Marshall made court supreme

Wednesday of this week — Jan. 20 — marked the inauguration of Joe Biden, the 46th president of the United States. 

Every four years, that date rises to significance because the U.S. Constitution pegs it as Inauguration Day.

Jan. 20, 1801, exactly 220 years ago, also stands important for another reason. That was the date that President John Adams appointed John Marshall of Virginia to the U.S. Supreme Court, the most important chief justice in American history.

The namesake of Marshall County and the city of Marshalltown in Iowa, Marshall served as chief justice from 1801 until his death in 1835 at the age of 79. He remains the longest-serving chief justice in American history, with the fourth-longest tenure on the Supreme Court among all justices.

His tenure alone is impressive. But much more so is how he crafted the Supreme Court into a coequal branch of the federal government.

It was Marshall who nailed the principle of judicial review into the soul of the nation’s highest court, and who through his immense powers of persuasion over the decades made sure it would remain there. The Supreme Court became the final arbiter of constitutional interpretation.

It could be argued that John Marshall is the reason presidential appointments to the Supreme Court stand so all-important in American political life.

From 1789, the year the Constitution was ratified, until Marshall’s appointment a dozen years later, the Supreme Court had floated in insignificance. It had issued only 65 opinions, none of them important. Most legal disputes during that period were resolved in state courts rather than the federal system.

In contrast, during Marshall’s 34-year tenure, the Supreme Court issued more than 1,000 decisions, about half of them written by Marshall himself. Incredibly, during his decades on the court he stood with a dissenting opinion in only one of those 1,000 cases.

His leadership of the court guaranteed that the federal government would exercise strong powers, even though the states-rights Democratic-Republican Party dominated American politics for decades after 1800.

Marshall’s charisma served him well.

One colleague in the Adams administration credited him with the knack (like Benjamin Franklin) of “putting his own ideas into the minds of others, unconsciously to them.”

Despite his ability to convince others in points of law, he was not really a legal scholar, and usually did not cite legal precedents. Even though he wrote hundreds of opinions after the Court came to its decisions, he often asked Justice Joseph Story, a colleague, close friend and respected legal scholar, to come up with precedents: “There, Story, that is the law of this case; now go and find the authorities.”

In Marbury v. Madison in February 1803, the Marshall Court, with Marshall in the lead, declared a portion of the Judiciary Act of 1789 unconstitutional. (The situation in dispute doesn’t need to be exhumed for this column.)  

The important thing is that by declaring a federal law null and void because it violated the Constitution, Marshall’s ruling stands today as “the single most significant constitutional decision issued by any court in American history,” to quote Marshall biographer Joel Richard Paul.

The Marbury decision remained the only instance in which the Supreme Court struck down a federal law until 1857, when the court led by Chief Justice Roger Taney issued its infamous Dred Scott decision. That decision contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War.

Marshall’s upbringing did not suggest his later success.

While from ancestral Virginia powerful family lines and distantly related to Thomas Jefferson, he was born in 1755 in a two-room log cabin in the Virginia frontier town of Germantown, the oldest of 15 siblings. He had only one year of formal schooling, but read widely through the encouragement of his parents. 

His father, whom he greatly admired, succeeded financially through hard work, and eventually purchased a Virginia estate. His father and he both volunteered into a Virginia regiment after the 1775 battles at Lexington and Concord, and John Marshall became a lieutenant in the Continental Army. He fought in several battles and spent the bitter winter at Valley Forge.

After he left the Army in 1780, he attended the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg, Va., and was admitted to the Virginia bar. He won election to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1782.

Marshall became disillusioned with the weak Articles of Confederation that tried to govern the new nation in the 1780s, and strongly supported ratification of the new constitution hammered out in Philadelphia in 1787. After Washington’s election as president, Marshall aligned himself with the Federalist Party as a strong-government advocate.

Washington twice tried to appoint him to federal positions, but Marshall turned him down both times.

John Adams, who succeeded Washington as president in 1797, named him to negotiate an agreement with France. The next year Washington, now back in Virginia, persuaded Marshall to run for the U.S. House, a race he won, and he was sworn in with the 6th Congress in 1799. He quickly emerged as a leader of the moderate faction of Federalists in Congress. 

Marshall holds a unique distinction: President Adams named him secretary of state in 1800 and then chief justice in 1801, and Marshall held both positions simultaneously for five weeks.

Marshall married Mary “Polly” Ambler, the daughter of the Virginia state treasurer, in 1783. They had 10 children, with six surviving to adulthood. The family lived in the Richmond home they built in 1790. 

Marshall died at the age of 79 in July 1835 in Philadelphia, where he had gone for medical treatment. The Liberty Bell was rung following his death. His body was returned to Richmond for burial next to Polly.

President John Adams, prior to his own death in 1826, stated that “my gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States was the proudest act of my life.”