He received me with a pleasant smile … and said, “Well, Doctor, you find me taking breakfast, and I assure you I have had a good one. I thought it very probable that this might be my last chance, and therefore I was determined to enjoy it and eat heartily.” … He said that he had not the slightest desire to live, laboring under the sufferings to which he was subjected, and that he was perfectly ready to take all the chances of an operation, and he knew there were many against him.… After he had finished his breakfast, I administered him some medicine; he then inquired at what hour the operation would be performed. I mentioned the hour of eleven. He said “Very well; do you wish me for any other purpose, or may I lie down and go to sleep?” I was a good deal surprised at this question, but told him that if he could sleep it would be very desirable. He immediately placed himself upon the bed and fell into a profound sleep, and continued so until I was obliged to rouse him in order to undergo the operation. He exhibited the same fortitude, scarcely uttering a murmur throughout the whole procedure which, from the nature of his complaint, was necessarily tedious.
The death of his wife on Christmas Day of the same year was a heavy blow. Despite her invalidism, she was a woman of much force of character and many graces of mind, to which Marshall rendered touching tribute in a quaint eulogy composed for one of his sons on the first anniversary of her death:
Her judgment was so sound and so safe that I have often relied upon it in situations of some perplexity.… Though serious as well as gentle in her deportment, she possessed a good deal of chaste, delicate, and playful wit, and if she permitted herself to indulge this talent, told her little story with grace, and could mimic very successfully the peculiarities of the person who was its subject. She had a fine taste for belle-lettre reading.… This quality, by improving her talents for conversation, contributed not inconsiderably to make her a most desirable and agreeable companion. It beguiled many of those winter evenings during which her protracted ill health and her feeble nervous system confined us entirely to each other. I shall never cease to look back on them with deep interest and regret.… She felt deeply the distress of others, and indulged the feeling liberally on objects she believed to be meritorious.… She was a firm believer in the faith inculcated by the Church in which she was bred, but her soft and gentle temper was incapable of adopting the gloomy and austere dogmas which some of its professors have sought to engraft on it.
Marshall believed women were the intellectual equals of men, because he was convinced that they possessed in a high degree “those qualities which make up the sum of human happiness and transform the domestic fireside into an elysium,” and not because he thought they could compete on even terms in the usual activities of men.
Despite these “buffetings of fate,” the Chief Justice was back in Washington in attendance upon Court in February, 1832, and daily walked several miles to and from the Capitol. In the following January his health appeared to be completely restored. “He seemed,” says Story, with whom he messed, along with Justices Thompson and Duval, “to revive, and enjoy anew his green old age.” This year Marshall had the gratification of receiving the tribute of Story’s magnificent dedication of his Commentaries to him. With characteristic modesty, the aged Chief Justice expressed the fear that his admirer had “consulted a partial friendship farther than your deliberate judgment will approve.” He was especially interested in the copy intended for the schools, but he felt that “south of the Potomac, where it is most wanted it will be least used,” for, he continued, “it is a Mohammedan rule never to dispute with the ignorant, and we of the true faith in the South adjure the contamination of infidel political works. It would give our orthodox nullifyer a fever to read the heresies of your Commentaries. A whole school might be infected by the atmosphere of a single copy should it be placed on one of the shelves of a bookcase.”
Marshall sat on the Bench for the last time in the January term of 1835. Miss Harriet Martineau, who was in Washington during that winter, has left a striking picture of the Chief Justice as he appeared in these last days. “How delighted,” she writes, “we were to see Judge Story bring in the tall, majestic, bright-eyed old man,—old by chronology, by the lines on his composed face, and by his services to the republic; but so dignified, so fresh, so present to the time, that no compassionate consideration for age dared mix with the contemplation of him.”
Marshall was, however, a very sick man, suffering constant pain from a badly diseased liver. The ailment was greatly aggravated, moreover, by “severe contusions” which he received while returning in the stage from Washington to Richmond. In June he went a second time to Philadelphia for medical assistance, but his case was soon seen to be hopeless. He awaited death with his usual serenity, and two days before it came he composed the modest epitaph which appeared upon his tomb: John Marshall, son of Thomas and Mary Marshall, was born on the 24th of September, 1755, Intermarried with Mary Willis Ambler the 3d of January, 1783, departed this life the — day of —, 18—. He died the evening of July 6, 1835, surrounded by three of his sons. The death of the fourth, from an accident while he was hurrying to his father’s bedside, had been kept from him. He left also a daughter and numerous grandchildren.
Marshall’s will is dated April 9, 1832, and has five codicils of subsequent dates attached. After certain donations to grandsons named John and Thomas, the estate, consisting chiefly of his portion of the Fairfax purchase, was to be divided equally among his five children. To the daughter and her descendants were also secured one hundred shares of stock which his wife had held in the Bank of the United States, but in 1835 these were probably of little value. His faithful body servant Robin was to be emancipated and, if he chose, sent to Liberia, in which event he should receive one hundred dollars. But if he preferred to remain in the Commonwealth, he should receive but fifty dollars; and if it turned out to “be impracticable to liberate him consistently with law and his own inclination,” he was to select his master from among the children, “that he may always be treated as a faithful meritorious servant.”
The Chief Justice’s death evoked many eloquent tributes to his public services and private excellencies, but none more just and appreciative than that of the officers of court and members of the bar of his own circuit who knew him most intimately. It reads as follows:
John Marshall, late Chief Justice of the United States, having departed this life since the last Term of the Federal Circuit Court for this district, the Bench, Bar, and Officers of the Court, assembled at the present Term, embrace the first opportunity to express their profound and heartfelt respect for the memory of the venerable judge, who presided in this Court for thirty-five years—with such remarkable diligence in office, that, until he was disabled by the disease which removed him from life, he was never known to be absent from the bench, during term time, even for a day,—with such indulgence to counsel and suitors, that every body’s convenience was consulted, but his own,—with a dignity, sustained without effort, and, apparently, without care to sustain it, to which all men were solicitous to pay due respect,—with such profound sagacity, such quick penetration, such acuteness, clearness, strength, and comprehension of mind, that in his hand, the most complicated causes were plain, the weightiest and most difficult, easy and light,—with such striking impartiality and justice, and a judgment so sure, as to inspire universal confidence, so that few appeals were ever taken from his decisions, during his long administration of justice in the Court, and those only in cases where he himself expressed doubt,—with such modesty, that he seemed wholly unconscious of his own gigantic powers,—with such equanimity, such benignity of temper, such amenity of manners, that not only none of the judges, who sat with him on the bench, but no member of the bar, no officer of the court, no juror, no witness, no suitor, in a single instance, ever found or imagined, in any thing said or done, or omitted by him, the slightest cause of offence.
His private life was worthy of the exalted character he sustained in public station. The unaffected simplicity of his manners; the spotless purity of his morals; his social, gentle, cheerful disposition; his habitual self-denial, and boundless generosity towards others; the strength and constancy of his attachments; his kindness to his friends and neighbours; his exemplary conduct in the relations of son, brother, husband, father; his numerous charities; his benevolence towards all men, and his ever active beneficence; these amiable qualities shone so conspicuously in him, throughout his life, that, highly as he was respected, he had the rare happiness to be yet more beloved.