John Marshall

The Riverside Biographical Series NUMBER 7 JOHN MARSHALL
JAMES BRADLEY THAYER
BY JAMES BRADLEY THAYER
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1901 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY JAMES BRADLEY THAYER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The writer has drawn with entire freedom from an address delivered by him at Cambridge on February 4, 1901, before the Harvard Law School and the Bar Association of the City of Boston, and from an article on John Marshall in the Atlantic Monthly for March, 1901.
J. B. T.
Cambridge, March 30, 1901.
The portrait is from a miniature by St. Mémin.

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.