This explains the refusal of the Supreme Court, including even Justice Johnson, to take notice of the compromise of 1796. (See infra, 157.)
[378] When Lord Fairfax devised his Virginia estate to his nephew, Denny Martin, he required him to take the name of Fairfax.
[379] Order Book, Superior Court of Frederick Co. Va., iii, 721.
[380] 1 Munford, 223. The record states that Judge Tucker did not sit on account of his near relationship to a person interested.
[381] It should be repeated that David Hunter was not one of the destitute settlers who appealed to the Legislature in 1796. From the records it would appear that he was a very prosperous farmer and land-owner who could well afford to employ the best legal counsel, as he did throughout the entire litigation. As early as 1771 we find him selling to Edward Beeson 536 acres of land in Frederick County. (Deed Book 15, 213, Office of Clerk of Circuit Court, Frederick County, Va.) The same Hunter also sold cattle, farming implements, etc., to a large amount. (Deeds dated Nov. 2, 1771, Deed Book cited above, 279, 280.)
These transactions took place eighteen years before Hunter secured from Virginia the grant of Fairfax lands, twenty-five years before the Marshall compromise of 1796, thirty-eight years before Hunter employed Wickham to revive his appeal against the Fairfax devisee, forty-two years prior to the first arguments before the Supreme Court, and forty-five years before the final argument and decision of the famous case of Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee. So, far from being a poor, struggling, submissive, and oppressed settler, David Hunter was one of the most well-to-do, acquisitive, determined, and aggressive men in Virginia.
[382] April 23, 1810.
[383] By using the plural "appellees," Roane apparently intimates that Marshall was personally interested in the case; as we have seen, he was not. There was of record but one appellee, the Fairfax devisee.
[384] 1 Munford, 232.
The last two lines of Roane's language are not clear, but it would seem that the "objection" must have been that the Marshall compromise did not include the land claimed by Hunter and others, the title to which had been adjudged to be in Fairfax's devisee before the compromise. This is, indeed, probably the meaning of the sentence of Roane's opinion; otherwise it is obscure. It would appear certain that the Fairfax purchasers did make just this objection. Certainly they would have been foolish not to have done so if the Hunter land was not embraced in the compromise.