Brave Men and Women Part 23

XXVIII.

JOHN MARSHALL

(BORN 1755--DIED 1835.)

IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMY--HIS MARRIAGE--LAW LECTURES--AT THE BAR--HIS INTELLECTUAL POWERS--ON THE BENCH.

The family stock of Marshall, like that of Jefferson, was Welsh, as is generally the case in names with a double letter, as a double f or a double l. This Welsh type was made steady by English infusions. The first Marshall came from Wales in 1730, and settled in the same county where Was.h.i.+ngton, Monroe, and the Lees were born. He was a poor man, and lived in a tract called "The Forest." His eldest son, Thomas, went out to Fauquier County, at the foot of the Blue Ridge, and settled on Goose Creek, under Mana.s.sas Gap. This Thomas Marshall had been a playmate of George Was.h.i.+ngton, and, like him, was a mountain surveyor, and they loved each other, and when the Revolutionary War broke out both went into the service, Thomas Marshall being colonel of one of the Virginia regiments. His son, John Marshall, who was not twenty years old when the conflict began, became a lieutenant under his father. The mother of John Marshall was named Mary Kieth, and his grandmother Elizabeth Markham, and the latter was born in England.

Marshall's father had a good mind, not much education; but he was a great reader, and especially loved poetry, and he taught his son to commit poetry to memory, and to model his mind on the clear diction and heroic strain of poets like Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope. In these books of poetry the great chief-justice found the springs to freshen his own good character. To the last day of his life he loved literature, and was especially fond of novels, and of books written by females. He held the view that the United States must be a literary nation in the sense of having great and n.o.ble authors to leaven its people and teach them high thoughts. His schools were chiefly down in the Chesapeake Bay, in the county of his birth, and his teachers were poor Presbyterian clergymen from Scotland, who at that period were the teachers of nearly all the Middle States, from New York southward. He knew some Latin, but not very much. One of his teachers was his own father, who, with a large family, took delight in training this boy.

OUR JUDGE ON DRILL.

In 1775 the country hunters and boors on the Blue Ridge Mountain went to their mustering place, and, the senior officer being absent, this young Marshall, with a gun on his shoulder, began to show them how to use it.

Like them, he wore a blue hunting s.h.i.+rt and trousers of some stuff fringed with white, and in his round hat was a buck-tail for a c.o.c.kade.

He was about six feet high, lean and straight, with a dark skin, black hair, a pretty low forehead, and rich, dark small eyes, the whole making a face dutiful, pleasing, and modest. After the drill was over he stood up and told those strange, wild mountaineers, who had no newspapers and knew little of the world, what the war was about. He described to them the battle of Lexington. They listened to him for an hour, as if he had been some young preacher.

Thus was our great chief-justice introduced to public life. He had come to serve, and found that he must instruct. When he marched with the regiment of these mountaineers, who carried tomahawks and scalping-knives, the people of Williamsburg trembled for their lives. At that time, the country near Harper's Ferry was the Far West. In a very little while, these mountaineers, by mingled stratagem and system, defeated Lord Dunmore, very much as Andrew Jackson defeated the British at New Orleans thirty-five years later. Marshall then went with the army to the vicinity of Philadelphia; was in the battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and in the long Winter of Valley Forge. Almost naked at that place, he showed an abounding good-nature, that kept the whole camp content. If he had to eat meat without bread, he did it with a jest.

Among his men he had the influence of a father, though a boy. He was so much better read than others that he frequently became a judge advocate, and in this way he got to know Alexander Hamilton, who was on Was.h.i.+ngton's staff. Marshall was always willing to see the greatness of another person, and Judge Story says that he said of Hamilton that he was not only of consummate ability as both soldier and statesman, but that, in great, comprehensive mind, sound principle, and purity of patriotism, no nation ever had his superior.

It became Marshall's duty, in the course of twenty-five years, to try for high treason the man who killed his friend Hamilton, but he conducted that trial with such an absence of personal feeling that it was among the greatest marvels of our legal history. He could neither be influenced by his private grief for Hamilton, nor by Jefferson's attempts as President to injure Burr, nor by Burr himself, whom he charged the jury to acquit, but whom he held under bond on another charge, to Burr's rage. Marshall was in the battle of Monmouth, and at the storming of Stony Point, and at the surprise of Jersey City. In the army camps, he became acquainted with the Northern men, and so far from comparing invidiously with them, he recognized them all as fellow-countrymen and brave men, and never in his life was there a single trace of sectionalism.

HIS MARRIAGE.

Near the close of the Revolution, Marshall went to Yorktown, somewhat before Cornwallis occupied it, to pay a visit, and there he saw Mary Ambler at the age of fourteen. She became his wife in 1783. Her father was Jacqueline Ambler, the treasurer of the State of Virginia. She lived with him forty-eight years, and died in December, 1831. He often remarked in subsequent life that the race of lovers had changed. Said he: "When I married my wife, all I had left after paying the minister his fee was a guinea, and I thought I was rich." General Burgoyne, whom Marshall's fellow-soldiers so humiliated, wrote some verses, and among these were the following, which Marshall said over to himself often when thinking of his wife:

"Encompa.s.sed in an angel's frame, An angel's virtues lay; Too soon did heaven a.s.sert its claim And take its own away.

My Mary's worth, my Mary's charms, Can never more return.

What now shall fill these widowed arms?

Ah, me! my Mary's urn."

LAW LECTURES.

The only law lectures Marshall ever attended were those of Chancellor Wythe, at William and Mary College, Williamsburg, while the Revolution was still going on. Before the close of the war he was admitted to the bar, but the courts were all suspended until after Cornwallis's surrender. Before the war closed Marshall walked from near Mana.s.sas Gap, or rather from Oak Hill, his father's residence, to Philadelphia on foot to be vaccinated. The distance was nearly two hundred miles; but he walked about thirty-five miles a day, and when he got to Philadelphia looked so shabby that they repelled him at the hotel; but this only made him laugh and find another hotel. He never paid much attention to his dress, and observed through life the simple habits he found agreeable as a boy. For two years he practiced in one rough, native county; but it soon being evident that he was a man of extraordinary grasp of a law case, he removed to Richmond, which had not long been the capital, and there he lived until his death, which happened in 1835 in the city of Philadelphia, whither he had repaired to submit to a second operation.

The first of these operations was cutting to the bladder for the stone, and he survived it. Subsequently, his liver became enlarged and had abcesses on it, and his stomach would not retain much nutriment.

Marshall was a social man, and at times convivial; and I should think it probable that, though he lived to a good old age, these complaints were, to some extent, engendered by the fried food they insist upon in Virginia, and addiction to Madeira wine instead of lighter French or German wines. He was one of the last of the old Madeira drinkers of this country, like Was.h.i.+ngton, and his only point of pride was that he had perhaps the best Madeira at Richmond. Above all other men who ever lived at Richmond, Virginia, Marshall gives sanct.i.ty and character to the place. His house still stands there, and ought to become the property of the bar of this country. It is now a pretty old house, made of brick and moderately roomy.

AT THE BAR.

The basis of Marshall's ability at the bar was his understanding. Not highly read, he had one of those clear understandings which was equal to a mill-pond of book-learning. His first practice was among his old companions in arms, who felt that he was a soldier by nature, and one of those who loved the fellows.h.i.+p of the camp better than military or political ambition. Ragged and dissipated, they used to come to him for protection, and at a time when imprisonment for debt and cruel executions were in vogue. He not only defended them, but loaned them money. He lost some good clients by not paying more attention to his clothing, but these outward circ.u.mstances could not long keep back recognition of the fact that he was the finest arguer of a case at the Richmond bar, which then contained such men as Edmund Randolph, Patrick Henry, and later, William Wirt. He was not an orator, did not cultivate his voice, did not labor hard; but he had the power to penetrate to the very center of the subject, discover the chief point, and rally all his forces there. If he was defending a case, he would turn his attention to some other than the main point, in order to let the prosecution a.s.semble its powers at the wrong place. With a military eye he saw the strong and weak positions, and, like Rembrandt painting, he threw all his light on the right spot. The character of his argument was a perspicuous, easy, onward, acc.u.mulative, reasoning statement. He had but one gesture--to lift up his hand and bring it down on the place before him constantly.

He discarded fancy or poetry in his arguments. William Wirt said of him, in a sentence worth committing to memory as a specimen of good style in the early quarter of this century: "All his eloquence consists in the apparent deep self-conviction and emphatic earnestness of his manner; the corresponding simplicity and energy of his style; the close and logical connection of his thoughts, and the easy graduations by which he opens his lights on the attentive minds of his hearers. The audience are never permitted to pause for a moment. There is no stopping to weave garlands of flowers to hang in festoons around a favorite argument. On the contrary, every sentence is progressive; every idea sheds new light on the subject; the listener is kept perpetually in that sweetly pleasurable vibration with which the mind of man always receives new truths; the dawn advances with easy but unremitting pace; the subject opens gradually on the view, until, rising in high relief in all its native colors and proportions, the argument is consummated by the conviction of the delighted hearer."

Immediately after the Revolutionary War the State courts were crowded with business, because of the numerous bankruptcies, arising from war habits, the changes in the condition of families, repudiation of debts, false currency, etc. Marshall was one of the first lawyers who rose to the magnanimity to admit the propriety of a federal judiciary, different from that of the States. The other lawyers thought it would not do to take the business away from these courts. They preferred to see the people hanging around Richmond, with their cases undecided and unheard on account of the pressure of business, rather than to concede a national judiciary. All sorts of novel questions were arising at that time, cases which had no precedents, which the English law-books did not reach, and where the man of native powers, pus.h.i.+ng out like Columbus on the unknown, soon developed a st.u.r.dy strength and self-reliance the mere popinjay and student of the law could never get. Among the cases he argued was the British debt case, tried in 1793. The United States now had its Circuit Court, and Chief-justice Jay presided at Richmond. The treaty of peace of England provided that the creditors on either side should meet with no lawful impediment to the recovery of the full value of all _bona fide_ debts theretofore contracted. The question was whether debts sequestrated by the Virginia Legislature during the war came under this treaty. It is said that the Countess of Huntingdon heard the speeches on this case, and said that every one of the lawyers, if in England, would have been given a peerage. Patrick Henry broke his voice down in this case, and never again could speak with his old force.

Marshall surpa.s.sed them all in the cogency of his reasoning. At that time he was thought to be rather lazy. He went into the State Legislature in 1782, just before he married. His personal influence was such in Richmond that, although he was constantly in the minority, he was always elected. His princ.i.p.al amus.e.m.e.nt was pitching the quoit, which he did to the end of his days, and could ring the meg, it is said, at a distance of sixty feet frequently. He arose early in the morning and went to market without a servant, and brought back his chickens in one hand and his market basket on the other arm. He never took offense, and once when a dude stopped him on the street and asked him where there was a fellow to take home his marketing, Marshall inquired where he lived, and said, "I will take it for you." After he got home with the other man's marketing, the dude was much distressed to find that Mr.

Marshall had been his supposed servant.

INTELLECTUAL POWER.

Nevertheless, the intellectual existence of the man was decided. From the beginning of his life he took the view that while Virginia was the State of his birth, his country was America; that all he and his neighbors could accomplish on this planet would be under the great government which comprehends all, and, true to this one idea, he never wavered in his life. Mr. Jefferson, who was much his senior, he distrusted profoundly, regarding him as a man of cunning, lacking in large faith, and const.i.tutionally biased in mind. In the sketch Marshall made of General Was.h.i.+ngton, he said, and it is believed that he referred to Jefferson: "He made no pretension to that vivacity which fascinates or to that wit which dazzles, and frequently imposes on the understanding. More solid than brilliant; judgment, rather than genius, const.i.tuted the most prominent feature of his character. No man has ever appeared upon the theater of public action whose integrity was more incorruptible, or whose principles were more perfectly free from the contamination of those selfish and unworthy pa.s.sions which find their nourishment in the conflicts of party. Having no views which required concealment, his real and avowed motives were the same, and his whole correspondence does not furnish a single case from which even an enemy would infer that he was capable, under any circ.u.mstances, of stooping to the employment of duplicity. No truth can be uttered with more confidence than that his ends were always upright and his means always pure. He exhibited the rare example of a politician to whom wiles were totally unknown, and whose professions to foreign governments, and to his own countrymen, were always sincere. In him was fully exemplified the real distinction which found existence between wisdom and cunning, and the importance, as well as the truth of the maxim, that honesty is the best policy." It is to be noticed that Marshall's "Life of Was.h.i.+ngton," though written by the chief-justice of the United States, was not a success, and pa.s.sed through only one edition. It gave him more annoyance than any thing in his life. He wrote it with labor and sincerity, but he was incapable of writing mere smart, vivacious things, and, in the attempt to give Was.h.i.+ngton his due proportions, he insensibly failed of making a popular book.

Jefferson, who had been urging Tobias Lear, Was.h.i.+ngton's secretary, to get out of Was.h.i.+ngton's papers remarks injurious to himself, was greatly exercised at the publication of Marshall's book about as much as the better element dudes are at Blaine's book.

Mr. Marshall, in 1788, a.s.sisted to make the new const.i.tution of Virginia. By the desire of Was.h.i.+ngton he ran for Congress as a Federalist. President Was.h.i.+ngton offered him the place of attorney-general, which he declined. He also declined the minister to France, but subsequently accepted the position from President Adams, and in France was insulted with his fellow-members by Talleyrand. John Adams, on his return, wished to make him a member of the Supreme Court, but this he declined, preferring the practice of the law.

It was at Mount Vernon that Was.h.i.+ngton prevailed upon him to run for Congress. The story being raised that Patrick Henry was opposed to him, old Henry came forward and said: "I should rather give my vote to John Marshall than to any citizen of this State at this juncture, one only excepted," meaning Was.h.i.+ngton.

The father of Robert E. Lee was one of the old Federal minority rallying under Marshall. Marshall had scarcely taken his seat in Congress, in 1799, when Was.h.i.+ngton died, and he officially announced the death at Philadelphia, and followed his remarks by introducing the resolutions drafted by General Lee, which contained the words, "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

ON THE BENCH.

John Marshall was next Secretary of State of John Adams, succeeding Timothy Pickering. Adams was defeated for re-election, but before he went out of office he appointed Marshall chief-justice, at the age of forty-five.

At the head of that great bench sat Marshall more than one-third of a century. Before him pleaded all the great lawyers of the country, like William Pinckney, Hugh Legare, Daniel Webster, Horace Binney, Luther Martin, and Walter Jones.

John Marshall left as his great legacy to the United States his interpretation of the Const.i.tution. While chief-justice he became a member of the Const.i.tutional Convention of Virginia in company with Madison and Monroe, both of whom had been President. He gave the Federal Const.i.tution its liberal interpretation, that it was not merely a bone thrown to the general government, which must be watched with suspicion while it ate, but that it was a doc.u.ment with something of the elasticity of our population and climate, and that it was designed to convey to the general state powers n.o.ble enough to give us respect.

Without a spot on his reputation, without an upright enemy, the old man attended to his duty absolutely, loved argument, encouraged all young lawyers at the bar, and he lived down to the time of nullification, and when General Jackson issued his proclamation against the nullifiers John Marshall and Judge Story went up to the White House and took a gla.s.s of wine with him.

And thus those two old men silently appreciated each other near the end of their days when the suspicions of Jefferson had resulted in incipient rebellion that was to break out in less than thirty years, and which Marshall predicted unless there was a more general a.s.sent to the fact that we were one country, and not a parcel of political chicken-coops.--GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND.

XXIX.

A n.o.bLE MOTHER.

HOW SHE TRAINED HERSELF, AND EDUCATED HER BOYS