In speaking of Marshall’s personal qualities and ways, I must quote from those exquisite passages in Judge Story’s address, delivered in the fall of 1835, to the Suffolk bar, in which his own true affection found expression: “Upon a first introduction he would be thought to be cold and reserved; but he was neither the one nor the other. It was simply a habit of easy taciturnity, watching, as it were, his own turn to follow the line of conversation, and not to presume to lead it.… Meet him in a stage-coach as a stranger, and travel with him a whole day, and you would only be struck with his readiness to administer to the accommodation of others, and his anxiety to appropriate least to himself. Be with him the unknown guest at an inn, and he seemed adjusted to the very scene; partaking of the warm welcome of its comforts, whenever found; and if not found, resigning himself without complaint to its meanest arrangements.… He had great simplicity of character, manners, dress, and deportment, and yet with a natural dignity that suppressed impertinence and silenced rudeness. His simplicity … had an exquisite naïveté, which charmed every one, and gave a sweetness to his familiar conversation approaching to fascination. The first impression of a stranger, upon his introduction to him, was generally that of disappointment. It seemed hardly credible that such simplicity should be the accompaniment of such acknowledged greatness. The consciousness of power was not there; the air of office was not there; there was no play of the lights or shades of rank, no study of effect in tone or bearing.”
Add to this what Judge Story said from the bench, in receiving the resolutions of the Bar of the Supreme Court after Marshall’s death: “But, above all, he was the ornament of human nature itself, in the beautiful illustrations which his life constantly presented, of its most attractive graces, and its most elevated attributes.”[49]
Of Marshall’s appearance on the bench we have a picture in one of Story’s letters from Washington, while he was at the bar. He is writing in 1808, the year after the Burr trial. “Marshall,” he says, “is of a tall, slender figure, not graceful or imposing, but erect and steady. His hair is black, his eyes small and twinkling, his forehead rather low, but his features are in general harmonious. His manners are plain, yet dignified; and an unaffected modesty diffuses itself through all his actions. His dress is very simple, yet neat; his language chaste, but hardly elegant; it does not flow rapidly, but it seldom wants precision. In conversation he is quite familiar, but is occasionally embarrassed by a hesitancy and drawling.… I love his laugh,—it is too hearty for an intriguer,—and his good temper and unwearied patience are equally agreeable on the bench and in the study.”
Daniel Webster, in 1814, while he was a member of Congress from New Hampshire, wrote to his brother: “There is no man in the court that strikes me like Marshall. He is a plain man, looking very much like Colonel Adams, and about three inches taller. I have never seen a man of whose intellect I had a higher opinion.”
In the year 1808, when Judge Story wrote what has just been quoted, Marshall was sketched in chalk by St. Mémin. It is a beautiful portrait, which its present owner, Mr. Thomas Marshall Smith, of Baltimore, John Marshall’s great-grandson, has now generously allowed to be copied for the use of the public.
It was in 1830 that Chester Harding painted for the Boston Athenæum the full-length portrait, of which, a little later, he made the replica, afterwards purchased, by subscription, for the Harvard Law School. “I consider it,” says Harding, “a good picture.[50] I had great pleasure in painting the whole of such a man.… When I was ready to draw the figure into his picture, I asked him, in order to save time, to come to my room in the evening.… An evening was appointed; but he could not come until after the ‘consultation,’ which lasts until about eight o’clock.” It will be remembered that the judges, at that time, used to lodge together, in one house. “It was a warm evening,” continues Harding, “and I was standing on my steps waiting for him, when he soon made his appearance, but, to my surprise, without a hat. I showed him into my studio, and stepped back to fasten the front door, when I encountered [several gentlemen] who knew the judge very well. They had seen him passing by their hotel in his hatless condition, and with long strides, as if in great haste, and had followed, curious to know the cause of such a strange appearance.… He said that the consultation lasted longer than he expected, and he hurried off as quickly as possible to keep his appointment with me.” He declined the offer of a hat on his return: “Oh no, it is a warm night; I shall not need one.”
A good many artists tried their hands on the Chief Justice, and with every sort of result. Some depicted a dull and wooden person, some a worthy but feeble one. Other portraits, commended for their likeness to the original, differ much in what they represent.[51]
In the written descriptions of him, also, one needs to compare several before he can feel much assurance of the true image. In an anonymous account of him, preserved in Van Santvoord’s “Lives of the Chief Justices,”[52] the reader seems to perceive the humorous exaggerations of an entertaining and practiced writer, but, taken with due allowance, the description may well be preserved.
“As to face and figure,” says this account, “nature had been equally little at pains to stamp, with any princely effigy of what pleases, the virgin gold of which she had composed his head and heart. Except that his countenance was thoughtful and benignant, it had nothing about it that would have commanded a second look. Separately his features were but indifferent, jointly they were no more than commonplace. Then as to stature, shape, and carriage, there was nothing in him that was not the opposite of commanding or prepossessing; he was tall, yet his height was without the look of either strength or lightness, and gave neither dignity nor grace. His body seemed as ill as his mind well compacted; he not only was without proportion, but of members singularly knit, that dangled from each other and looked half dislocated. Habitually he dressed very carelessly; in the garb, I should not dare to say in the mode, of the last century. You would have thought he had on the old clothes of a former generation, not made for him by even some superannuated tailor of the period, but gotten from the wardrobe of some antiquated slop-shop of second-hand raiment. Shapeless as he was, he would probably have defied all fitting, by whatever skill of the shears; judge then how the vestments of an age when, apparently, coats and breeches were cut for nobody in particular, and waistcoats were almost dressing gowns, sat upon him.”