John Marshall

Marshall was born on September 24, 1755, in Prince William (now Fauquier) County, Virginia, and grew up on his father’s estate, Oak Hill. At a local academy he befriended a future president, James Monroe. When the Revolution came he served as a lieutenant in the Culpeper County Minutemen in 1775–1776 and then as an officer in the Continental Army’s Eleventh Virginia Regiment, rising to captain.

In 1780 he studied law briefly at the College of William and Mary, then practiced in Fauquier County and, from 1783, in Richmond, where he spent most of his adult life. He served several terms in the Virginia House of Delegates.

A Federalist, Marshall was a delegate to Virginia’s 1788 convention that ratified the Constitution. In 1797 President John Adams sent him with two other envoys to France, where agents of Foreign Minister Talleyrand demanded a loan and a bribe before negotiations could begin; the “XYZ Affair” led to a limited, undeclared war with France, and Marshall came home praised for refusing to bend. In 1800 Adams made him secretary of state. Weeks before leaving office, Adams nominated him Chief Justice, and the Senate confirmed him on January 27, 1801.

The Court he joined was weak; its first justices had complained of its limited stature and the burden of riding circuit. In Marbury v. Madison (1803) he held that courts could refuse to enforce laws that conflict with the Constitution — the foundation of judicial review. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) he upheld Congress’s implied powers to create a national bank and barred states from taxing it, warning that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) he read Congress’s power to regulate commerce broadly, and in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) he held that Georgia had no authority over the Cherokee Nation.

Marshall was a nationalist who believed the Constitution created a government of the people, not merely a compact among sovereign states, and that it should be read to give the federal government the means to accomplish its ends. He protected property rights and the sanctity of contracts, and he believed an independent judiciary was the safeguard of a written constitution.

Jeffersonian Republicans saw Marshall as a partisan Federalist using the bench to thwart democratic majorities, and states’-rights advocates attacked his decisions as threats to state sovereignty. His ruling for the Cherokee in Worcester v. Georgia was not enforced by Georgia or by President Andrew Jackson and did not prevent their forced removal, exposing the limits of a court that cannot enforce its own judgments.

Marshall died in Philadelphia on July 6, 1835, at seventy-nine, where he had gone for medical treatment, and was buried in Richmond. He served thirty-four years and five months — longer than any other Chief Justice — and the Supreme Court itself credits his “vigorous and able leadership” in its formative years as central to its prominent role in American government. His opinions on judicial review, federal power, and commerce remain foundations of constitutional law.