John Marshall

by Harlow Giles Unger

  All charged as one with comrades from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. Their common quest and common sufferings had brought them together in the dust and dirt of a bloody hell and turned them into brothers. For the first time in the history of the Americas—perhaps the world—a large, heterogeneous band of men and boys had shed national, regional, and religious differences to merge as one new people: Americans all!

  Or so they believed at the moment.

  Before Washington’s men could press their advantage, darkness fell on the field of battle and ended the day’s fighting. As Washington and his exhausted troops slept, the British quietly slipped away to Sandy Hook, a spit of land on the northeastern New Jersey shore at the entrance to New York Bay. Transports carried them to New York and deprived the Americans of a clear-cut victory, but Washington nonetheless boasted that “their trip through the Jerseys has cost them [the British] at least 2,000 of their best troops in killed, wounded, prisoners, and deserters. We had 60 men killed—132 wounded and about 130 missing, some of whom I suppose may yet come in.”35

  Energized by the fighting at Monmouth, Marshall and Monroe sought more action, but enlistment terms of their troops had expired. Their men were returning home, and neither officer had replacements to lead into battle. Nor were there any battles to fight. Washington planned to await the French army’s arrival before engaging the British again, and he moved his forces through northern New Jersey to the west bank of the Hudson River opposite Manhattan to contain British forces on the island while awaiting the French. Monroe took a post as an aide to the general staff, while Marshall volunteered for a special attack that General “Mad” Anthony Wayne was planning in the Hudson Highlands, about fifty miles up-river from New York.

  The British had seized two rocky points that jutted into the water on opposite sides of the river and provided landings for a ferry connection. Wayne organized a small corps of 1,350 elite officers and troops for a quick strike to seize Stony Point on the western side of the River. He chose Captain John Marshall as one of the officers to lead the strike.

  On June 15, 1779, after the silent night had cloaked their movements, Wayne and his raiders, including Marshall, were ready to scale the steep rock cliffs of Stony Point. Armed with bayonets and hunting knives, they hoped to assault sentries at the top and capture the British garrison while most of the enemy still slept.

  “This will not reach your eye, until the writer is no more,” Wayne scribbled at the foot of the cliffs in a note to his brother-in-law. “Attend to the education of my little son & daughter.”36 In his heart General Wayne knew the expedition was certain suicide.

  _______________

  * The area surrounding Oak Hill now comprises the town of Marshall, Virginia, about forty miles due west of Arlington.

  CHAPTER 2

  Commotions

  AS MARSHALL AND THE OTHER TROOPS CLAMBERED OVER THE CLIFF tops into the British camp at Stony Point, New York, a prearranged signal set off a barrage from General “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s artillery, which had quietly rolled into the forest behind the British. The bursts of shell fire drew attention away from the raiders, and, after only twenty-five minutes, Marshall and his men had secured the fort and taken 500 British prisoners at a cost of only 15 American lives. Twenty British soldiers died, with 83 Americans and 60 British wounded.

  The victory proved of no value, however. At the ferry base across the river from Stony Point, the British repelled a similar assault and left the two landings in the hands of opposing forces—unusable by either.

  A month later, in August 1779, Marshall volunteered for what would prove his last engagement of the war. He joined Virginia General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee in another night assault—this one on a British fort at Paulus Hook (now Jersey City), on the Hudson River opposite lower Manhattan. The Americans took 158 British prisoners and captured the last British military emplacement in northern New Jersey.

  As the Continental Army moved to winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey, at the end of 1779 Washington learned of British plans to invade Virginia. Thomas Jefferson had succeeded Patrick Henry as governor in June 1779 after Henry had completed his third successive term and was constitutionally ineligible to succeed himself. Washington urged Jefferson to install chevaux-de-frise* defenses at the mouths of navigable state rivers to prevent British ships from sailing upstream. He also asked Jefferson in the strongest terms to step up military recruiting efforts. Most Virginia troops had returned home after their three-year commitments, and the state’s officers—Marshall, Monroe, and the rest—were left without men to defend the state. Convinced that citizens would, like the Massachusetts Minutemen, stream from their homes en masse to repel invaders, Jefferson “totally disbelieved” Washington’s warnings.

  “Peace is not far off,” Jefferson all but scoffed at Washington. “The English cannot hold out long, because all the world is against them.”1

  As a precaution, though, the governor ordered the capital moved fifty miles upstream from Williamsburg to Richmond and stored all state papers, archives, and other records in a shabby-looking forge outside the new capital.

  With no infantrymen to command himself, Marshall took a leave of absence to visit his father, who commanded an artillery regiment in Yorktown. To his joy, he learned that the officer corps included two of his brothers, Thomas Jr., and James Markham, both captains. Adding even more pleasure to his imminent family reunion were four, beautiful, unmarried young ladies who lived across the road from his father’s headquarters—the four daughters of state councilor Jacquelin Ambler. Targets of longing looks from every lonely officer in camp, the girls were the youngest descendants of an old and noble Huguenot family that had fled France after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants in 1572 during the French wars of religion.

  The first of the Amblers arrived in Virginia in 1672 with much of their fortune intact—only to see it largely disappear in the looting and destruction of the Revolutionary War. Still socially and politically influential after the Revolution, Ambler’s most valuable assets were his daughters, whose beauty, charm, and education, he hoped, would compensate for the absence of dowries. A close friend of Thomas Marshall, Ambler planned a ball to present his daughters to society after he learned that, in addition to Colonel Marshall’s two other sons and a gaggle of other eligible young officers, the young hero Captain John Marshall was coming to visit.

  “Our expectations were raised to the highest pitch,” Eliza Ambler, the oldest Ambler daughter, wrote of John Marshall’s anticipated arrival. “We had been accustomed to hear him spoken of by all as a very paragon. . . . The eldest of fifteen children, devoted from his earliest years to his younger brothers and sisters, he was almost idolized by them, and every line received from him was read with rapture.”2

  The John Marshall who finally staggered into town, however, left the Ambler girls aghast. Instead of the sword-wielding Adonis in shining armor they had conjured in their imaginations, the young man they saw was a filthy, emaciated, unshaven, unkempt vagabond—an elongated skeleton in tatters. He and his comrades had walked from the northern battlefields, sleeping in the open along the way, seldom stopping for anything but the most basic needs.

  “I lost all desire of becoming agreeable in his eyes,” Eliza Ambler shuddered, “when I beheld his awkward figure, unpolished manners, and total negligence of person.”3

  Not, however, Eliza’s youngest sister, fourteen-year-old Mary Ambler, whom her family and friends called “Polly.” Too young to go to the ball, Polly had never even taken dancing lessons, but, intent on glimpsing the fabled Captain John Marshall, she ignored the admonitions of her older sister and sneaked into the ballroom. When she and John saw each other, they fell in love.

  “She with a glance divined his character,” Polly’s sister explained, “and understood how to appreciate it. . . . [She] resolved
to set her cap at him . . . and at the first introduction he became devoted to her.”4

  John Marshall would treasure every minute of those first moments with Polly the rest of his life: “The ball at Yorktown . . . the dinner on fish at your house the next day . . . the very welcome reception you gave me . . . our little tiffs and makings up . . . and all the thousand indescribable but deeply affecting instances of your affection or coldness which constituted for a time the happiness or misery of my life.”5

  Marshall became a daily visitor to the Ambler home, reading poetry to the girls and gradually winning over the entire family. “Beneath the slovenly garb there dwelt a heart complete with every virtue,” Polly’s oldest sister Eliza conceded later.

  From the moment he loved my sister he became truly a brother to me (a blessing which before I had never known). . . . During the short stay he made with us, our whole family became attached to him. . . . We felt a love for him that can never cease; and how could it have been otherwise when there was no circumstance, however trivial, in which we were concerned that was not his care.6

  As the first days of 1780 passed and Governor Jefferson did nothing to enlist new recruits, John Marshall’s father set out with sons Thomas Jr. and James Markham for Kentucky, then still part of Virginia. With land the most valuable resource at the time, Virginia had set aside thousands of acres in Kentucky’s wilderness as bounties for service in the Revolutionary War, with grants based on rank and length of service. To claim ownership, however, recipients had to survey and stake out their properties—a difficult and costly, time-consuming adventure that left many returning soldiers so intimidated by the enormity of the task that they willingly sold their bounty rights to speculators for pennies on the dollar.

  As a Revolutionary War general, Thomas Marshall claimed almost 110,000 acres of bounty lands for himself, while his sons, as captains, could each add at least 4,000 acres more to family holdings. Before they left, the Marshalls bought warrants at prices well below their face values for thousands more acres from other veterans and built their holdings in Kentucky alone to 152,229 acres.

  The road to Kentucky was more trail than road. Carved from the wilderness by Daniel Boone, “Boone’s Trace” began west of Richmond, south of the Shenandoah Valley, sliced through the Cumberland Gap, and turned north into central Kentucky, before splitting: a western fork led to Louisville and a northern fork into the fertile bluegrass country in Fayette Country, which included Lexington. Thomas Marshall sought—and won—appointment as chief surveyor for both Fayette County and the town of Lexington.

  A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Judge George Wythe became a legendary law professor at College of William and Mary, preparing, among others, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and George Washington’s nephew Bushrod Washington for the law. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  John Marshall, meanwhile, extended his leave from the army to study law at College of William and Mary under the legendary George Wythe, who had trained Governor Jefferson. Wythe was teaching nearly forty other students when Marshall enrolled—among them George Washington’s favorite nephew, Bushrod Washington, and Spencer Roane, who would soon marry one of Patrick Henry’s daughters.

  A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Wythe was Virginia’s most renowned lawyer and legal scholar—and designer of a unique American curriculum that expanded the usual study of textbooks with a monthly moot court for students to act as attorneys before a jury of professors. He also organized students into a mock legislature to write and debate laws, with Wythe acting as “speaker” and preparing each to enter government and lead his state.

  John Marshall completed his studies in August 1780 and had no sooner won admission to the Virginia bar that autumn when Benedict Arnold, who had switched sides in the war, sailed from New York for Chesapeake Bay with a fleet of twenty-seven ships carrying 1,600 British troops. His fleet sailed across the bay and up the James River unimpeded because of Jefferson’s failure to install chevaux-de-frise. Caught unprepared, Jefferson and other Virginia officials fled Richmond toward the hills of Charlottesville, where Jefferson had built an incongruously pretentious home he called “Monticello” (“little mountain” in Italian).

  “Such terror and confusion, you have no idea of,” Ambler’s daughter Eliza wrote the night of Arnold’s arrival. “Governor, Council, everybody scampering . . .”

  How dreadful the idea of an enemy passing through such a country as ours committing enormities that fill the mind with horror and returning exultantly without meeting one impediment to discourage them. . . . But this is not more laughable than . . . our illustrious Governor, who they say took neither rest nor food for man or horse until he reached [his] Mountain.7

  Arnold and his men burned much of Richmond, including the forge where Jefferson had stored Virginia’s records and official history.

  With Jefferson unable or unwilling to defend the state, Washington sent the young French Major General Lafayette with 1,000 regulars to Richmond. Lord Cornwallis, however, rode in from the south with 7,000 troops to seize and hold the state capital and send Lafayette and his men in full flight northward. General “Mad” Anthony Wayne waited at the Pennsylvania border with 1,300 Pennsylvanians to replenish, reclothe, re-arm, and reinforce Lafayette’s men before counterattacking the British. Far from his sources of supply in Chesapeake Bay off Yorktown, Cornwallis had no choice but retreat.

  In the spring of 1781, as Governor Jefferson’s second one-year term in office neared its end, Virginia’s House of Delegates, led by Patrick Henry, took up a motion to impeach Jefferson and call on General Washington to take command of all Virginia forces. Jefferson pleaded with Washington that only a few days remained before the end of his term, after which he pledged his “retirement to a private station . . . relinquishing [his office] to abler hands.”8

  Adding to Jefferson’s public humiliation as governor was a devastating personal loss: his daughter Lucy Elizabeth—not yet two years old—had died. Nor was that the last blow he was to suffer. Lucy’s death left Jefferson’s wife so weak physically and so shattered emotionally that less than five months after her daughter’s death Martha Jefferson followed her daughter to the grave, leaving Jefferson with three surviving young daughters to raise by himself.

  On June 3, 1781, Thomas Jefferson ceded the governorship to General Thomas Nelson without explanation. Forty years later Jefferson was still unwilling to explain his conduct as governor. His autobiography revealed nothing:

  From a belief that, under the pressure of the invasion under which we were then laboring, the public would have more confidence in a military chief, and that the military commander, being invested with the civil power also, both might be wielded with more energy, promptitude and effect for the defense of the state, I resigned the administration at the end of my second year, and General Nelson was appointed to succeed me.9

  John Marshall and James Monroe both hoped the new governor would change the recruitment picture, but they soon learned that “the militia in the field was officer’d and . . . that [they] could procure none whatever.”10

  Two months later, on the night of October 14, 1781, Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette—both close friends and battlefield comrades of Marshall and Monroe at Monmouth—led the heroic charge through enemy redoubts at Yorktown. On October 17 Lord Cornwallis, the British commander, proposed “a cessation of hostilities” and, two days later, signed the articles of capitulation that ended fighting in America. John Marshall rode home to Oak Hill, where neighbors elected him to the Virginia House of Delegates and sent him back to Richmond and the arms of his beloved Polly Ambler.

  When Marshall took his seat in the spring of 1782, his friend James Monroe had also won election to the legislature. The two would now serve their country together in peace as they had in war—this time alongside such legendary Virginians as Patrick Henry, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, and James Madison.

  Their wartime heroics made Marshall and Monroe instant
celebrities, while Marshall’s romance with Polly Ambler and close ties to the rest of the Ambler family gave Richmond’s gossip mills more than enough fodder. Both young men won immediate acceptance by legislators, who gave the young heroes prime committee appointments as well as invitations to important social functions.

  From the first, Marshall championed veterans’ rights, demanding an end to state seizures of properties owned by former soldiers unable to pay property taxes. “I partook largely of the sufferings and feelings of the army and brought with me into civilian life an ardent devotion to its interests,” Marshall explained. He grew convinced, however, that state politics lay behind the sufferings of the army and its veterans “and that no safe and permanent remedy could be found but in a more efficient and better organized general [federal] government.”11

  By the end of Marshall’s first year in the legislature the sufferings of the army had grown unbearable. Without power to levy taxes, the Confederation Congress was bankrupt and unable to pay the troops, many of whom roamed the countryside pillaging farms for food and clothing. In Newburgh, New York, where Washington’s Continental Army lay encamped after Yorktown, an unsigned leaflet urged officers to take up arms and march against Congress.

  “My God,” Washington shuddered at what he termed a call to treason. He ordered officers to assemble and read the letter to them. He then acknowledged the hardships officers and troops had faced but called the letter “something so shocking that humanity revolts at the idea.” He reminded them, “I have never left your side one moment” and pledged his name and honor that “you may command my services . . . in the attainment of complete justice for all your toils and dangers.”12

  Although Washington’s appeal ended the mutiny in Newburgh, troops encamped in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, did not hear his message. Enraged over government failure to pay them, they marched to Philadelphia, their numbers increasing to more than 500 as they reached the doors of Congress to extract justice—and money. As rifle barrels shattered windows and took aim, congressmen fled the hall and the city, crossing the Delaware River to New Jersey. Congress reconvened in Princeton on June 24 and met there on and off until October, when it moved to more spacious quarters in Annapolis, Maryland, and ultimately New York City, far from any mutinous troop encampments.