under which they act having made it their duty to give an opinion, they say, though with much diffidence, that they do not think any attempt to fortify the city advisable. It is to be saved by operations in the open field, by facing the enemy with a force which may deter him from any attempt to penetrate the interior of our country, and which may impress him with the danger of separating himself from his ships. If this protection cannot be afforded, Richmond must share the fate of other places which are in similar circumstances. Throughout the world, open towns belong to the army which is master of the country.… If the militia be put into the best condition for service, if the light artillery be well manned and supplied with horses, so as to move with celerity to any point where its services may be required; if the cavalry be kept entire and in active service; if the precaution of supplying in sufficient quantity all the implements of war be taken, your committee hope and believe that this town will have no reason to fear the invading foe.”[42]

In those efforts on the part of some of the leaders of Virginia and the South, early in the century, to rid themselves of slavery, to which we at the North have never done sufficient justice, Marshall took an active part.

The American Colonization Society was organized in 1816 or 1817, with Bushrod Washington for president. In 1823 an auxiliary society was organized at Richmond, of which Marshall was president, an office which he held nearly or quite up to the time of his death. It is interesting to observe that one of the plans for colonization was to have worked out the abolition of slavery in Virginia in the year 1901. Of slavery Marshall wrote to a friend, in 1826: “I concur with you in thinking that nothing portends more calamity and mischief to the Southern States than their slave population. Yet they seem to cherish the evil, and to view with immovable prejudice and dislike everything which may tend to diminish it. I do not wonder that they should resist any attempt, should one be made, to interfere with the rights of property, but they have a feverish jealousy of measures which may do good without the hazard of harm, that, I think, very unwise.”

In 1828, Marshall presided, in Virginia, over a convention to promote internal improvements. On this subject he held and freely expressed views, such as are now generally entertained, as to the power of the general government, and the expediency of exerting them.[43]

In 1829, he allowed himself to be elected to the Virginia convention for revising the state constitution, and took an active part in the debates. “Tall, in a long surtout of blue, with a face of genius and an eye of fire,” is the description that is given of him in the convention. On several questions he influenced greatly the course of the convention, especially in continuing, for a score of years to come, the judicial tenure of office during good behavior.

Marshall’s membership of the society of Free Masons is sometimes spoken of. It should be said that he lived to condemn that organization. During the political excitement which followed the abduction of Morgan, he was asked for information as to some praise of Freemasonry which had been publicly attributed to him, and replied, in October, 1833, that he was not particularly interested in the anti-masonic excitement. “The agitations which convulse the North did not pass the Potomac. Consequently … I felt no inclination to volunteer in a distant conflict, in which the wounds that might be received would not be soothed by the consoling reflection that he suffered in the performance of a necessary duty.” And he added that he had “never affirmed that there was any positive good or ill in the institution itself.” This cautious letter is illustrated by an earlier one, in July, 1833, in which, writing confidentially to Edward Everett, he says that he became a Mason soon after he entered the army, and afterwards continued in the society because his neighbors did. “I followed the crowd for a time, without attaching the least importance to its object or giving myself the trouble to inquire why others did. It soon lost its attraction, and though there are several lodges in the city of Richmond, I have not been in one of them for more than forty years, except on an invitation to accompany General Lafayette, nor have I been a member of one of them for more than thirty. It was impossible not to perceive the useless pageantry of the whole exhibition.” And he adds that he has become convinced “that the institution ought to be abandoned, as one capable of producing much evil and incapable of producing any good which might not be effected by safe and open means.”[44]

As to Marshall’s religious affiliations, he was a regular and devoted attendant, all his life, of the Episcopal Church, in which he was brought up; taking an active part in the services and the responses, and kneeling in prayer, we are told, even when the pews were so narrow that his tall form had to be accommodated by the projection of his feet into the aisle. His friend, Bishop Meade, the Episcopal bishop of Virginia, states that he was never a communicant in that church; and he quotes a letter from an Episcopal clergyman who often visited Mrs. Harvie, Marshall’s only daughter, in her last illness, and who reports from her the statement that, during the last months of his life, he told her “that the reason why he never communed was that he was a Unitarian in opinion, though he never joined their society.” It is added, however, in the same letter, that Mrs. Harvie, a person “of the strictest probity, the most humble piety, and the most clear and discriminating mind,” also said that, during these last months, Marshall read Keith on Prophecy, and was convinced by that work, and the fuller investigation to which it led, of the supreme divinity of Jesus, and wished to commune, but thought it his duty to do it publicly; and while waiting for the opportunity, died.

The reader of such a statement seems to perceive or to conjecture an anxiety to relieve the memory of the Chief Justice of an opprobrium. Whatever the exact fact may be about this late change in opinion, there is little occasion to be surprised that Marshall shared, during his active life, the opinions of his friend Judge Story. The genuineness and the simplicity of Marshall’s lifelong piety are indicated by another statement reported from Mrs. Harvie: “Her father told her that he never went to bed without concluding his prayer with those which his mother taught him when a child, viz. the Lord’s prayer and the prayer beginning, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.’”

Marshall was a man of vigorous physique. “He was always,” says a descendant,[45] “devoted to walking, but more especially before breakfast in the early morning. A venerable professor I met in Washington told me that, when he was a boy, regularly every morning at seven o’clock, when he was on his way to school, he met the Chief Justice returning from a long walk. He walked rapidly always. Hon. Horace Binney says: ‘After doing my best one morning to overtake Chief Justice Marshall, in his quick march to the Capitol, when he was nearer to eighty than seventy, I asked him to what cause in particular he attributed that strong and quick step, and he replied that he thought it was most due to his commission in the army of the Revolution, in which he had been a regular foot practitioner for six years.’”

We often hear of the Chief Justice at his “Quoit Club.” He was a famous player at quoits. A club had been formed by some of the early Scotch settlers of Richmond, and it came to include among its members leading men of the city, such as Marshall, Wirt, Nicholas, Call, Munford, and others. Chester Harding, the artist who painted the full-length portrait of Marshall that hangs in the Boston AthenÆum, tells us of seeing him at the Quoit Club. Fortunately, language does not, like paint, limit the artist to a single moment of time. He gives us the Chief Justice in action. Marshall was then attending the Virginia Constitutional Convention, which sat from October, 1829, to January, 1830. The Quoit Club used to meet every week in a beautiful grove, about a mile from the city. Harding went early. “I watched,” he says, “for the coming of the old chief. He soon approached, with his coat on his arm and his hat in his hand, which he was using as a fan. He walked directly up to a large bowl of mint julep, which had been prepared, and drank off a tumblerful of the liquid, smacking his lips, and then turned to the company with a cheerful ‘How are you, gentlemen?’ He was looked upon as the best pitcher of the party, and could throw heavier quoits than any other member of the club. The game began with great animation. There were several ties; and before long I saw the great Chief Justice of the United States down on his knees, measuring the contested distance with a straw, with as much earnestness as if it had been a point of law; and if he proved to be in the right, the woods would ring with his triumphant shout.”[46]

An entertaining account has been preserved[47] of a meeting of the club, held, apparently, while Marshall was still at the bar, at which he and Wickham—a leading Virginia lawyer, one of the counsel of Aaron Burr—were the caterers. At the table Marshall announced that at the last meeting two members had introduced politics, a forbidden subject, and had been fined a basket of champagne, and that this was now produced, as a warning to evil-doers; as the club seldom drank this article, they had no champagne glasses, and must drink it in tumblers. Those who played quoits retired, after a while, for a game. Most of the members had smooth, highly polished brass quoits. But Marshall’s were large, rough, heavy, and of iron, such as few of the members could throw well from hub to hub. Marshall himself threw them with great success and accuracy, and often “rang the meg.” On this occasion Marshall and the Rev. Mr. Blair led the two parties of players. Marshall played first, and rang the meg. Parson Blair did the same, and his quoit came down plumply on top of Marshall’s. There was uproarious applause, which drew out all the others from the dinner; and then came an animated controversy as to what should be the effect of this exploit. They all returned to the table, had another bottle of champagne, and listened to arguments, one from Marshall, pro se, and one from Wickham for Parson Blair. The company decided against Marshall. His argument is a humorous companion piece to any one of his elaborate judicial opinions. He began by formulating the question, “Who is winner when the adversary quoits are on the meg at the same time?” He then stated the facts, and remarked that the question was one of the true construction and application of the rules of the game. The one first ringing the meg has the advantage. No other can succeed who does not begin by displacing this first one. The parson, he willingly allowed, deserves to rise higher and higher in everybody’s esteem; but then he mustn’t do it by getting on another’s back in this fashion. That is more like leapfrog than quoits. Then, again, the legal maxim is, Cujus est solum, ejus est usque ad coelum,—his own right as first occupant extends to the vault of heaven; no opponent can gain any advantage by squatting on his back. He must either bring a writ of ejectment, or drive him out vi et armis. And then, after further argument of the same sort, he asked judgment, and sat down amidst great applause.

Mr. Wickham then rose, and made an argument of a similar pattern. No rule, he said, requires an impossibility. Mr. Marshall’s quoit is twice as large as any other; and yet it flies from his arm like the iron ball at the Grecian games from the arm of Ajax. It is an iron quoit, unpolished, jagged, and of enormous weight. It is impossible for an ordinary quoit to move it. With much more of the same sort, he contended that it was a drawn game. After very animated voting, designed to keep up the uncertainty as long as possible, it was so decided. Another trial was had, and Marshall clearly won.

All his life he played this game. There is an account of a country barbecue in the mountain region, where a casual guest saw him, then an old man, emerge from a thicket which bordered a brook, carrying a pile of flat stones as large as he could hold between his right arm and his chin. He stepped briskly up to the company and threw them down. “There! Here are quoits enough for us all.”

Of Marshall’s simple habits, remarkable modesty, and engaging simplicity of conduct and demeanor, every one who knew him speaks. These things were in the grain, and outlasted all the wear and tear of life. “What was it in him which most impressed you?” asked one of his descendants, now a distinguished judge,[48] of an older relative who had known him. “His humility,” was her answer. “With Marshall,” wrote President Quincy, “I had considerable acquaintance during the eight years I was member of Congress, from 1805 to 1813, played chess with him, and never failed to be impressed with the frank, cordial, childlike simplicity and unpretending manner of the man, of whose strength and breadth of intellectual power I was … well apprised.”

“Nothing was more usual,” we are told, as regards his life in Richmond, “than to see him returning from market, at sunrise, with poultry in one hand and a basket of vegetables in the other.” And, again, some one speaks of meeting him on horseback, at sunrise, with a bag of seeds before him, on his way to his farm, three or four miles out of town. It was of this farm that he wrote to James Monroe, his old friend and schoolmate, about passing so much time in “laborious relaxation.” The italics are his own.

In speaking of Marshall’s personal qualities and ways, I must quote from those exquisite passages in Judge Story’s address, delivered in the fall of 1835, to the Suffolk bar, in which his own true affection found expression: “Upon a first introduction he would be thought to be cold and reserved; but he was neither the one nor the other. It was simply a habit of easy taciturnity, watching, as it were, his own turn to follow the line of conversation, and not to presume to lead it.… Meet him in a stage-coach as a stranger, and travel with him a whole day, and you would only be struck with his readiness to administer to the accommodation of others, and his anxiety to appropriate least to himself. Be with him the unknown guest at an inn, and he seemed adjusted to the very scene; partaking of the warm welcome of its comforts, whenever found; and if not found, resigning himself without complaint to its meanest arrangements.… He had great simplicity of character, manners, dress, and deportment, and yet with a natural dignity that suppressed impertinence and silenced rudeness. His simplicity … had an exquisite naÏvetÉ, which charmed every one, and gave a sweetness to his familiar conversation approaching to fascination. The first impression of a stranger, upon his introduction to him, was generally that of disappointment. It seemed hardly credible that such simplicity should be the accompaniment of such acknowledged greatness. The consciousness of power was not there; the air of office was not there; there was no play of the lights or shades of rank, no study of effect in tone or bearing.”

Add to this what Judge Story said from the bench, in receiving the resolutions of the Bar of the Supreme Court after Marshall’s death: “But, above all, he was the ornament of human nature itself, in the beautiful illustrations which his life constantly presented, of its most attractive graces, and its most elevated attributes.”[49]

Of Marshall’s appearance on the bench we have a picture in one of Story’s letters from Washington, while he was at the bar. He is writing in 1808, the year after the Burr trial. “Marshall,” he says, “is of a tall, slender figure, not graceful or imposing, but erect and steady. His hair is black, his eyes small and twinkling, his forehead rather low, but his features are in general harmonious. His manners are plain, yet dignified; and an unaffected modesty diffuses itself through all his actions. His dress is very simple, yet neat; his language chaste, but hardly elegant; it does not flow rapidly, but it seldom wants precision. In conversation he is quite familiar, but is occasionally embarrassed by a hesitancy and drawling.… I love his laugh,—it is too hearty for an intriguer,—and his good temper and unwearied patience are equally agreeable on the bench and in the study.”

Daniel Webster, in 1814, while he was a member of Congress from New Hampshire, wrote to his brother: “There is no man in the court that strikes me like Marshall. He is a plain man, looking very much like Colonel Adams, and about three inches taller. I have never seen a man of whose intellect I had a higher opinion.”

In the year 1808, when Judge Story wrote what has just been quoted, Marshall was sketched in chalk by St. MÉmin. It is a beautiful portrait, which its present owner, Mr. Thomas Marshall Smith, of Baltimore, John Marshall’s great-grandson, has now generously allowed to be copied for the use of the public.

It was in 1830 that Chester Harding painted for the Boston AthenÆum the full-length portrait, of which, a little later, he made the replica, afterwards purchased, by subscription, for the Harvard Law School. “I consider it,” says Harding, “a good picture.[50] I had great pleasure in painting the whole of such a man.… When I was ready to draw the figure into his picture, I asked him, in order to save time, to come to my room in the evening.… An evening was appointed; but he could not come until after the ‘consultation,’ which lasts until about eight o’clock.” It will be remembered that the judges, at that time, used to lodge together, in one house. “It was a warm evening,” continues Harding, “and I was standing on my steps waiting for him, when he soon made his appearance, but, to my surprise, without a hat. I showed him into my studio, and stepped back to fasten the front door, when I encountered [several gentlemen] who knew the judge very well. They had seen him passing by their hotel in his hatless condition, and with long strides, as if in great haste, and had followed, curious to know the cause of such a strange appearance.… He said that the consultation lasted longer than he expected, and he hurried off as quickly as possible to keep his appointment with me.” He declined the offer of a hat on his return: “Oh no, it is a warm night; I shall not need one.”

A good many artists tried their hands on the Chief Justice, and with every sort of result. Some depicted a dull and wooden person, some a worthy but feeble one. Other portraits, commended for their likeness to the original, differ much in what they represent.[51]

In the written descriptions of him, also, one needs to compare several before he can feel much assurance of the true image. In an anonymous account of him, preserved in Van Santvoord’s “Lives of the Chief Justices,”[52] the reader seems to perceive the humorous exaggerations of an entertaining and practiced writer, but, taken with due allowance, the description may well be preserved.

“As to face and figure,” says this account, “nature had been equally little at pains to stamp, with any princely effigy of what pleases, the virgin gold of which she had composed his head and heart. Except that his countenance was thoughtful and benignant, it had nothing about it that would have commanded a second look. Separately his features were but indifferent, jointly they were no more than commonplace. Then as to stature, shape, and carriage, there was nothing in him that was not the opposite of commanding or prepossessing; he was tall, yet his height was without the look of either strength or lightness, and gave neither dignity nor grace. His body seemed as ill as his mind well compacted; he not only was without proportion, but of members singularly knit, that dangled from each other and looked half dislocated. Habitually he dressed very carelessly; in the garb, I should not dare to say in the mode, of the last century. You would have thought he had on the old clothes of a former generation, not made for him by even some superannuated tailor of the period, but gotten from the wardrobe of some antiquated slop-shop of second-hand raiment. Shapeless as he was, he would probably have defied all fitting, by whatever skill of the shears; judge then how the vestments of an age when, apparently, coats and breeches were cut for nobody in particular, and waistcoats were almost dressing gowns, sat upon him.”

Such a statement should be supplemented by what one of his family said of him: “The descriptions of his dress are greatly exaggerated; he was regardless of style and fashion, but all those who knew him best testified to the extreme neatness of his attire.”[53]