"In the Blue Grass region,
A 'Paradox' was born,
The corn was full of kernels
And the 'colonels' full of corn."[232]
But Marshall heartily disliked the formal society of the National Capital. He was, of course, often invited to dinners and receptions, but he was usually bored by their formality. Occasionally he would brighten his letters to his wife by short mention of some entertainment. "Since being in this place," he writes her, "I have been more in company than I wish.... I have been invited to dine with the President with our own secretaries & with the minister of France & tomorrow I dine with the British minister.... In the midst of these gay circles my mind is carried to my own fireside & to my beloved wife."[233]
Again: "Soon after dinner yesterday the French Chargé d'affaires called upon us with a pressing invitation to be present at a party given to the young couple, a gentleman of the French legation & the daughter of the secretary of the navy who are lately married. There was a most brilliant illumination which we saw and admired, & then we returned."[234] Of a dinner at the French Legation he writes his wife, it was "rather a dull party. Neither the minister nor his lady could speak English and I could not speak French. You may conjecture how far we were from being sociable. Yesterday I dined with Mr Van Buren the secretary of State. It was a grand dinner and the secretary was very polite, but I was rather dull through the evening. I make a poor return for these dinners. I go to them with reluctance and am bad company while there. I hope we have seen the last, but I fear we must encounter one more.[235] With the exception of these parties my time was never passed with more uniformity. I rise early, pour [sic] over law cases, go to court and return at the same hour and pass the evening in consultation with the Judges."[236]
Chester Harding relates that, when he was in Washington making a full-length portrait of the Chief Justice,[237] Marshall arrived late for the sitting, which had been fixed for eight o'clock in the evening. He came without a hat. Congressman Storrs and one or two other men, having seen Marshall, bare-headed, hurrying by their inn with long strides, had "followed, curious to know the cause of such a strange appearance." But Marshall simply explained to the artist that the consultation lasted longer than usual, and that he had hurried off without his hat. When the Chief Justice was about to go home, Harding offered him a hat, but he said, "Oh, no! it is a warm night, I shall not need one."[238]
No attorney practicing in the Supreme Court was more unreserved in social conversation than was the Chief Justice. Sometimes, indeed, on a subject that appealed to him, Marshall would do all the talking, which, for some reason, would occasionally be quite beyond the understanding of his hearer. Of one such exhibition Fisher Ames remarked to Samuel Dexter: "I have not understood a word of his argument for half an hour." "And I," replied the leader of the Massachusetts bar, "have been out of my depth for an hour and a half."[239]
The members of the Supreme Court made life as pleasant for themselves as they could during the weeks they were compelled to remain in "this dismal" place, as Daniel Webster described the National Capital. Marshall and the Associate Justices all lived together at one boarding-house, and thus became a sort of family. "We live very harmoniously and familiarly,"[240] writes Story, one year after his appointment. "My brethren are very interesting men," he tells another friend. We "live in the most frank and unaffected intimacy. Indeed, we are all united as one, with a mutual esteem which makes even the labors of Jurisprudence light."[241]
Sitting about a single table at their meals, or gathered in the room of one of them, these men talked over the cases before them. Not only did they "moot every question as" the arguments proceeded in court, but by "familiar conferences at our lodgings often come to a very quick, and ... accurate opinion, in a few hours," relates that faithful chronicler of their daily life, Joseph Story.[242] Story appears to have been even more impressed by the comradery of the members of the Supreme Court than by the difficulty of the cases they had to decide.
None of them ever took his wife with him to Washington, and this fact naturally made the personal relations of the Justices peculiarly close. "The Judges here live with perfect harmony," Story reiterates, "and as agreeably as absence from friends and from families could make our residence. Our intercourse is perfectly familiar and unconstrained, and our social hours when undisturbed with the labors of law, are passed in gay and frank conversation, which at once enlivens and instructs."[243]
This "gay and frank conversation" of Marshall and his associates covered every subject—the methods, manners, and even dress of counsel who argued before them, the fortunes of public men, the trend of politics, the incident of the day, the gossip of society. "Two of the Judges are widowers," records Story, "and of course objects of considerable attraction among the ladies of the city. We have fine sport at their expense, and amuse our leisure with some touches at match-making. We have already ensnared one of the Judges, and he is now (at the age of forty-seven) violently affected with the tender passion."[244]
Thus Marshall, in his relation with his fellow occupants of the bench, was at the head of a family as much as he was Chief of a court. Although the discussion of legal questions occurred continuously at the boarding-house, each case was much more fully examined in the consultation room at the Capitol. There the court had a regular "consultation day" devoted exclusively to the cases in hand. Yet, even on these occasions, all was informality, and wit and humor brightened the tediousness. These "consultations" lasted throughout the day and sometimes into the night; and the Justices took their meals while the discussions proceeded. Amusing incidents, some true, some false, and others a mixture, were related of these judicial meetings. One such story went the rounds of the bar and outlived the period of Marshall's life.