Marshall, John (b. Germantown [now Midland], Va., 24 Sept. 1755; d. Philadelphia, Pa., 6 July 1835; interred New Burying Ground, Richmond, Va.), chief justice, 1801–1835. By common acclaim, John Marshall is “the great Chief Justice,” the single best representative of American constitutional law. His greatness, as Oliver Wendell Holmes noted in 1901, consisted partly in his “being there” during the formative period of the Court's history. But Marshall's conservative‐national ideology fit the formative age perfectly, just as his personality and legal genius exactly suited the duties of chief justice.

President John Adams appointed Marshall to the Court on 20 January 1801, to save the Constitution from the Jeffersonian Republicans. The well‐settled values Marshall brought to his duties were the product of the revolutionary age as refracted through family and place. He was born and grew up in Fauquier County on the north‐western frontier of Virginia, the eldest of fifteen children. Frontier life imparted to Marshall an easygoing, democratic demeanor that was balanced by the conservative values of the privileged class to which he belonged. Marshall's marriage to Betsy Ambler in 1783 further consolidated his membership in polite society and gave him a useful entree into politics and law. They had ten children, six of whom lived to maturity.

The strong love of union that infused his jurisprudence was due mainly to his father's influence and his own experience in the Revolutionary War. Young Marshall received only two years of formal education. Beyond that, his father taught him rudimentary math, deepened his love of English literature, introduced him to black‐stone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) and most importantly perhaps, kept him abreast of political developments in pre‐Revolutionary Virginia. Father and son were among the first to enlist. As an officer in the Culpepper Minutemen and later in the continental line, Marshall saw action at the battles of Great Bridge, Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth Courthouse. Wintering at Valley Forge instilled in him a lifelong hatred of state provincialism and feckless national government. While serving as deputy judge advocate, he met several members of General George Washington's staff who would later become champions of national union. Marshall's intense patriotism and admiration of Washington can be gleaned from his Life of George Washington (1805–1807).

Marshall resumed his legal studies in 1780 by briefly attending the law lectures of George Wythe at William and Mary. With little more formal training than that he began legal practice, first in Fauquier County and then in Richmond, where he settled with his wife and family. Neither as lawyer nor as judge was he inclined to blackletter scholarship. He did possess, however, in rare combination, those qualities essential to legal greatness: a capacious, retentive, and quick mind; sharp analytical skills; and a logical prose style that bordered on eloquence. He rose rapidly to the top of the highly competitive Richmond bar, specializing in noncriminal appellate cases. The staple of his practice was British debt cases, but he litigated a wide range of cases in law and equity in state and federal courts. His only case before the Supreme Court, which he lost, was Ware v. Hylton (1796), which, ironically, he argued on states' rights grounds.

To be a nationalist in Virginia was to be a Federalist and Marshall was both. Serving in Virginia's Council of State (1782–1784) and in the House of Delegates (1782, 1784–1785, 1787–1788, 1795) convinced him as it had James Madison that state legislators were parochial and incompetent. He made his debut as a nationalist in the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788, where he spoke effectively in defense of federal judicial authority. As a prominent Federalist, he defended Washington's foreign policy and Alexander Hamilton's domestic program. Proven ability, well‐placed connections, and service to party brought him offers to serve as U.S. attorney general, minister to France, and associate justice of the Supreme Court. He rejected these offers for financial reasons, but he did agree to serve on the so‐called XYZ mission to France, where he distinguished himself for his nationalism, his diplomatic skills, and the effectiveness of his written dispatches to President John Adams. At Washington's behest, he agreed to serve in Congress (1799–1800), where he became the leading spokesman for the moderate Federalism of President Adams. He served briefly but effectively as secretary of state before assuming his duties as chief justice on 5 March 1801.

As chief justice he immediately set out to strengthen the Court by unifying it—a chore made easier by the threats posed by President Thomas Jefferson and his party who controlled Congress. His most important innovation was to persuade his colleagues to abandon seriatim opinions, thus making it possible for the Court to speak authoritatively in a single voice. Most often in important constitutional questions that voice belonged to Marshall, who sensed intuitively that the function of the Court was to legitimate and educate a people as yet unschooled in constitutional law. His great opinions were expansive constitutional state papers written with grace, eloquence, and authority and rooted in the republican principles of a written and supreme Constitution emanating from a sovereign people.

His first great effort as spokesman for the whole Court was Marbury v. Madison (1803), which was the opening battle in the struggle for judicial review over acts of Congress. For a unanimous Court, Marshall ruled that section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 was void, so far as it extended original jurisdiction not authorized by Article III of the Constitution. Contrary to what is often written about the opinion, Marshall did not explicitly claim that the Court was the sole or final interpreter of the Constitution. In fact, not until Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) did the Court strike down another act of Congress. Marbury was not cited by the Supreme Court itself as the definitive statement on judicial review until the late nineteenth century. Marshall did, however, successfully nullify an act of Congress and in the process grounded judicial authority in the supremacy of a written constitution. By lecturing President Jefferson on the rule of law, he implicitly put forth the Court as the special guardian of that sacred republican principle. Given the political vulnerability of the Court, it was a brilliant victory and a timely one as well. But the real meaning of judicial review—as the power of the Court to expound the text of the Constitution as law—became clear only in cases like McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) where Marshall upheld the federal statute in question.

If McCulloch is the best example of Marshall's use of judicial review, Cohens v. Virginia (1821) was his most elaborate defense of it. The case arose when Virginia challenged the appellate authority of the Supreme Court under section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which gave the Court the right to review federal questions decided by state courts. Marshall's opinion demonstrated by logic and recourse to fundamental principles that the supremacy of the Constitution and the appellate authority of the Court are inseparable. By ruling that the Eleventh Amendment was no bar to appellate jurisdiction, he further limited that amendment as a states' rights curb on judicial authority (see State Sovereignty and States' Rights). The importance of Cohens is suggested by the fact that John C. Calhoun, who initially supported the decision, developed his theory of nullification in direct refutation of Marshall's argument.25

Another theme running through Marshall's constitutional opinions was vested rights. As an extensive land speculator he learned firsthand the Lockean principle that property and individual liberty were connected. Experience in state government taught him that the greatest threat to both was state legislation. Fletcher v. Peck (1810) gave him a chance to address that problem. The question was whether an act passed by the Georgia legislature in 1796 repealing a previous act selling state land to private speculators violated Article I, section 10, which prohibited states from passing laws impairing the obligation of contracts (see Contracts Clause). Georgia defended the repeal on the grounds that the original grant was induced by bribery and fraud—which it was. But if states could repeal their own grants, innocent buyers could lose their property and massive insecurity would be introduced into the land market. It was a judgment call for Marshall on constitutional as well as policy grounds, because available evidence pointed to the fact that Article I, section 10 seemed intended by the framers to apply to private contracts but not public contracts to which the state itself was a party. In voiding the Georgia rescinding act—the first time a state law had been held in violation of the Constitution—Marshall opted for property rights and market stability. He also chose the Lockean spirit of the age over the letter of the Constitution10

In Fletcher, Marshall made the Contracts Clause the constitutional shield of property rights against state action; in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) he closed the circle of protection. In 1816 New Hampshire altered the charter of Dartmouth College, in effect making the private college into a state university. The question was whether the Contracts Clause prevented it from doing so. Marshall ruled that state charters as well as state grants were contracts within the meaning of Article I, section 10. The state could not alter the terms of charters unless, as Justice Joseph Story pointed out in his concurrence, it had reserved the right to do so in the charter. The decision not only secured private education in America but also promoted the growth of business corporations by providing a stable climate for investment. Corporations, which had been justified because of their public function and which accordingly had been subject to state control, now became private entities protected by the Constitution.

The chief justice was less successful in his effort to prohibit state bankruptcy legislation via the Contracts Clause. The unsettled constitutional issue was whether the federal authority to pass uniform bankruptcy laws, granted in Article I, section 8, automatically prohibited state action and whether state authority, if it existed, was valid only when applied to future contracts. Marshall's opinion in Sturges v. Crowninshield (1819), which confronted the issue for the first time, struck down a New York bankruptcy law that applied to contracts made before the law was passed, but it did not resolve the questions of exclusivity and prospective contracts. When in Ogden v. Saunders (1827) the Court upheld a state bankruptcy law governing prospective contracts, Marshall entered a passionate dissent, denying the prospective‐retrospective distinction altogether. Scholars have concluded that the justices were badly divided in Sturges and that Marshall had fashioned his opinion to avoid an open split.8

Marshall's thinking about the relationship of law and capitalism was shaped by an age where agriculture and commerce dominated, where large‐scale manufacturing was in its infancy, and the business cycle yet unknown. Yet his view of law and economics was progressive as his quest for the creation of a national market in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) indicates. The former construed implied powers to uphold a congressional act creating the Second Bank of the United States; the latter's broad construction of the federal commerce clause prohibited states from passing laws interfering with interstate transportation and the free flow of goods across state lines (see Commerce Power). Taken with Marshall's effort in Fletcher and Dartmouth to provide a stable environment for investment in land and corporate stock, these opinions show the entrepreneurial cast of Marshall's jurisprudence. Jefferson and others accused him of having transformed the Constitution, yet Marshall followed the spirit if not the literal intent of the framers.

The central and most controversial theme in Marshall's decisions concerned federalism and involved the Court in the effort to brighten the line between state and nation that was so indistinctly drawn in the Constitution. All his leading constitutional opinions, except Marbury, address this issue, either directly or indirectly, and all of them curb state power: in Cohens he demolished state judicial claims of finality in constitutional cases; in Fletcher and Dartmouth, state legislatures were kept from repudiating their own grants and charters; in McCulloch states were prohibited from taxing federally chartered corporations; in Gibbons from interfering with interstate commerce. In the process of curbing the states, Marshall created a vast reservoir of congressional power. Thus in McCulloch he read the “necessary and proper” clause of Article I, section 8, so as to establish implied powers. By his expansive definition of the Commerce Clause in Gibbons, he established the principle that Congress was supreme within its enumerated powers (though he drew back from the proposition that the mere grant of a power to Congress excluded the states from acting). These opinions not only settled the constitutional question at hand but repudiated the emerging political doctrine of state sovereignty. Here Marshall emphasized the Federalist insistence that the people, not the states, were sovereign, that they established an enduring nation with all the powers necessary to nationhood, and that the Supreme Court was mandated by the people themselves to preserve those powers.

Because Marshall's opinions have been cited so frequently in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as justifications of federal power, it is tempting to conclude that he was the unrelenting consolidationist that southern states' rights critics accused him of being. In evaluating Marshall's jurisprudence, it must be remembered that the federal regulatory state was a century away. Congress did legislate on tariff, banking, public lands, and internal improvements, and Marshall's opinions authorized congressional action in these areas. But there was almost no federal regulatory legislation in his day. Measured by the governmental practice of his own age, Marshall's theoretical assertions of national authority came mainly as a response to states' rights radicals who wanted to undo the concessions to national authority that they believed had been unwisely agreed to in 1787.

Marshall's constitutional opinions taken as a whole stand as a comprehensive exposition of the Constitution on a par with the Federalist Papers, on which he drew heavily (see Federalist, The). Unlike those famous essays, however, Marshall's opinions were the law of the land. They were persuasive because they drew effectively on Revolutionary history, on the political theory of the founders, and on widely accepted sources of legal authority: natural law, the law of nations, and English common law. As befit a Court that was making precedents rather than following them, they were written in stately language that was logical, eloquent, and authoritative.

Indeed, because Marshall's constitutional opinions appear so authoritative, it is easy to overestimate their actual impact. In fact, they did not always control events or sometimes even the parties in the suit. Some of Marshall's contract decisions (e.g., New Jersey v. Wilson, 1812) went unenforced. Those in the Georgia Indian cases were resisted outright, with the support of the president. More threatening and disheartening to Marshall, however, was the fact that new appointments after 1823 brought states' rights ideology onto the bench itself. Beleaguered from outside by the rising tide of states' rights, challenged from the inside, Marshall was forced to retreat from his doctrinal preferences. In Willson v. Blackbird Creek Marsh Co. (1829), for example, Marshall drew back from the broad view of congressional power over interstate commerce set forth in Gibbons. In Providence Bank v. Billings (1830), he retreated from the spirit if not the letter of Dartmouth, ruling that the state's power to tax corporations cannot be restricted by implications from the charter but must be specifically stated. There is considerable evidence, too, that he resisted implied charter rights in the Charles River Bridge case (1837) when it was first argued in 1831.

Occasionally he was able to hold the line, as in his opinion in Craig v. Missouri (1830) where, in the old nationalist spirit, he invalidated a Missouri law that indirectly legalized state paper money. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832) (see Cherokee Cases), he struck a blow against states' rights and Jacksonian democracy and for the Indians. But here, as in some of his contract cases, the Court's opponents had the final word. Ironically, Marshall's last constitutional opinion was Barron v. Baltimore (1833), which conceded control over civil liberties to the states by ruling that the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government.

Where the chief justice stood on the slavery issue is not clear, since no legal challenge to the institution was presented him. As an officer in the American Colonization Society, he was in favor of gradual emancipation. But his support of the proslavery forces at the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–1830, his own experience as a small slaveholder, and his willingness to make pragmatic concessions to states' rights in the period after 1825 suggest that he would have been reluctant to unsettle the institution by judicial decision. It remained a possibility, however, and one readily perceived by Marshall's southern critics, that the broad power he gave Congress might do just that.

Marshall defined for all time the nature of the chief justiceship (see Chief Justice, Office of the), but his own role in the office varied according to circumstances. His greatest dominance came in the period from 1801 to 1811. From 1811 to 1823, during the Court's most stable and productive period, he increasingly shared power with strong‐minded colleagues like Joseph Story and William Johnson, sometimes compromising his doctrinal preferences to maintain unity. During his last decade on the Court, he further moderated his style of leadership to fit the new age and the new justices who represented it. He never surrendered his position as leader of the Court, however, even after the onset of illness in 1831. But neither, to his great distress, could he quell the “revolutionary spirit” on the Court, and he died fearing that both it and the Constitution were gone. Modest man that he was, it never occurred to him that he would become the symbol of the living Constitution and the personal embodiment of the Court he loved.

See also Judicial Power and Jurisdiction; Judicial Review.

Bibliography

Albert J. Beveridge , The Life of John Marshall, 4 vols. (1916–1919).
Robert K. Faulkner , The Jurisprudence of John Marshall (1968).
George L. Haskins and and Herbert A. Johnson , History of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 2, Foundations of Power: John Marshall, 1801–15 (1981).
Charles F. Hobson, ed., The Papers of John Marshall, 6 vols. (1974–).
G. Edward White , John Marshall and the Genesis of the Tradition, in his The American Judicial Tradition (1976).
G. Edward White , History of the Supreme Court of the United States, vols. 3–4, The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815–35 (1988).

R. Kent Newmyer

John Marshall

As the fourth chief justice of the United States, John Marshall (1755-1835) was the principal architect in consolidating and defining the powers of the Supreme Court. Perhaps more than any other man he set the prevailing tone of American constitutional law.

The eldest of Thomas and Mary Marshall's 15 children, John Marshall was born on Sept. 24, 1755, near Germantown, Va. Frontier and family were the shaping forces of his youth. His mother came from the aristocratic Randolphs of "Turkey Island." His father—"the foundation of all my own success in life," recalled John Marshall—was a man of humble origin who, through native ability and strength of character, rose to relative prominence. Marshall's spare formal education consisted mainly of tutored lessons in the classics and Latin. His father saw to it, however, that John was solidly grounded in English literature and history; he also brought home practical lessons in politics from his service in the Virginia House of Burgesses during the years preceding the American Revolution.

Family unity, a tradition of learning, and a concern for affairs of the world shielded young Marshall from the barbarity of the frontier. But the West also left its mark—in a gaiety of heart, an open democratic demeanor, and a manliness of character that were no small part of Marshall's gift of leadership.

American Revolution

A dedicated patriot from the outset, Marshall saw action with the Culpepper Minutemen in 1775. As an officer in the Continental Line, he took part in several important battles and endured the hardships of Valley Forge. His experience, fortified by his association with George Washington and other nationalist leaders, left him with the passionate love of union and chronic distrust of state particularism that later became the twin pillars of his constitutional law.

Before Capt. Marshall was mustered out of the Army in 1781, he had decided on law as a profession. He heard George Wythe's law lectures at the College of William and Mary in 1780, and during that summer he was licensed to practice and that August was admitted to the county bar. During this same period Marshall fell in love with Mary Ambler. They were married in January 1783 and took up residence in Richmond, Va.

Early Political Career

Marshall's natural eloquence, charismatic personality, and rare gift for logical analysis overcame the deficiencies in his legal education. He rose quickly to the head of the Richmond bar. He also distinguished himself in state politics. He sat in the House of Burgesses (1782-1784, 1787-1791, and 1795-1797), where he consistently supported nationalist measures. He served on the important Committee on the Courts of Justice and when only 27 was elected by the legislature to the governor's Council of State.

Marshall's legislative experience confirmed his belief that the Articles of Confederation needed to be strengthened against the irresponsible and selfish forces of state power. As a delegate to the Virginia convention for the ratification of the Federal Constitution (1788), he put his nationalist ideas to use. Though somewhat overshadowed by established statesmen, he spoke influentially for ratification. And on the hotly debated subject of the Federal judiciary, he led the nationalist offensive.

Federalist orthodoxy and demonstrated ability soon won Marshall national prominence. During the crisis over the Jay Treaty in 1795, when party lines began to crystallize, Marshall supported Washington and Alexander Hamilton against the Jeffersonian Republicans. As a lawyer in the Supreme Court case of Ware v. Hylton (1796), he adhered to Federalist principles by arguing the supremacy of national law.

Marshall had turned down offers from President Washington to be attorney general and minister to France. In 1797 he agreed to serve on the "XYZ mission" to France. Shortly after his return, President John Adams offered him an appointment to the Supreme Court, but he declined. Elected to Congress in 1798, he soon became a leader of the Federalists in the House. Declining to serve as secretary of war, he accepted appointment in 1800 as secretary of state. Eight months later Adams appointed him chief justice of the Supreme Court, hoping to hold back the forces of states'-rights democracy, which in the form of the Jeffersonian Republicans had gained control of the Federal government.

Chief Justice

Marshall took his seat on the Court on March 5, 1801, and from that time until his death was absorbed in judicial duties. He did find time, however, to write a five-volume biography of George Washington (1804-1807) and to serve in the Virginia constitutional convention (1829-1830). But it was as chief justice that Marshall made his mark on American history. The pressing problem in 1801 was to unify and strengthen the Court. Accordingly he persuaded his colleagues to abandon the practice of delivering separate opinions and to permit him to write the opinion of the Court, which he did in the great majority of cases from 1801 to 1811. In addition, Marshall gave the Court a needed victory. His opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) for the first time declared an act of Congress unconstitutional, thus consolidating the Court's power of judicial review and providing future Courts with an elaborate defense of judicial power.

In United States v. Peters (1809) Marshall struck another blow for judicial power, this time against the claims of a state, by establishing the Court's right to be the final interpreter of Federal law. His opinion in Fletcher v. Peck held that the contract clause of the Constitution prevented state legislatures from repealing grants of land to private-interest groups. This was the first in a series of contract decisions that encouraged the growth of corporate capitalism. Few of Marshall's opinions touched civil rights; but in the Aaron Burr treason case, he struck a powerful blow for political freedom by defining treason narrowly and requiring strict proof for conviction.

Precedent-setting Cases

From the end of the War of 1812 through 1824 the Marshall Court was most creative. Marshall's position on the Court was less dominant than it had been before because able, new justices appeared. But he was unquestionably the guiding spirit and personally wrote opinions in the most important constitutional cases. Two such were McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824). In the first case, Marshall upheld the congressional act chartering the Second Bank of the United States, thereby securing a national currency and credit structure for interstate capitalism. Also, by authorizing Congress to go beyond enumerated powers through a broad interpretation of the "necessary and proper" clause, he created a body of implied national powers.

Marshall's Gibbons opinion gave Congress supreme and comprehensive authority within the enumerated powers of Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution. The definition of commerce in the Gibbons case was sufficiently broad to bring the revolutionary developments in transportation and communication of the 20th century within the scope of congressional authority. These two cases created a reservoir of national power and guaranteed a flexible Constitution that could meet the nation's changing needs. That the Court should be the final interpreter of that flexible Constitution was the message of Marshall's compelling opinion in Cohens v. Virginia (1821).

Marshall's Concept of the Nation

Nationalist though he was, Marshall did not intend to destroy the states or establish the nation as an end in itself. He envisaged the national good as the sum of the productive individuals who constituted it, each pursuing his self-interest. Accordingly Marshall's opinions worked to release the creative energies of private enterprise and create a national arena for their operation. In Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) Marshall ruled that a corporation charter was a contract within the meaning of the Constitution which the states could not impair. As a result, private educational institutions, along with hundreds of business corporations chartered by the states, were secured against state interference. The unleashed forces of commerce, Marshall believed, would transcend selfish provincialism and create a powerful, self-sufficient nation.

Aroused states'-rights pressures in the 1820s forced the Marshall Court to curtail its nationalism. In addition, new appointments to the Court allowed division and dissent to burst into the open. The chief justice did not surrender national principles—as evidenced in Brown v. Maryland (1827) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832)—and he continued to lead the Court, but the age of judicial creativity was temporarily over. With the election of President Andrew Jackson in 1828, Marshall became increasingly pessimistic.

Meanwhile the death of Marshall's wife left him disconsolate. And his own health began to fail, though he remained intellectually alert and continued performing his duties until his death on July 6, 1835.

Marshall died believing that the Constitution and the republic for which he had labored were gone, but history proved him wrong. The nation continued along the course of nationalism and capitalism that he had done so much to establish; the Court and the law continued to follow the lines he projected. His reputation as the "great chief justice" seems secure.

Further Reading

Albert J. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall (4 vols., 1916-1919; rev. ed., 2 vols., 1947), despite its nationalist bias, remains the standard biography. Edward S. Corwin, John Marshall and the Constitution: A Chronicle of the Supreme Court (1919), concentrates on his judicial career.

James Bradley Thayer and others, John Marshall (1967), is a collection of classic essays. William M. Jones, ed., Chief Justice John Marshall: A Reappraisal (1956), is another collection of distinguished essays. The most exhaustive analysis of Marshall's judicial philosophy is Robert K. Faulkner, The Jurisprudence of John Marshall (1968). The relationship between the two giants of American constitutional development is examined in Samuel J. Konefsky, John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton: Architects of the American Constitution (1964). Standard constitutional histories, such as Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (3 vols., 1923; rev. ed., 2 vols., 1926), and Charles G. Haines, The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government and Politics, 1789-1835 (1944), also contain material on Marshall's career. For further material the reader should consult James A. Servies, A Bibliography of John Marshall (1956), and numerous essays on him in historical and legal periodicals. □

MARSHALL, JOHN

John Marshall presided over the U.S. Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835. Appointed by President john adams, Marshall assumed leadership during a pivotal era. The early nineteenth century saw tremendous political battles over the future of the United States and its Constitution, often with the Court at the center of controversy. By the force of personality, argument, and shrewdness, Marshall steered it through this rocky yet formative period. He weathered harsh criticism as the Court set important precedents that increased its power and defined its role in government. Historians credit him with establishing what has been called the American judicial tradition, in which the Supreme Court acts as an independent branch of government endowed with final authority over constitutional interpretation.

Marshall was born September 24, 1755, near Germantown (now Midland), Virginia. He was the son of Thomas Marshall, a wealthy landowner, justice of the peace, and sheriff. Like his father he fought in the Revolutionary War and married into a prominent family. His father's tutoring significantly enhanced his mere two years of formal education, which were augmented in 1780 by a brief attendance at lectures in law at the College of William and Mary.

Marshall was also influenced by george washington. Because of his service to General Washington in the war, Marshall became a strong Federalist. He later wrote about his mentor in his book Life of George Washington (1805–7).

Marriage ties made Marshall a relative of a leading Virginia political family. This helped secure his place in society, paving the way for an early legal and political career in the 1780s. He specialized in appellate cases and quickly distinguished himself in the Virginia state bar. He also served in Virginia's council of state from 1782 to 1784, and in its house of delegates four times between 1782 and 1795. But it was as a partisan of the Federalists—the opponents of the states' rights–minded Republicans—that he came to wide acclaim. The struggle between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans was the most important political contest of the day. Marshall served as a devoted publicist and organizer for the Federalist cause in Virginia, and this work earned him various offers to serve as U.S. attorney general and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. It also earned him the animosity of his distant cousin, Republican thomas jefferson, who soon became U.S. president and was his lifelong political adversary.

"It is, emphatically, the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."
—John Marshall

In 1798 Marshall agreed to serve Federalist president John Adams as one of three U.S. ministers to France during one of the Napoleonic Wars between France and Great Britain. In a scandal known as the xyz affair, the French foreign ministry attempted to solicit a bribe from the U.S. emissaries, and Marshall became a national hero for refusing. He quickly emerged

as the leading spokesman for federalism in Washington, D.C., as a member of Congress from 1799 to 1800 and briefly as secretary of state under Adams in 1800. Then Adams lost the 1800 presidential election to Jefferson, and the Republicans won control of Congress. In a desperate attempt to preserve the Federalists' power, Adams spent the remaining days of his administration making judicial appointments. Sixteen new positions for judges on federal circuit courts and dozens for justices of the peace in the District of Columbia were handed out during the final days of Adams's administration. These last-minute appointees came to be known as midnight judges. One of these seats went to Marshall, who was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court.

On March 4, 1801, Marshall assumed his duties as the head of the Court. Jefferson and the Republicans were furious over Adams's court stacking, and they swiftly quashed the appointments—except that, inexplicably, they did not challenge Marshall's. Marshall kept the Court out of the fray. He feared that in a conflict between the judiciary and the executive branch, the Court would lose.

Marshall again faced political conflict when in 1803 the Court ruled on a case brought by William Marbury, whose appointment as a D.C. justice of the peace had been one of those barred by the Republicans. Marshall's opinion for the unanimous Court in marbury v. madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 2 L. Ed. 60, dismissed Marbury's suit on the ground that the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction to rule on it. But at the same time, the Court restated the position that it had the power to rule on questions of constitutionality. By striking down a section of the judiciary act of 1789 (1 Stat. 73), Marshall's opinion marked the first time that the Court overturned an act of Congress. Not for more than fifty years would it exercise this power again. Marshall asserted the right of the Supreme Court to engage in judicial review of the law, writing, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." Marbury was the crucial first step in the evolution of the Supreme Court's authority as it exists today.

Marshall emphasized the need to limit state power by asserting the primacy of the federal government over the states. In 1819, as Marshall reached the height of his influence, he cited the Contracts Clause of the U.S. Constitution (art.

1, § 10) as a basis for protecting corporate charters from state interference (trustees of dartmouth college v. woodward, 17 U.S. [4 Wheat.] 518, 4 L. Ed. 629). That year he also struck a blow to states' rights in mcculloch v. maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 4 L. Ed. 579, where he noted that the Constitution is not a "splendid bauble" that states can abridge as they see fit. In 1821 he advanced the theory of judicial review, rejecting a challenge by the state of Virginia to the appellate authority of the Supreme Court (Cohens v. Virginia, 19 U.S. [6 Wheat.] 264, 5 L. Ed. 257).

In his written opinions, Marshall typically relied on the power of logic and his own forceful eloquence, rather than citing law. This approach was noted by Associate Justice joseph story: "When I examine a question, I go from headland to headland, from case to case. Marshall has a compass, puts out to sea, and goes directly to the result."

Marshall was not without opponents. Foremost among them was Jefferson. In 1810 Jefferson wrote to President james madison that "[t]he Chief Justice's leadership was marked by "cunning and sophistry" and displayed "rancourous hatred" of the democratic principles of the Republicans. Jefferson led the Republican attack on Marshall with the accusation that he twisted the law to suit his own biases.

Although Marshall weathered the attacks, his authority, and the Court's, was ultimately affected. Not all his decisions were enforced; some were openly resisted by the president. New appointments to the Court brought states' rights advocates onto the bench, and Marshall began to compromise as a leader and to make concessions to ideological opponents.

Marshall died in office on July 6, 1835.

further readings

Friedman, Leon, and Fred L. Israel, eds. 1969. The Justices of the Supreme Court, 1789–1969: Their Lives and Major Opinions. New York: Chelsea House.

Klarman, Michael J. 2001. "How Great Were the 'Great' Marshall Court Decisions?" Virginia Law Review 87 (October): 1111–84.

Marion, David E. 2001. "The State of the Canon in Constitutional Law: Lessons from the Jurisprudence of John Marshall." The William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 9 (February): 385–417.

Newmyer, R. Kent. 2001. John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press.

Olken, Samuel R. 2000. "Chief Justice John Marshall and the Course of American Constitutional History." John Marshall Law Review 33 (summer): 743–79.

Simon, James F. 2002. What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States. New York: Simon & Schuster.

cross-references

Constitution of the United States; Fletcher v. Peck; Gibbons v. Ogden; Supreme Court of the United States.

John Marshall (1755-1835)

Source

Chief justice of the supreme court

Second Choice. John Marshall was President John Adams’s second choice for appointment to the Supreme Court when Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth resigned in 1800. The selection of a chief justice took on heightened importance since the election of Thomas Jefferson, and a Republican Congress meant that the Federalists would no longer control the government. John Adams knew that the courts alone could impose a lasting Federalist balance to an otherwise politically lopsided government. He turned first to John Jay, former chief justice, the governor of New York, and an esteemed Federalist. Jay, however, had few fond memories of his service on the Supreme Court, with its punishing requirement of riding the circuit and the lack of a clearly defined constitutional role. He politely declined the honor, but his letter did not reach Adams until the middle of January 1801. With barely two months left in office, Adams had little time to deliberate on a substitute; he had to choose quickly. When Secretary of State John Marshall presented Jay’s letter to the president, Adams looked up and asked, “Who shall I nominate now?” Answering his own question, the president told Marshall: “I believe I must nominate you.”

Early Years. John Marshall was born in the frontier county of Fauquier, Virginia, on 24 September 1755, the first child of Thomas and Mary Keith Marshall. He was descended from the great Randolph family, a distinction he shared with his rival, Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Marshall made his life as a surveyor and land agent and somehow found the means to borrow or purchase a substantial library. He encouraged his young son to read history and poetry. Marshall recalled in later years great happiness in transcribing the works of Alexander Pope at the age of twelve. Marshall’s youth was steeped in the revolutionary spirit, and as a captain in the Continental Army he saw action in the battles of Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth. Marshall returned to Virginia in late 1779 and began to study law under George Wythe at William and Mary College. Marshall was still in the Continental Army when he was studying law, and this part-time education was his only formal legal training. He was admitted to the Virginia bar on 28 August 1780. In 1783 he married Mary Ambler, known as Polly.

Lawyer. Marshall became one of Virginia’s foremost lawyers, noted for his skill in thinking quickly on his feet. The 1783 Treaty of Paris had provided for repayment of prewar debts owed to British creditors, but states tried to protect their citizens from having to repay. Marshall made his fame and early fortune as a lawyer representing Virginians who sought to use state laws to stave off the claims of British creditors. In one case, Ware v. Hylton (1796), Marshall appeared before the Supreme Court to argue that a Virginia statute that allowed citizens to discharge their debts by making payments to the state treasury should be upheld. Judge James Iredell wrote that the oral argument before the Court reflected “a degree of ability equal to any occasion … an ingenuity, a depth of investigation, and a power of reasoning fully equal to anything I have ever witnessed.” Marshall’s talents were large, but he lost his case, the only one he ever argued before the Supreme Court. The Treaty of Paris had to be upheld, in Justice William Cushing’s words, as “being sanctioned as the supreme law, by the Constitution of the United States, which nobody pretends to deny to be paramount and controlling to all state laws, and even state constitutions, wheresoever they interfere or disagree.” Marshall would embrace these sentiments of the primacy of the federal laws and Constitution during his tenure on the Court.

“X,” “Y,” “Z.” Marshall’s commitment to the new nation led him to public service, and he was elected to the Virginia Assembly in 1782. He was an ardent nationalist and one of Virginia’s foremost supporters of ratification of the Constitution. At the 1788 Virginia Constitutional Convention Marshall offered a strong defense of Article III, the judiciary article. Marshall confronted the Anti-Federalist opposition by explaining the importance of an independent judiciary to the balance of federal power. Embracing the concept of judicial review, Marshall declared that if Congress were to enact a law not warranted by the Constitution, the Court “would declare it void.” In 1797 President Adams appointed Marshall, Virginia’s leading Federalist after Washington, to join Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Elbridge Gerry as a special envoy to Paris. Marshall was appalled when he and his colleagues were approached by French ministers soliciting bribes. In dispatches sent back to America he gave the ministers the code names “X,” “Y,” and “Z” and found himself something of a hero when he returned home. Marshall was elected to Congress as a Virginia Federalist, and President Adams appointed him secretary of war on 9 May 1800. Marshall requested that Adams withdraw his nomination. Adams was so determined to have Marshall in his cabinet that he dismissed Secretary of State Timothy Pickering in order to open up the post for Marshall. He did not decline this honor “for which I had vanity enough to think myself fitted.” After the sweeping Federalist losses in the election of 1800 Marshall expected to retire from public service with John Adams. However, when John Jay declined a second appointment as chief justice, John Marshall found himself at the head of the third branch of government, politically isolated and lacking any practical experience. He was just forty-five years old.

On the Bench. Marshall’s first act as chief justice was to administer the presidential oath to Thomas Jefferson on 4 March 1801. This was the first occasion when leadership in America passed from one party to another, a peaceful transfer of power. Resulting from a popular election, the event was a stunning demonstration of the great American experiment. As chief justice, Marshall developed the primacy of the Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution and laws. Marshall established an overwhelming series of precedents: the doctrine of judicial review (Marbury v. Madison in 1803), a limited meaning of treason (the Aaron Burr trial of 1807), the federal government’s constitutional supremacy over the states (United States v. Peters in 1809), limits on the government’s power to interfere with contracts {Fletcher v. Peck in 1810), and broad powers for Congress (McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819). He also established the Supreme Court as the final voice when the states and the federal government disagreed. Marshall enhanced the Court by making it speak with one voice. He frowned on allowing each justice to write a separate opinion, and by the power of his social skills and legal reasoning he dominated the Court. Marshall’s Court decided the vast majority of cases unanimously, and he wrote the opinions in about half of the decisions handed down between 1801 and 1835.

Final Years. Marshall’s work on the Court was supplemented by his deep devotion to Polly, who was a sickly woman in need of regular care and attention, and to writing history. He wrote the first biography of George Washington in 1805–1807. After Polly died on Christmas Day 1831, Marshall’s health began to fail; he died on 6 July 1835. At his funeral in Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell cracked while paying tribute to the great chief justice.

Source

Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (New York: Holt, 1996).

Marshall, John (1755–1835), fourth chief justice of the United States.Born into the Virginia gentry, John Marshall had little formal schooling. During the Revolutionary War, he saw combat with the Culpepper Minutemen and the Continental army, spent the Winter of 1778 at Valley Forge, and came to revere George Washington. He resigned his commission in 1781. This military service reinforced his nationalism.

In 1780, Marshall studied law briefly at the College of William and Mary under George Wythe, one of Virginia's most respected lawyers; passed the bar; and received a license to practice from Governor Thomas Jefferson. In 1782, he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. He married Mary Willis Ambler, called Polly, in 1783; they had ten children. Moving to Richmond, Virginia's new capital, Marshall enjoyed an extensive practice and was recognized as the leader of the local bar. As a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1788, he helped win approval of the new federal Constitution, delivering a noteworthy speech defending the judiciary.

Through the 1790s, Marshall stalwartly supported the Washington and John Adams administrations. In 1797, Adams sent him as an envoy to settle grievances during the Quasi‐War with France. There with Charles Pinckney and Elbridge Gerry he became part of the so‐called XYZ Affair. Welcomed as a hero upon returning to America in 1798, he was the subject of the famous toast, “Millions for Defense but not a cent for Tribute,” and won a seat in Congress in 1799. President Adams appointed him secretary of state in 1800, in which capacity he supervised the federal government's move to Washington, D.C., the new capital. In 1801, Adams appointed him chief justice of the United States, a post he held until his death in 1835.

Marshall is known as the “Great Chief Justice” because he established the institutional integrity of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court decided over 1,100 cases in his tenure; he wrote the decisions in over 500—including 36 of 62 constitutional decisions. Among these were some of the most important precedents in American constitutional law: Marbury v. Madison (1803); Fletcher v. Peck (1810); McCulloch v. Maryland (1819); Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819); Cohens v. Virginia (1821); and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824).

Marshall's greatness traces to the timing of his appointment, his sociable temperament and engaging personality, and his remarkable ability to get to the heart of issues and express himself with compelling logic. An unwavering nationalist, Marshall believed in a living Constitution, a strong national government, and a vigorous and independent judiciary within the federal system. Defining the role of chief justice through his long tenure, he initiated the practice of the court's speaking with one majority opinion and regularly suppressed his own views to help his colleagues reach a majority opinion. He dissented only once in a constitutional case, Ogden v. Sanders (1827). Although sometimes prone to stating general principles and then making the facts and statutes in a case conform to them, John Marshall was a brilliant jurist who always remained keenly sensitive to the political and economic consequences of the Court's decisions.
See also Dartmouth College Case; Early Republic, Era of the; Federal Government, Judicial Branch; Federalism; Federalist Party; Judicial Review; Jurisprudence; States' Rights.

Bibliography

Albert J. Beveridge , The Life of John Marshall, 4 vols., 1916–1919.
Charles F. Hobson , The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law, 1996.

Francis N. Stites