John Marshall

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Congress was still meeting in Annapolis when word arrived that the British had recognized American independence and ended the Revolutionary War. Washington rode to Annapolis, resigned his commission, and returned to private life, and the army disbanded.

  “At length then the military career of the greatest man on earth is closed,” John Marshall wrote to his friend Monroe. By then the House of Delegates had elected Monroe to the Confederation Congress as one of Virginia’s representatives. Recalling the hardships he and Monroe had shared with Washington at Valley Forge and elsewhere, Marshall was overcome by emotion:

  May happiness attend him wherever he goes. May he long enjoy those blessings he has secured his country. When I speak or think of that superior man, my heart overflows with gratitude. May he ever experience from his countrymen those attentions which such sentiments of themselves produce.13

  John Marshall’s wife “Polly”—Mary Ambler Marshall—in a drawing by her oldest son Thomas Marshall. (FROM THE LIFE OF JOHN MARSHALL, BY ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE, VOL. I:168.)

  On January 3, 1783, John Marshall married Polly Ambler. The bride was seventeen, appropriately shy; the groom slightly more than ten years older. After paying the parson, he confessed to one of his sisters-in-law that he had “but one solitary guinea left.”14 It was fortunate that Polly’s cousin John Ambler was one of the state’s richest young men, with a country estate that served as a picture-book setting for the wedding and wedding reception—and enough cash to lend John Marshall the money to begin married life.

  Marshall’s marriage and his service in the legislature made it more convenient to make Richmond his permanent home, and he and Polly rented a small, two-room cottage. Rather than travel north to Oak Hill to run for reelection every year, he gave up his seat in the legislature after his first term and opened an office in Richmond to practice full-time law. Among his first clients was his friend James Monroe, whose service in Congress—and romance with beautiful Elizabeth Kortright—now kept him in New York most of the year. He entrusted Marshall with management of his bounty lands in Kentucky and his affairs in Richmond.

  Life in New York proved costly, however, and Monroe soon ran out of cash and sent a messenger to Marshall for more.

  “I wish it was possible to relieve your wants,” Marshall replied, “but it is impossible. . . . There is not one shilling [in your account], and the keeper of it could not borrow one. . . . I am pressed warmly by Ege [a Richmond merchant] for money, and your old landlady Mrs. Shera begins now to be a little clamorous. I shall be obliged, I apprehend, to negotiate your warrants at a discount.”15

  Marshall eventually dipped into his own pocket for enough money to send Monroe for his immediate needs, then changed the substance of his letter to lighter fare: “The excessive cold weather [here] has operated like magic on our youth,” he reported. “They feel the necessity of artificial heat and quite wearied with lying alone, they are all treading the broad road to matrimony.”16

  At the time Richmond was little more than a frontier town of about 1,200 people on the edge of the wilderness. The streets were still dirt roads, and walkways were little more than elongated dumping grounds for ashes. St. John’s Church, where Patrick Henry had delivered his “liberty-or-death” oration, was the town’s only church and the only building of consequence. A state house of sorts looked more like a warehouse than the home of the state legislature and court. Several hundred wooden houses dotted the surrounding hills, but most were little more than shacks that shook with every gust of wind and struggled to stay upright when a six-horse transport wagon rumbled by.

  The town had one tavern—Farmicola—a sizable two-story inn that doubled as Richmond’s men’s club, where Marshall was a consistent loser at whist but a popular conversationalist and drinking companion. The upstairs at Farmicola housed beds for visitors who crowded into Richmond when the House of Delegates was in session. The downstairs welcomed “generals, colonels, captains, senators, assemblymen, judges, doctors, clerks, and crowds of gentlemen of every weight and caliber and every hue of dress sitting altogether about the fire, drinking, smoking, singing, and talking ribaldry.”17

  On July 24, 1784, Polly gave birth to the Marshalls’ first child, whom they named Thomas, for John’s father. Three weeks before the boy’s birth Marshall had purchased a slave for V£90 (Virginia pounds) to relieve Polly of some household chores. After Thomas was born, he bought two more slaves for only V£30, the equivalent of two months’ rent, and relieved Polly of all the rest of her household chores.

  Late in 1785 Polly elated her husband with news that she was pregnant with their second child, and he in turn surprised her with news that he had taken a major case called Hite v. Fairfax, which, if he won, would make him one of America’s wealthiest men.

  Hite v. Fairfax traced its origins to 1649, when King Charles II of England granted a group of noblemen 5 million acres on Virginia’s Northern Neck, the northernmost of three eastern Virginia peninsulas that reached into Chesapeake Bay. Bounded by the Potomac River on the north and the Rappahannock River on the south, Virginia’s Northern Neck (see map, page 43) stretched inland to the Blue Ridge Mountains, hundreds of miles to the west. By the early eighteenth century one man in England—Lord Fairfax—had acquired the entire Northern Neck.

  When Virginia’s colonial government ran out of money in the early 1730s, it seized and sold lands of absentee owners who had failed to build homes on their properties and showed no intention of settling there. Among the lands seized were tens of thousands of acres of vacant Fairfax lands, including a 54,000-acre parcel that it sold to a speculator who resold it to Jost Hite, the owner of a gristmill near Germantown, Pennsylvania. Although Hite held a bill of sale for the 54,000 acres, Lord Fairfax still held the deed and legal title.

  In 1735, when Lord Fairfax learned what Virginia was doing to his grant, he sailed for Virginia as fast as Atlantic winds permitted to survey and stake out his lands and build homes on them before Virginia seized everything he owned. Among his surveyors were George Washington and Thomas Marshall, who surveyed about 215,000 acres, removing them from the pool of unclaimed wilderness the state could claim.

  England’s Lord Fairfax acquired a royal grant of five million acres, including all of Virginia’s Northern Neck. Bounded by the Potomac River on the north and the Rappahannock to the south, the Northern Neck stretched from the slopes of the Blue Ridge to Chesapeake Bay. The Marshall family would eventually gain possession of more than 200,000 acres of the Fairfax Manor Lands on the Blue Ridge, where Lord Fairfax built his mountain home.

  Lord Fairfax built a palatial home he called Belvoir, near George Washington’s Mount Vernon. He built a second simpler house—a hunting lodge he called Leeds Manor—on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains near the South Branch of the Potomac River. Named for his native English home at Leeds Castle in Kent, Leeds Manor stood on the 54,000 acres that Hite had bought and included the land at Oak Hill, where Thomas Marshall would later build his family home.

  By 1785 Lord Fairfax and Jost Hite were long dead, but potential fortunes awaited their heirs from the sale of the lands if they could prove ownership. Hite’s descendants held his original bill of sale from the Virginia government, but a descendant of Lord Fairfax, the Reverend Denny Martin Fairfax, held the original deed in England. Hite’s heirs demanded that Denny Fairfax surrender the deed, but Fairfax refused, arguing that Virginia had seized and sold the Fairfax lands illegally.

  In 1785 Hite’s heirs sued, and Denny Fairfax turned to Thomas Marshall, who had surveyed much of the land. Marshall, in turn, referred Fairfax to his son John Marshall, who saw an opportunity for the Marshall family to profit by buying the original deed to the Fairfax Manor lands themselves. He sent his younger brother James Markham Marshall to Britain to negotiate with Denny Fairfax, who agreed to sell the deed for £20,000 (about $1.5 million in today’s US dollars), or two shillings an acre—about 40 percent below market prices for Virginia lands. For the Marshalls to c
onsummate the sale, however, John Marshall would have to defend Denny Fairfax’s title to the lands against Hite family claims.

  Beginning in 1786, the next eight years would see Hite v. Fairfax consume every legal skill at John Marshall’s command in four federal courts, including the US Supreme Court. If he won the case, however, it promised him fame as an attorney and both him and his family untold wealth from the resale of the lands, whose value had appreciated dramatically.

  In 1786 Marshall reaped a windfall when his cousin Edmund Randolph won election as governor of Virginia. After taking his oath, the governor retired from his private law practice and directed all his clients to his favorite young cousin John Marshall. The acquisition of Governor Randolph’s practice catapulted Marshall to the top of his profession in Virginia, which, despite the growth of New York, was still the nation’s largest, wealthiest, and most populated state.

  “My extensive acquaintance in the army was also of great service to me,” Marshall noted in his autobiography. “My numerous military friends, who were dispersed over the state, took great interest in my favor, and I was more successful than I had reason to expect.”18

  On June 15 of the same year Polly added to her husband’s joy by giving birth to the Marshalls’ second child, whom they named Rebecca, after Polly’s mother. Unfortunately baby Rebecca died after only five days, plunging Polly into a deep depression that only intensified in September, when a miscarriage claimed another Marshall offspring.

  Thomas Jefferson’s daughter Martha—a mean-spirited gossip—wrote her father that “Mrs. Marshall, once Miss Ambler, is insane. The loss of two children is thought to have occasioned it.”19

  At the end of 1786 John Marshall bought his first home in Richmond, where, in December 1787, Polly gave birth to their second son, whom they named Jacquelin Ambler Marshall after Polly’s father. The multiple childbirths and the miscarriage, however, took a crippling toll on Polly’s emotional and physical health—much as similar losses had affected her mother and sisters. She emerged a lifelong semi-invalid who needed a full-time personal caretaker—and a husband close to home to assume responsibilities normally performed by a wife. He embraced the role with good humor, however, growing more joyful and loving toward his wife. A huge bear of a man, Marshall cherished taking the fragile Polly in his arms and cooing poetic professions of his love. The more responsibilities he assumed in life, the happier he seemed and the more time he found to take on more.

  “His exemplary tenderness to our unfortunate sister,” Polly’s older sister Eliza told friends, “is without parallel. . . . Early after her marriage, she became prey to an extreme nervous affliction . . . but this only served to increase his care and tenderness.”

  He is always and under every circumstance as devoted to her as at the moment of their first being married. 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 to whom he is so tenderly devoted.20

  Helping Marshall prolong Polly’s life and relieving him of many household burdens was Robin Spurlock, an evidently brilliant young man. Spurlock was a slave who had appeared among John Marshall’s wedding presents and, as Polly grew weaker, stepped in and gradually took charge of the entire Marshall household.

  Marshall’s father and two brothers, meanwhile, had accumulated about 230,000 acres in Kentucky. After setting aside fertile lands to settle and farm themselves, they converted the rest of their holdings into great wealth by dividing them into tracts for sale to land-hungry migrants streaming across the Appalachians. Although many were Europeans seeking opportunities in the New World, thousands of others were American Tories who had seen their holdings plundered and confiscated in the East and now sought to rebuild their lives in the West—often under assumed new names.

  By the mid-1780s Thomas Marshall realized he would never return East, and he transferred his magnificent 824-acre Oak Hill property to his son John. John cherished his boyhood home and immediately expanded it to nearly 1,100 acres by purchasing an adjacent 260-acre property. Although he would use it only sporadically at first, it soon proved a valuable second home for him and Polly, who found the cool mountain breezes of the Blue Ridge a welcome escape from Richmond’s blistering summer heat.

  While Thomas Marshall and his sons were amassing fortunes in Kentucky, the vast majority of Revolutionary War veterans in the East remained mired in poverty. Most were farmers on small barren plots that seldom yielded enough to feed a family, let alone pay crushing property taxes that state governments imposed after the war to pay for public services the British government had provided before independence. Although many veterans had received warrants for western bounty lands, few had Thomas Marshall’s skills, time, or money to exploit their holdings. Most gladly accepted cash offers from speculators, who bought rights to thousands of acres for a few pennies on the dollar and left veterans with little to show for their military service—but a few pennies.

  When John Marshall turned eighteen in 1773, his father Thomas had accumulated enough wealth to buy a 1,700-acre farm and build this home at Oak Hill. The seven-room house measured thirty by thirty-three feet, with one of the three rooms upstairs serving as a classroom for the fifteen Marshall children. (FROM THE LIFE OF JOHN MARSHALL, BY ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE, VOL. I: 64)

  Unable to pay property taxes, thousands of farmers fell victim to government seizures of their homes—and few could appeal. Most courts were in coastal cities—Boston, New York, and such. By the time a farmer in rural Massachusetts or New York traveled the long, rutted roads to a far-off court, the judge had already declared him in default and sent a sheriff to seize his property. Farmers saw their lands and homes confiscated and their livestock and personal possessions—including tools of their trade—auctioned at prices too low to clear their debts. Hysterical wives and terrified children watched helplessly as sheriffs’ deputies dragged farmers off to debtors’ prisons, where they languished indefinitely—unable to earn money to pay their debts and without tools to do so even if they won their freedom.

  By 1786—five years after Yorktown—enraged farmers across the East took up pitchforks and rifles to protect their properties, firing at sheriffs who ventured too near. Reassembling their wartime companies, some set fire to debtors prisons, courthouses, and offices of county clerks. In western Massachusetts former captain Daniel Shays, a destitute farmer struggling to hold onto his property, organized an army of 500 other farmers and marched to Springfield. Shouting their battle cry of “Close down the courts!” they shut down the state supreme court before marching on the federal arsenal to arm themselves with more powerful weapons. Their battle cries echoed across the state, provoking farmers to march on courthouses in Cambridge, Concord, Worcester, Northampton, Taunton, and Great Barrington—and shut them down.

  “The commotions . . . have risen in Massachusetts to an alarming height,” Virginia’s congressional delegate Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee wrote to Washington from the Confederation capital in New York. “After various insults to government, by stopping the courts of justice etc., the insurgents have taken possession of the town of Springfield. . . . This event produces much suggestion as to its causes. Some attribute it to the weight of taxes and the decay of commerce . . . others, to British councils.”21

  The farmer uprising in Massachusetts soon spread to other states. New Hampshire farmers marched to the state capital at Exeter, surrounded the legislature, and demanded forgiveness of all debts, return of all seized properties to former owners, and equitable distribution of property. A mob of farmers in Maryland burned down the Charles County courthouse, while farmers in Virginia burned down the King William County and New Kent County courthouses, east and north of Richmond.

  “All is gloom in the eastern states,” John Marshall fretted to former brigadier general James Wilkinson, an enigmatic figure whom Marshall had known at Valley Forge. Wilkinson had resigned from the army after joini
ng a failed plot to oust Washington as Continental Army commander. After the war Wilkinson had settled in Kentucky and was on his way to New Orleans on an ill-defined mission for Kentucky planters and needed a passport to travel into Spanish territory. He turned to the influential lawyer John Marshall, and although Marshall was unable to help, he sent Wilkinson a chatty letter with his views on Shays’s rebellion.

  “These violent, I fear bloody, dissentions,” Marshall commented, “cast a deep shade over that bright prospect which the revolution in America and the establishment of our free governments had opened to the votaries of liberty throughout the globe. . . . I fear that these have truth on their side who say that man is incapable of governing himself. I fear we may live to see another revolution.”22

  _______________

  * Timbers embedded in the river bed at an angle facing downstream. Tied together by a network of wires with their ends shaped into sharp spikes, they prevented enemy ships from sailing upstream.

  CHAPTER 3

  “We, Sir, Idolize Democracy!”

  THE CHAOS CREATED BY FARMER REBELLIONS IN 1786 PARALYZED STATE legislators in Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, and elsewhere with fear.

  “This long session has not produced a single bill of public importance,” John Marshall complained in Virginia. “It is surprising that gentlemen of character cannot dismiss their private animosities but will bring them in the assembly.”1