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John Marshall

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Political People

   John Marshall
   4th Chief Justice of the United States
                  In office
   February 4, 1801 –  July 6, 1835
   Preceded by  Oliver Ellsworth
   Succeeded by Roger B. Taney
       Born     September 24, 1755
                Germantown, Virginia
       Died     July 6, 1835
                Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

   John Marshall ( September 24, 1755 – July 6, 1835) was an American
   statesman and jurist who more than anyone else shaped American
   constitutional law and made the Supreme Court a centre of power.
   Marshall was the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the
   United States, serving from February 4, 1801 until his death. He served
   in the United States House of Representatives from March 4, 1799 to
   June 7, 1800, and, under President John Adams, was Secretary of State
   from June 6, 1800 to March 4, 1801. Marshall was a native of the state
   of Virginia and a leader of the Federalist Party.

   The longest-serving Chief Justice in Supreme Court history, Marshall
   dominated the Court for over three decades and played a significant
   role in the development of the American legal system. Most notably, he
   established that the courts are entitled to exercise judicial review,
   i.e., the power to strike down laws that violate the Constitution.
   Thus, Marshall has been credited with cementing the position of the
   judiciary as an independent and influential branch of government.
   Furthermore, Marshall made several important decisions relating to
   Federalism, shaping the balance of power between the federal government
   and the states during the early years of the republic. In particular,
   he repeatedly confirmed the supremacy of federal law over state law,
   and supported an expansive reading of the enumerated powers.

Early years

   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.

   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. 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.

State political career

   In 1782, Marshall entered politics, winning a seat in the Virginia
   House of Delegates, in which he served until 1789, and again from
   1795–1796. The Virginia General Assembly elected him to serve on the
   Council of State later in the same year. In 1785, Marshall took up the
   additional office of Recorder of the Richmond City Hustings Court.

   In 1788, Marshall was selected as a delegate to the Virginia convention
   responsible for ratifying or rejecting the United States Constitution,
   which had been proposed by the Philadelphia Convention a year earlier.
   Together with James Madison and Edmund Randolph, Marshall led the fight
   for ratification. He was especially active in defense of Article III
   which provides for the Federal judiciary. His most prominent opponent
   at the ratification convention was the anti-Federalist leader Patrick
   Henry. Ultimately, the convention approved the constitution by a vote
   of 89–79. Marshall identified with the new Federalist Party (which
   supported a strong national government and commercial interests),
   rather than Jefferson's Republican Party (which advocated states'
   rights and idealized the yeoman farmer and the French Revolution).

   Meanwhile, Marshall's private law practice continued to flourish. He
   successfully represented the heirs of Lord Fairfax in Hite v. Fairfax
   (1786), an important Virginia Supreme Court case involving a large
   tract of land in the Northern Neck of Virginia. In 1796, he appeared
   before the United States Supreme Court in another important case, Ware
   v. Hylton, a case involving the validity of a Virginia law providing
   for the confiscation of debts owed to British subjects. Marshall argued
   that the law was a legitimate exercise of the state's power; however,
   the Supreme Court ruled against him, holding that the Treaty of Paris
   required the collection of such debts.

Federal political career

   CAPTION: John Marshall

   Engraving of Marshall by Charles-Balthazar-Julien Fevret de Saint-Mémin
   in 1808.
   4th United States Secretary of State
   In office
   13 June 1800 –  4 February 1801
   Preceded by Timothy Pickering
   Succeeded by James Madison
   Political party Federalist

   In 1795, Marshall declined Washington's offer of Attorney General of
   the United States, and, in 1796, declined to serve as minister to
   France. In 1797, he accepted when President John Adams appointed him to
   a three-member commission to represent the United States in France.
   (The other members of this commission were Charles Pinckney and
   Elbridge Gerry.) However, when the envoys arrived, the French refused
   to conduct diplomatic negotiations unless the United States paid
   enormous bribes. This diplomatic scandal became known as the XYZ
   Affair, inflaming anti-French opinion in the United States. Hostility
   increased even further when the Directoire expelled Marshall and
   Pinckney from France. Marshall's handling of the affair, as well as
   public resentment towards the French, made him popular with the
   American public when he returned to the United States.

   In 1798, Marshall declined a Supreme Court appointment, recommending
   Bushrod Washington, who would later become one of Marshall's staunchest
   allies on the Court. In 1799, Marshall reluctantly ran for a seat in
   the United States House of Representatives. Although his congressional
   district (which included the city of Richmond) favored the Republican
   Party, Marshall won the race, in part due to his conduct during the XYZ
   Affair and in part due to the support of Patrick Henry. His most
   notable speech was related to the case of Thomas Nash (alias Jonathan
   Robbins), whom the government had extradited to Great Britain on
   charges of murder. Marshall defended the government's actions, arguing
   that nothing in the Constitution prevents the United States from
   extraditing one of its citizens.

   On May 7, 1799, President Adams nominated Congressman Marshall as
   Secretary of War. However, on May 12, Adams withdrew the nomination,
   instead naming him Secretary of State, as a replacement for Timothy
   Pickering. Confirmed by the Senate on May 13, Marshall took office on
   June 6, 1800. As Secretary of State, Marshall directed the negotiation
   of the Convention of 1800 which ended the Quasi-War with France and
   brought peace to the new nation.

Supreme Court career

   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 of that year, 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." 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.)

   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."

   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.

   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.
   Enlarge
   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.

Other work, later life, legacy

   Marshall loved his home near Richmond, Virginia and spent as much time
   there as possible in quiet contentment. For approximately three months
   in every year, however, he would be away in Washington for the Court's
   annual term, and he would also be away for several weeks to serve on
   the circuit court in Raleigh, North Carolina.

   In 1805, he published a five-volume biography of George Washington, the
   Life of Washington, based on records and papers provided him by the
   President's family, of which the first volume was, in 1824, reissued
   separately as A History of the American Colonies. The work reflected
   Marshall's Federalist principles.

   In 1823, he became first president of the Richmond branch of the
   American Colonization Society, which was dedicated to resettling freed
   American slaves in Liberia, on the West coast of Africa.

   In 1828, he presided over a convention to promote internal improvements
   in Virginia.

   In 1829, he was a delegate to the state constitutional convention where
   he was again joined by fellow American statesman and loyal Virginians,
   James Madison and James Monroe, although all were quite old by that
   time. Marshall mainly spoke at this convention to promote the necessity
   of an independent judiciary.

   On Christmas Day, 1831, Mary, his beloved wife of some 49 years, died.
   Most who knew him agreed that after Mary's death, he was never quite
   the same.

   In 1832, Marshall's revised and condensed two-volume Life of Washington
   was published.

   On returning from Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1835 he suffered
   severe contusions resulting from an accident to the stage coach in
   which he was riding. His health, which had not been good for several
   years, now rapidly declined and in June he journeyed to Philadelphia,
   Pennsylvania for medical attendance. There he died on July 6, at the
   age of 79, having served as Chief Justice for over 34 years. He was
   also the last surviving member of John Adams's Cabinet.

   Two days before his death, he enjoined his friends to place only a
   plain slab over his and his wife's graves, and he wrote the simple
   inscription himself. His body, which was taken to Richmond, lies in
   Shockhoe Hill Cemetery.

   JOHN MARSHALL
   Son of Thomas and Mary Marshall
   was born the 24th of September 1755
   Intermarried with Mary Willis Ambler
   the 3rd of January 1783
   Departed this life
   the 6th day of July 1835.

   Legend has it that Marshall was the last person for whom the Liberty
   Bell tolled. However, there is little evidence to support this
   assertion.

Monuments and memorials

   Marshall Memorial by WW Story
   Enlarge
   Marshall Memorial by WW Story

   Marshall's home in Richmond, Virginia has been preserved by APVA
   Preservation Virginia.

   The United States Bar Association commissioned sculptor William Wetmore
   Story to execute the statue of Marshall that now stands [sits] inside
   the the Supreme Court on the ground floor. A copy of the statue also
   stands at Constitution Ave. and 4th Street in Washington D.C. Story's
   father Joseph Story had served as an Associate Jusice on the United
   States Supreme Court with Marshall. The statue was originally dedicated
   in 1884.

   An engraved portrait of Marshall appears on U.S. paper money on the
   series 1890 and 1891 treasury notes. These rare notes are in great
   demand by collectors today. Also, in 1914, an engraved portrait of
   Marshall was used as the central vignette on series 1914 $500 federal
   reserve notes. These notes are also quite scarce. Example of both notes
   are available for viewing on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
   website.

   Four law schools today bear his name: The Marshall-Wythe School of Law
   at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia; The
   Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in Cleveland, Ohio; John Marshall Law
   School in Atlanta, Georgia; and, The John Marshall Law School in
   Chicago, Illinois.

   Having grown from a Reformed Church academy, Marshall College, named
   upon the death of Chief Justice John Marshall, officially opened in
   1836 with a well-established reputation. After a merger with Franklin
   College in 1853, the school was renamed Franklin and Marshall College.
   The college went on to become one of the nations foremost liberal arts
   colleges.

   John Marshall's birthplace in Fauquier County is a park, the John
   Marshall Birthplace Park, and a marker can be seen on Route 28 noting
   this event.

   Fauquier County is also part of the John Marshall Soil and Water
   Conservation District which was named in his honour.

   Marshall University in Huntington, WV was named for John Marshall. It
   was founded in 1837 as the private Marshall Academy, a secondary school
   or high school, under the control of the Southern Methodist Church. It
   was renamed Marshall College in 1857; however, the majority of its
   offerings remained below the college level. The church lost control of
   the college and it became a state institution in 1867. It was renamed
   Marshall University in 1961, although it had been accredited as a
   university-level institution since 1938. The university is currently
   trying to bring a law school to the Huntington campus.

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