Notes for John Marshall

!John Marshall was born in a log cabin near Germantown, a rural community on the Virginia frontier, in what is now Fauquier County near Midland, Virginia. His parents were Thomas Marshall, a planter, and Mary Randolph Keith. (His mother was a cousin of Thomas Jefferson; his cousin was United States Representative Humphrey Marshall.) John was the oldest of fifteen children (seven boys and eight girls), all of whom survived into adulthood, and many of whom were remarkably significant in the development of the republic. Marshall was of English descent.["Marshall, John." (1911). Encyclopędia Britannica, 11th ed. London: Cambridge University Press]
As a young man, he studied the classics and English literature, eventually working with a private tutor from Scotland, the Reverend James Thompson. At the age of fourteen, he was sent to a classical academy in Westmoreland County for additional instruction. James Monroe, who would later become the fifth President of the United States, studied alongside Marshall. After a year, he returned home to resume studies with the Reverend Thompson.
As the American Revolutionary War began in 1775, Marshall joined the Culpeper Minutemen and was appointed as a lieutenant. He fought at the Battle of Great Bridge, where the minutemen defeated British troops under Lord Dunmore, permanently ending British control of Virginia. In 1776, Marshall's company was attached to the Eleventh Virginia Continental Regiment. He participated in many battles, including Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Stony Point and Paulus Hook. In the winter of 1777-1778, he was at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, with General George Washington's troops.["John Marshall" Encyclopędia Britannica, from Encyclopędia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2004 DVD. Copyright © 1994-2003 Encyclopędia Britannica, Inc. May 30, 2003] During his military service, he became personally acquainted with Washington.
Having reached the rank of captain, Marshall returned to Virginia in 1779. He studied law privately, attending lectures conducted by George Wythe at the College of William and Mary. He was admitted to the bar in 1780, but returned to the army when British troops invaded Virginia later in the same year. He served under the Baron von Steuben until 1781, when he resigned his army commission in order to begin private law practice. Soon, Marshall gained a reputation as a leading lawyer. He married seventeen-year-old Mary Willis Ambler in 1783; the couple would have ten children, of whom six would survive into adulthood. With his new wife, the young lawyer settled in Richmond, the state capital.["Marshall, John." (1888). Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton and Company]
He was Secretary of State from 05/13/1800 to 02/04/1801. It was in 1801 that Marshall embarked upon the most important work of his life, that of leading the Supreme Court of the United States. On January 20, 1801, President Adams nominated him to replace Oliver Ellsworth as Chief Justice. Adams had first offered the seat to ex-Chief Justice John Jay, who declined on the grounds that the Court lacked "energy, weight, and dignity."[Goldman, Jerry. "John Jay." OYEZ Project] Marshall was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on January 27 and took office on February 4. However, he continued to serve as Secretary of State until President Adams' term expired on March 4.
Soon after becoming Chief Justice, Marshall revolutionized the manner in which the Supreme Court announced its decisions. Previously, each Justice would author a separate opinion (known as a seriatim opinion). Under Marshall, however, the Supreme Court adopted the practice of handing down a single opinion of the Court. As Marshall was almost always the author of this opinion, he essentially became the Court's sole mouthpiece in important cases. His forceful personality allowed him to dominate his fellow Justices; he very rarely found himself on the losing side. (The case of Ogden v. Saunders, in 1827, was the sole constitutional case in which he dissented from the majority.)[Ariens, Michael. "John Marshall"]
The first important case of Marshall's career was Marbury v. Madison (1803), in which the Supreme Court invalidated a provision of the Judiciary Act of 1789 on the grounds that it violated the Constitution by attempting to expand the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Marbury was the first case in which the Supreme Court ruled an act of Congress unconstitutional; it firmly established the doctrine of judicial review. Oddly enough, the Justice-of-the-Peace commissions which were the subject of the Marbury case were to be delivered to the nominees by then-Secretary of State, John Marshall. Some historians have speculated that Marshall may have deliberately failed to deliver several of the commissions so as to trigger a case that would ultimately create the doctrine of judicial review. The Court's decision was opposed by President Thomas Jefferson, who lamented that this doctrine made the Constitution "a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."[Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to Spencer Roane]
In 1807, he presided, with Judge Cyrus Griffin, at the great state trial of former Vice President Aaron Burr, who was charged with treason and misdemeanor. Prior to the trial, President Jefferson condemned Burr and strongly supported conviction. Marshall, however, narrowly construed the definition of treason provided in Article III of the Constitution; he noted that the prosecution had failed to prove that Burr had committed an "overt act," as the Constitution required. As a result, the jury acquitted the defendant, leading to increased animosity between the President and the Chief Justice.[Linder, Doug. "The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr."]
During the 1810s and 1820s, Marshall made a series of decisions involving the balance of power between the federal government and the states, where he repeatedly affirmed federal supremacy. For example, he established in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) that states could not tax federal institutions and upheld congressional authority to create the Second Bank of the United States, even though the authority to do this was not expressly stated in the Constitution. Also, in Cohens v. Virginia (1821), he established that the Federal judiciary could hear appeals from decisions of state courts in criminal cases as well as the civil cases over which the court had asserted jurisdiction in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee (1816). Justices Bushrod Washington and Joseph Story proved to be his strongest allies in these cases.
The text of the McCulloch v. Maryland decision, handed down March 6, 1819, as recorded in the minutes of the Supreme Court of the United States, in which the Court determined the separate states could not tax the federal government.As the young nation was endangered by regional and local interests that often threatened to fracture its hard-fought unity, Marshall repeatedly interpreted the Constitution broadly so that the Federal Government had the power to become a respected and creative force guiding and encouraging the nation's growth. Thus, for all practical purposes, the Constitution in its most important aspects today is the Constitution as John Marshall interpreted it. As Chief Justice, he embodied the majesty of the judiciary of the government as fully as the President of the United States stood for the power of the Executive Branch.
Marshall wrote several important Supreme Court opinions, including:
Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803)
Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87 (1810)
McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819)
Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819)
Cohens v. Virginia, 19 U.S. 264 (1821)
Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824)
Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832)
Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243 (1833)
Marshall served as Chief Justice through all or part of six Presidential administrations (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson), and remained a stalwart advocate of Federalism and a nemesis of the Jeffersonian school of government throughout its heyday. He participated in over 1000 decisions, writing 519 of the opinions himself.["John Marshall" Encyclopędia Britannica, from Encyclopędia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2004 DVD. Copyright © 1994-2003 Encyclopędia Britannica, Inc. May 30, 2003]
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