Marshall, John

MARSHALL, JOHN. (1755–1835). Continental army officer, fourth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Virginia. Marshall first saw action as an officer in the Culpeper minutemen in the operations that drove Lord Dunmore, the royal governor, from Virginia at Great Bridge on 9 December 1775 and at Norfolk on 1 January 1776. On 30 July 1776 he became a first lieutenant in the Third Virginia Continental Regiment. He was promoted to captain lieutenant in the Fifteenth Virginia in December, with rank retroactive to 31 July 1776. On 20 November 1777 Marshall was appointed deputy judge advocate, and on 1 July 1778 he was promoted to captain. On 14 September 1778 he transferred to the Seventh Virginia, and on 12 February 1781 he retired from the army. He fought at Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, and Stony Point and also survived the winter at Valley Forge, where he said he served "with brave men from different states who were risking life and everything valuable in a common cause."

In the spring and summer of 1780 he attended a course of law lectures given at the College of William and Mary by Professor George Wythe, Jefferson's mentor, and on 28 August 1780 he was admitted to the Virginia bar. In 1783 he moved to Richmond from the frontier region where he had been reared and quickly became a successful lawyer. He was a member of the Virginia assembly (1782–1791 and 1795–1997), a delegate to the state convention that ratified the federal Constitution, and a member of the XYZ mission to France (1797–1798). He was a Federalist congressman from 1799 to 1800 and succeeded Timothy Pickering as secretary of state in May 1800. President John Adams nominated him to succeed Chief Justice Ellsworth of the U.S. Supreme Court, a position he accepted on 4 February 1801. During the next thirty-four years, the Court under his leadership became "the preeminent guardian and interpreter of the Constitution … and arbiter of conflicts arising from the clash of federal and state sovereignties" (Charles F. Hobson in ANB). His five-volume Life of Washington was published between 1804 and 1807.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Faulkner, Robert K. The Jurisprudence of John Marshall. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Hobson, Charles F. The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996.

Marshall, John. An Autobiographical Sketch by John Marshall. Edited by John Stokes Adams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1937.

Stites, Francis N. John Marshall: Defender of the Constitution. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981.

                               revised by Harold E. Selesky