The earliest personal description of Marshall that we have belongs to this period. It is preserved in Horace Binney’s admirable address at Philadelphia, after Marshall’s death. He gives it from the pen of an eyewitness, a “venerable kinsman” of Marshall. News had come, in May, 1775, of the fighting at Concord and Lexington. The account shows us the youth, as lieutenant, drilling a company of soldiers in Fauquier County:—
“He was about six feet high, straight, and rather slender, of dark complexion, showing little if any rosy red, yet good health, the outline of the face nearly a circle, and within that, eyes dark to blackness,[3] strong and penetrating, beaming with intelligence and good nature; an upright forehead, rather low, was terminated in a horizontal line by a mass of raven-black hair, of unusual thickness and strength. The features of the face were in harmony with this outline, and the temples fully developed. The result of this combination was interesting and very agreeable. The body and limbs indicated agility rather than strength, in which, however, he was by no means deficient. He wore a purple or pale blue hunting-shirt, and trousers of the same material fringed with white. A round black hat, mounted with the buck’s tail for a cockade, crowned the figure and the man. He went through the manual exercise by word and motion, deliberately pronounced and performed in the presence of the company, before he required the men to imitate him; and then proceeded to exercise them with the most perfect temper.…
“After a few lessons the company were dismissed, and informed that if they wished to hear more about the war, and would form a circle about him, he would tell them what he understood about it. The circle was formed, and he addressed the company for something like an hour. He then challenged an acquaintance to a game of quoits, and they closed the day with foot-races and other athletic exercises, at which there was no betting.”
“This,” adds Mr. Binney, “is a portrait, to which in simplicity, gayety of heart, and manliness of spirit, in everything but the symbols of the youthful soldier, and one or two of those lineaments which the hand of time, however gentle, changes and perhaps improves, he never lost his resemblance.”
Marshall accompanied his father to the war as a lieutenant, and in a year or two became a captain. In leaving the father here, it may be said that three of his sons were with him in the war, and that he himself served with gallantry and distinction as a colonel. In 1780, he was at the South with General Lincoln, and being included in the surrender of that officer and on parole, visited Kentucky, not yet a State. After a few years he removed there with the younger part of his family, leaving Oakhill, as it seems, in the hands of his son John. He died in Kentucky in 1806, having survived to witness the successive honors of his son culminate in his becoming Chief Justice of the United States.[4]
It was in the autumn of 1775 that Marshall, as lieutenant in a regiment of minutemen, of which his father was major, marched down through the country to the seaboard to resist Lord Dunmore’s aggressions. They were clothed, we are told, in green home-spun hunting-shirts, having the words “Liberty or Death” in large letters on the breast, with bucks’ tails in their hats, and tomahawks and scalping-knives in their belts. The enemy at Norfolk feared, it is said, for their scalps, but they lost none.[5]
He was thus in the first fighting in Virginia, in the fall of 1775, at Norfolk; afterwards he served in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York; and again in Virginia toward the end of the war. He was at Valley Forge, in the fighting at the Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Stony Point, and Paulus Hook, between 1776 and 1779. He served often as judge advocate, and in this way was brought into personal relations with Washington and Hamilton. A fellow officer and messmate describes him, during the dreadful winter at Valley Forge, as neither discouraged nor disturbed by anything, content with whatever turned up, and cheering everybody by his exuberance of spirits and “his inexhaustible fund of anecdote.” He was “idolized by the soldiers and his brother officers.”
President Quincy gives us a glimpse of him at this period, as he heard him described at a dinner with John Randolph and a large company of Virginians and other Southern gentlemen. They were talking of Marshall’s early life and his athletic powers. “It was said in them that he surpassed any man in the army; that when the soldiers were idle at their quarters, it was usual for the officers to engage in matches of quoits, or in jumping and racing; that he would throw a quoit farther, and beat at a race any other; that he was the only man who, with a running jump, could clear a stick laid on the heads of two men as tall as himself. On one occasion he ran in his stocking feet with a comrade. His mother, in knitting his stockings, had the legs of blue yarn and the heels of white. This circumstance, combined with his uniform success in the race, led the soldiers, who were always present at these races, to give him the sobriquet of ‘Silver-Heels,’ the name by which he was generally known among them.”
Toward the end of 1779, owing to the disbanding of Virginia troops at the end of their term of service, he was left without a command, and went to Virginia to await the action of the legislature as to raising new troops. It was a fortunate visit; for at Yorktown he met the young girl who, two or three years later, was to become his wife; and he was also able to improve his leisure by attending, for a few months in the early part of 1780, two courses of lectures at the college, on law and natural philosophy. This was all of college or university that he ever saw; but later, from several of them, he received their highest honors. In 1802 the college of New Jersey (Princeton, where his oldest son, Thomas, was to graduate in 1803), in 1806, Harvard, and in 1815, the University of Pennsylvania, made him doctor of laws.[6] Marshall’s opportunity for studying law, under George Wythe, at William and Mary College, seems to have been owing to a change in the curriculum, made, just at that time, at the instance of Jefferson, governor of the State, and, in that capacity, visitor of the college. The chair of divinity had just been abolished, and one of law and police, and another of medicine, were substituted. On December 29, 1779, the faculty voted that, “for the encouragement of science, a student, on paying annually 1000 pounds of tobacco, shall be entitled to attend any school of the following professors, viz.: of Law and Police; of Natural Philosophy and Mathematics,” etc. Marshall chose the two courses above named; he must have been one of the very first to avail himself of this new privilege. He remained only one term. In view of what was to happen by and by, it is interesting to observe that this opportunity for education in law came through the agency of Thomas Jefferson.