She was the daughter of Josiah Marshall, a Boston merchant in the China trade, a man of sagacity and enterprise in business affairs, and possessed of those traits that made him a most lovable father, wisdom, benevolence, and gentleness, with a quaint humor and readiness in repartée that enhanced the bond of comradeship between himself and his children.
The people of his own State, as well as the inhabitants of the far-away Sandwich Islands, are indebted to him for many benefactions. To the latter his ships carried the first missionaries, the materials for the first houses erected there, and the carpenters to build them. Upon being charged duty on some salmon which he had imported from the Columbia River, he pointed out to Louis Cass the desirability of establishing the claim of the United States to the region of Oregon.
In the improvements which added so much to the prosperity of Boston in 1826 he was Mayor Quincy's constant adviser and abettor.
He was a handsome man, with firm mouth and kindling eyes, and his quick step was well known in the business world, where to many a young man he gave the opportunity which was the opening of a successful mercantile career.
He was a son of Lieutenant Isaac Marshall of the Revolutionary army, and a great-grandson of John Marshall, one of the founders of Billerica, Massachusetts, in which town he was born. In the year 1800 he married Priscilla Waterman, a daughter of Freeman Waterman, who represented the town of Halifax in the Cambridge Convention which ratified for Massachusetts the Constitution of the United States.
Waterman had a sister who was distinguished for her charm, and who married a Mr. Josselyn. Traditions of the Josselyn beauty lingered in Plymouth until Emily Marshall's time. Mrs. Marshall was a woman of much beauty, grace, and dignity.
Emily was born in the year 1807 on an estate at Cambridge, which had been laid out a century before by Thomas Brattle. Shortly after her birth her parents moved into a house in Brattle Square, Boston, known as the White House. It was built upon a terrace, with steps running down to the square. A large, old-fashioned garden in the rear was one of its attractions. The house had already had two distinguished tenants, Lieutenant-Governor Bolin and John Adams, the latter having lived there when he was a young lawyer.
When Emily was fourteen years old her family once more transplanted their household gods, going this time into the house on Franklin Place, to which her beauty brought such fame. It had already begun to manifest itself, and when she was but nine or ten years of age she was frequently stopped on the street by strangers, who asked whose child she was and involuntarily told her of her budding loveliness. Yet so unconscious did she ever appear of its possession, so wholly lacking in personal vanity, that one of her sisters, gazing upon her one night arrayed in a ball-gown, and unable to restrain her admiration, asked her if she realized how beautiful she was. "Yes," she replied, "I know that I am beautiful, but I do not understand why people act so unwisely about it."
Her education was begun at Madame English's school, where Russell Sturgis, afterwards a partner of the Barings, said he first made her acquaintance. Like every one else who ever saw her, he never forgot her. More than forty years after her death, writing to thank her daughter for the photograph of a portrait she had sent him, he said, "I remember perfectly the portrait and the time when it was painted. No painter could ever give the brilliant expression which always lighted her beautiful face; the portrait is as good, therefore, as any one could make it."
At Dr. Park's school on Mount Vernon Street, then one of the best girls' schools in Boston, Margaret Fuller was one of her school-mates, and confessed later to a sister of Emily's that she would willingly have changed her mental gifts for those of the beauty and magnetism with which Emily was endowed.