The records of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at William and Mary College, where that now famous society had originated less than a year and a half before, show that on the 18th of May, 1780, “Captain John Marshall, being recommended as a gentleman who would make a worthy member of the society, was balloted for and received;” and three days later he was appointed, with others, “to declaim the question whether any form of government is more favorable to public virtue than a Commonwealth.” Bushrod Washington and other well-known names are found among his associates in this chapter, which has been well called “an admirable nursery of patriots and statesmen.”
It was in the summer of 1780 that Marshall was licensed to practice law.
During this visit to Virginia, as I have said, he met the beautiful little lady, fourteen years old, who became his wife at the age of sixteen, was to be the mother of his ten children,[7] and was to receive from him the most entire devotion until the day of her death in 1831. Some letters of her older sister, Mrs. Carrington, written to another sister, have lately been printed, which give us a glimpse of Captain Marshall in his twenty-fifth year. These ladies were the daughters of Jaquelin Ambler, formerly collector of customs at Yorktown, and then treasurer of the colony, and living in that town, next door to the family of Colonel Marshall. Their mother was that Rebecca Burwell, for whom, under the name of “Belinda,” Jefferson had languished, in his youthful correspondence of some twenty years before. The girls had often heard the captain’s letters to his family, and had the highest expectations when they learned that he was coming home from the war. They were to meet him first at a ball, and were contending for the prize beforehand. Mary, the youngest, carried it off. “At the first introduction,” writes her sister, who was but one year older, “he became devoted to her.” “For my own part,” she adds, “I felt not the smallest wish to contest the prize with her.… She, with a glance, divined his character, … while I, expecting an Adonis, lost all desire of becoming agreeable in his eyes when I beheld his awkward, unpolished manner and total negligence of person.” “How trivial now seem all such objections!” she exclaims, writing in 1810, and going on to speak with the utmost admiration of his relations to herself and all her family, and above all, to his wife. “His exemplary tenderness to our unfortunate sister is without parallel. With a delicacy of frame and feeling that baffles all description, she became, early after her marriage, a prey to extreme nervous affection, which, more or less, has embittered her comfort through her whole life; but this has only seemed to increase his care and tenderness, and he is, as you know, as entirely devoted as at the moment of their first being married. Always and under every circumstance an enthusiast in love, I have very lately heard him declare that he looked with astonishment at the present race of lovers, so totally unlike what he had been himself. His never-failing cheerfulness and good humor are a perpetual source of delight to all connected with him, and, I have not a doubt, have been the means of prolonging the life of her he is so tenderly devoted to.”
“He was her devoted lover to the very end of her life,” another member of his family connection has said. And Judge Story, in speaking of him after his wife’s death, described him as “the most extraordinary man I ever saw for the depth and tenderness of his feelings.”
A little touch of his manner to his wife is seen in a letter, which is in print, written to her from the city of Washington, on February 23, 1825, in his seventieth year. He had received an injury to his knee, about which Mrs. Marshall was anxious. “I shall be out,” he writes, “in a few days. All the ladies of the secretaries have been to see me, some more than once, and have brought me more jelly than I could eat, and many other things. I thank them, and stick to my barley broth. Still I have lots of time on my hands. How do you think I beguile it? I am almost tempted to leave you to guess, until I write again. You must know that I begin with the ball at York, our splendid assembly at the Palace in Williamsburg, my visit to Richmond for a fortnight, my return to the field, and the very welcome reception you gave me on my arrival at Dover, our little tiffs and makings-up, my feelings when Major Dick[8] was courting you, my trip to the Cottage [the Ambler home in Hanover County, where the marriage took place],[9]—the thousand little incidents, deeply affecting, in turn.”
This “ball at York” was the one of which Mrs. Carrington wrote; and of the “assembly at the Palace” she also gave an account, remarking that “Marshall was devoted to my sister.”
Miss Martineau, who saw him the year before he died, speaks with great emphasis of what she calls his “reverence” and his affectionate respect for women. There were many signs of this all through his life. Even in the grave and too monotonous course of his “Life of Washington,” one comes now and then upon a little gleam of this sort, that lights up the page; as when he speaks of Washington’s engagement to Mrs. Custis, a lady “who to a large fortune and a fine person added those amiable accomplishments which … fill with silent but unceasing felicity the quiet scenes of private life.” When he is returning from France, in 1798, he writes gayly back from Bordeaux to the Secretary of Legation at Paris: “Present me to my friends in Paris; and have the goodness to say to Madame Vilette, in my name and in the handsomest manner, everything which respectful friendship can dictate. When you have done that, you will have rendered not quite half justice to my sentiments.” “He was a man,” said Judge Story, “of deep sensibility and tenderness; … whatever may be his fame in the eyes of the world, that which, in a just sense, was his brightest glory was the purity, affectionateness, liberality, and devotedness of his domestic life.”
Marshall left the army in 1781, when most of the fighting in Virginia was over; and began practice in Fauquier County when the courts were opened, after Cornwallis’s surrender, in October of that year.
Among his neighbors he was always a favorite. In the spring of 1782 he was elected to the Assembly, and in the autumn to the important office of member of the “Privy Council, or Council of State,” consisting of eight persons chosen by joint ballot of the two houses of the Assembly. “Young Mr. Marshall,” wrote Edmund Pendleton, presiding judge of the Court of Appeals, to Madison, in November of that year, “is elected a councilor.… He is clever, but I think too young for that department, which he should rather have earned, as a retirement and reward, by ten or twelve years of hard service.” But, whether young or old, the people were forever forcing him into public life. Eight times he was sent to the Assembly; in 1788 to the Federal Convention of Virginia, and in 1798 to Congress.
Unwelcome as it was to him, almost always, to have his brilliant and congenial place and prospects at the bar thus interfered with, we can see now what an admirable preparation all this was for the great station, which, a little later, to the endless benefit of his country, he was destined to fill. What drove him into office so often was, in a great degree, that delightful and remarkable combination of qualities which made everybody love and trust him, even his political adversaries, so that he could be chosen when no one else of his party was available. In this way, happily for his country, he was led to consider, early and deeply, those difficult problems of government that distressed the country in the dark period after the close of the war, and during the first dozen years of the Federal Constitution.