he life of John Marshall, 1755, Germantown, Virginia, VA
Died: July 6, 1835, Philadelphia, PA
Founding Father and America’s premier chief justice In 1801-1835, a genial and brilliant Revolutionary War veteran and politician became the fourth chief justice of the United States. He would hold the post for 34 years (still a record), expounding the Constitution he loved.
He was an American politician, member of the United States House of Representatives and also served as the United States Secretary of State under President John Adams.
Adams appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court avoided direct conflict with the executive branch, which was led by Democratic-Republican President Thomas Jefferson.
By establishing the principle of judicial review while avoiding an inter-branch confrontation, Marshall helped cement the position of the American judiciary as an independent and co-equal branch of government.
Biographer John Richard Paul writes that Marshall owned between seven and sixteen household slaves at various points in his adult life.
Research by historian Paul Finkelman, however, reveals that Marshall may have owned hundreds of slaves. Marshall also engaged in the buying and selling of slaves throughout his life.
Finkelman’s research was published in his book, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court from the Harvard University Press.
Finkelman suggests that Marshall’s substantial slaveholdings may have influenced him to render judicial decisions in favor of slave owners.
John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court
BY RICHARD BROOKHISER. Basic Books, 2018, 336 pp.
It is thanks to John Marshall’s work as the fourth chief justice of the United States that the constitutional doctrines of the Federalist Party, which espoused strong judicial power and the supremacy
As Brookhiser shows in this brisk biography, Marshall’s success was partly due to the power of his legal reasoning and partly to his brilliant management of the men who served with him on the Supreme Court.
Marshall doesn’t offer much grist for a biographer; he led a quietly respectable private life and was as marmoreal in his public persona as George Washington. Few surviving papers reveal much of the inner man.
Brookhiser does his best with this unpromising material, but Marshall would doubtless be pleased that it is his ideas that dominate this biography, not his quarrels, debts, ambitions, or amours.
The greatest blot on Marshall’s record, as Brookhiser notes, was his failure to confront the horrors of slavery. Washington freed his slaves when he died, in 1799. Marshall, who died in 1835, left his in bondage.
Beaugrand's Blog 