Meanwhile, late in November, 1800, Ellsworth had resigned, and Adams had begun casting about for his successor. First he turned to Jay, who declined on the ground that the Court, “under a system so defective,” would never “obtain the energy, weight, and dignity which were essential to its affording due support to the National Government, nor acquire the public confidence and respect which, as the last resort of the justice of the nation, it should possess.” Adams now bethought himself of his Secretary of State and, without previously consulting him, on January 20, 1801, sent his name to the Senate. A week later the Senate ratified the nomination, and on the 4th of February Marshall accepted the appointment. The task despaired of by Jay and abandoned by Ellsworth was at last in capable hands.
[CHAPTER II]
Marshall’s Early Years
John Marshall was born on September 24, 1755, in Fauquier County, Virginia. Though like Jefferson he was descended on his mother’s side from the Randolphs of Turkey Island, colonial grandees who were also progenitors of John Randolph, Edmund Randolph, and Robert E. Lee, his father, Thomas Marshall, was “a planter of narrow fortune” and modest lineage and a pioneer. Fauquier was then on the frontier, and a few years after John was born the family moved still farther westward to a place called “The Hollow,” a small depression on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge. The external furnishings of the boy’s life were extremely primitive, a fact which Marshall used later to recall by relating that his mother and sisters used thorns for buttons and that hot mush flavored with balm leaf was regarded as a very special dish. Neighbors of course, were few and far between, but society was not lacking for all that. As the first of fifteen children, all of whom reached maturity, John found ample opportunity to cultivate that affectionate helpfulness and gayety of spirit which in after years even enemies accounted one of his most notable traits.
Among the various influences which, during the plastic years of boyhood and youth, went to shape the outlook of the future Chief Justice high rank must be accorded his pioneer life. It is not merely that the spirit of the frontier, with its independence of precedent and its audacity of initiative, breathes through his great constitutional decisions, but also that in being of the frontier Marshall escaped being something else. Had he been born in lowland Virginia, he would have imbibed the intense localism and individualism of the great plantation, and with his turn of mind might well have filled the rôle of Calhoun instead of that very different rôle he actually did fill. There was, indeed, one great planter with whom young Marshall was thrown into occasional contact, and that was his father’s patron and patron saint, Washington. The appeal made to the lad’s imagination by the great Virginian was deep and abiding. And it goes without saying that the horizons suggested by the fame of Fort Venango and Fort Duquesne were not those of seaboard Virginia but of America.
Many are the great men who have owed their debt to a mother’s loving helpfulness and alert understanding. Marshall, on the other hand, was his father’s child. “My father,” he was wont to declare in after years, “was a far abler man than any of his sons. To him I owe the solid foundations of all my success in life.” What were these solid foundations? One was a superb physical constitution; another was a taste for intellectual delights; and to the upbuilding of both these in his son, Thomas Marshall devoted himself with enthusiasm and masculine good sense, aided on the one hand by a very select library consisting of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, and on the other by the ever fresh invitation of the mountainside to health-giving sports.
Pope was the lad’s especial textbook, and we are told that he had transcribed the whole of the Essay on Man by the time he was twelve and some of the Moral Essays as well, besides having “committed to memory many of the most interesting passages of that distinguished poet.” The result is to be partially discerned many years later in certain tricks of Marshall’s style; but indeed the influence of the great moralist must have penetrated far deeper. The Essay on Man filled, we may surmise, much the same place in the education of the first generation of American judges that Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics filled in that of the judges of a later day. The Essay on Man pictures the universe as a species of constitutional monarchy governed “not by partial but by general laws”; in “man’s imperial race” this beneficent sway expresses itself in two principles, “self-love to urge, and reason to restrain”; instructed by reason, self-love lies at the basis of all human institutions, the state, government, laws, and has “found the private in the public good”; so, on the whole, justice is the inevitable law of life. “Whatever is, is right.” It is interesting to suppose that while Marshall was committing to memory the complacent lines of the Essay on Man, his cousin Jefferson may have been deep in the Essay on the Origin of Inequality.
At the age of fourteen Marshall was placed for a few months under the tuition of a clergyman named Campbell, who taught him the rudiments of Latin and introduced him to Livy, Cicero, and Horace. A little later the great debate over American rights burst forth and became with Marshall, as with so many promising lads of the time, the decisive factor in determining his intellectual bent, and he now began reading Blackstone. The great British orators, however, whose eloquence had so much to do, for instance, with shaping Webster’s genius, came too late to influence him greatly.