The elder Ambler sister thus pictures the Richmond of 1780: "This little town is made up of Scotch factors who inhabit small tenements scattered here and there from the river to the hill. Some of them look, as Colonel [Thomas] Marshall has observed, as if the poor Caledonians had brought them over on their backs, the weakest of whom being glad enough to stop at the bottom of the hill, others a little stronger proceeding higher, whilst a few of the stoutest and the boldest reached the summit."[540] Eight years after the Amblers moved to Richmond, Jefferson wrote: "The town below Shockoe creek is so deserted you cannot get a person to live in a house there rent free."[541]
But Mary's cousin, John Ambler, who, at twenty-one years of age, found himself "one of the richest men in the State of Virginia,"[542] solved the difficulty by offering his country seat for the wedding.[543] Mary Ambler was only seventeen when she became the young lawyer's bride,[544] and John Marshall was a little more than ten years older. After the bridegroom had paid the minister his fee, "he had but one solitary guinea left."[545]
This does not mean that John Marshall was without resources, but it indicates the scarcity of ready money in Virginia at the close of the war. Indeed, Marshall's father, while not yet the wealthy man he afterwards became,[546] had, as we have seen, already acquired very considerable property. He owned at this time at least two thousand acres in Fauquier County;[547] and twenty-two negroes, nine of them tithable (sixteen years old), twelve horses, and twenty-two head of cattle.[548]
When John Marshall married Miss Ambler, his father gave him one negro and three horses.[549] The following year (1784) the Tithable Book shows but five tithable negroes, eight young negroes, eight horses, and eighteen head of cattle in Thomas Marshall's name. He evidently sold his other slaves and personal property or took them with him to Kentucky. So it is likely that the slaves, horses, and cattle left behind were given to his son, together with a part of Thomas Marshall's Fauquier County farm.[550]
During the Revolution Thomas Marshall was, like most other Continental officers, in sore need of money. He tried to sell his land to Washington for cash. Washington was anxious to buy "Lands in my own Neck at (almost) any price ... in ye way of Barter ... for Negroes ... or ... for any thing else (except Breeding Mares and Stock)." But he could not pay money. He estimated, by memory, Thomas Marshall's land at £3000, at a time when, because of depreciated money and inflated prices, "a Barrl. of Corn which used to sell for 10/ will now fetch 40—when a Barl. of Porke that formerly could be had for £3 sells for £15." So Washington in 1778 thought that "Marshall is not a necessitous man." When it came to trading, the father of his country was keen and suspicious, and he feared, it would seem, that his boyhood friend and comrade in arms would "practice every deception in his power in order to work me ... up to his price."[551]
Soon after John Marshall met Mary Ambler at the "ball" at Yorktown, and just before he went to William and Mary College, his father sold this very land that Washington had refused to purchase. On March 28, 1780, Thomas Marshall conveyed to Major Thomas Massey [Massie] one thousand acres in Fauquier County for "thirty thousand pounds Currency."[552] This was a part of the seventeen hundred acres for which the elder Marshall had paid "nine hundred and twelve pounds ten shillings" seven years before.[553] The change shows the startling depreciation of Virginia currency as well as Continental paper, both of which in 1780 had reached a very low point and were rapidly going down.[554]
Mary Ambler Marshall
It reveals, too, the Marshall family's extreme need of cash, a want sorely felt by nearly everybody at this period; and the familiar fact that ownership of land did not mean the ready command of money. The year after John Marshall's marriage he wrote to James Monroe: "I do not know what to say to your scheme of selling out. If you can execute it you will have made a very capital sum, if you can retain your lands you will be poor during life unless you remove to the western country, but you have secured for posterity an immense fortune"; and Marshall tells Monroe that the latter can avail himself of the knowledge of Kentucky lands possessed by the members of the Marshall family who were on the ground.[555]
Writing twenty years later of economic conditions during the period now under review, Marshall says: "Real property was scarcely vendible; and sales of any article for ready money could be made only at a ruinous loss.... In every quarter were found those who asserted it to be impossible for the people to pay their public or private debts."[556]