The writer has drawn with entire freedom from an address delivered by him at Cambridge on February 4, 1901, before the Harvard Law School and the Bar Association of the City of Boston, and from an article on John Marshall in the Atlantic Monthly for March, 1901. J. B. T. Cambridge , March 30, 1901. The portrait is from a miniature by St. Mémin....

In beginning his “Life of Washington,” Chief Justice Marshall states that Washington was born in 1732, “near the banks of the Potowmac,” in Westmoreland County, Virginia; mentions his employment by Lord Fairfax, the proprietor of the Northern Neck, as surveyor of his estates in the western part of that region; and adds that, in the performance of these duties, “he acquired that information respecting vacant lands, and formed those opinions concerning their future value, which afterwards contribu

There is little room for quotations from Marshall’s speeches or dispatches. Some reference has already been made to his earliest reported argument in court, in 1786. In the Virginia Federal Convention, in 1788, Marshall’s principal speeches related to the subjects of taxation, the militia, and the judiciary. These, so far as preserved, are found in the third volume of Elliot’s Debates, and in Dr. Grigsby’s very interesting History of that Convention, in the tenth volume of the “Virginia Historic

Marshall’s accession to the bench was marked by an impressive circumstance. For ten years or more, he alone gave all the opinions of the court to which any name was attached, except where the case came up from his own circuit, or, for any reason, he did not sit. In the very few cases where opinions were given by the other justices, it was in the old way, seriatim ,—the method followed before Marshall came in, as it was also the method of contemporary English courts. Whatever may have been the pu

This is not the place for any detailed consideration of Marshall’s decisions. But it would be a strange omission to leave out all consideration of what played so great a part in his life. I must draw, therefore, upon the patience of the reader, while some points are mentioned relating to that class of his opinions which is at once the most important and of the widest interest, viz., those given in constitutional cases. If these matters seem to any reader dull or unintelligible, he must be allowe

I have drawn attention to the immense service that Chief Justice Marshall rendered to his country in the field of constitutional law, and have considered a few of the cases. Since his time not twice the length of his term of thirty-four years has gone by, but more than five times the number of volumes that sufficed for the opinions of the Supreme Court during his period is required for those of his successors on the bench. Nor does even that proportion indicate the increase in the quantity of th

No systematic attempt seems ever to have been made to collect Marshall’s letters. It should be done. Only a few of his family letters have yet found their way into print. One of them, to his wife, is quoted in a previous page. In another to her, written on March 9, 1825, referring to the inauguration of President John Quincy Adams, he says: “I administered the oath to the President in the presence of an immense concourse of people, in my new suit of domestic manufacture. He, too, was dressed in

There is more to be said of Marshall’s private and personal life. After he went on the bench, his principal non-judicial work, in the nature of public service, seems to have been writing the “Life of Washington,” with the later revision and reconstruction of that work, and his activity in a few matters of not too partisan a sort, such as were likely to engage the attention of a public-spirited citizen. In 1813, at a meeting of the citizens of Richmond, he was appointed member of a Committee of V

The year 1831 was a sad one for Marshall. The greatest apprehensions were felt for his health. “Wirt,” says John Quincy Adams in his diary, on February 13, 1831, “spoke to me, also, in deep concern and alarm at the state of Chief Justice Marshall’s health.” In the autumn he went to Philadelphia to undergo the torture of the operation of lithotomy, before the days of ether. It was the last operation performed by the distinguished surgeon, Dr. Physick. Another eminent surgeon, who assisted him, Dr