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CHAPTER 1
Marshall's Virginia Heritage
The events of my life are too unimportant, and have too little interest for any person not of my immediate family, to render them worth communicating or preserving.1
With those modest words John Marshall commenced a terse autobiographical sketch for his old friend and colleague Joseph Story. The year was 1827, and Marshall was seventy-two. Story had requested the information for a review he was writing of Marshall's History of the Colonies, which had recently been republished. Marshall told Story that he had difficulty recounting the events of his life "since the mere act of detailing exhibits the appearance of attaching consequence to them. ... If I conquer [that difficulty] now, it is because the request is made by a partial and highly valued friend."
The chief justice thereupon provided Story with a succinct survey of his early life:
I was born on the 24th of September 1755 in the county of Fauquier, at that time one of the frontier counties of Virginia. My Father possessed scarcely any fortune, and had received a very limited education; — but was a man to whom nature had been bountiful, and who had assiduously improved her gifts. He superintended my education, and gave me an early taste for history and poetry. At the age of twelve I had transcribed Pope's Essay on Man, with some of his Moral Essays.
There being no grammar school in that part of the country in which my Father resided I was sent, at fourteen, about one hundred miles from home, to be placed under the tuition of Mr. Campbell, a clergyman of great respectability. I remained with him one year, after which I was brought home and placed under the care of a Scotch gentleman who was just introduced into the parish as Pastor, and who resided in my Father's family. He remained in the family one year, at the expiration of which time I had commenced reading Horace and Livy. I continued my studies with no other aid than my Dictionary. My Father superintended the English part of my education, and to his care I am indebted for anything valuable which I may have acquired in my youth. He was my only intelligent companion; and was both a watchful parent and an affectionate friend. The young men within my reach were entirely uncultivated; and the time I passed with them was devoted to hardy athletic exercises.
With those sparse words John Marshall sketched the broad outline of his upbringing. In September 1755 when Marshall was born, Fauquier county, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was perched at the frontier and lightly settled. Its pioneer inhabitants were nervous and apprehensive that autumn. Two months before, 5,000 red-coated regulars, the largest force Britain had ever deployed in the colonies, had been ambushed by the French and Indians on the banks of the Monongahela. Major General Edward Braddock, the British commander in chief in North America, had been killed and his command annihilated. The panic flight of the few survivors shattered the myth of English invincibility. If Wolfe's victory over Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham consolidated the British hold on Canada, Braddock's defeat at the hands of the Indians convinced the American colonists they must fend for themselves.
George Washington, then twenty-three years old, led the Virginia rangers who served with Braddock. He saw firsthand the magnitude of Brad-dock's defeat, as did the other young Virginians who accompanied him. One Virginian who did not join the campaign was Washington's close friend Thomas Marshall, the future chief justice's father. Washington and Thomas Marshall had been raised as neighbors in tidewater's Westmoreland county and briefly attended school together in Washington parish. Both were surveyors by profession and had worked together mapping the vast expanse of Virginia's northern neck to chart the way for future settlement. Like Washington, the elder Marshall was an officer in the Virginia militia, but with his wife expecting their first child, he remained at home that summer in the tiny community of Germantown, a settlement of less than a dozen dwellings, all of which disappeared when the frontier moved westward.
John Marshall's parents were typical of many young couples in colonial America. His paternal ancestors were Welsh artisans who came to Virginia sometime in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. His father was the son of another John Marshall, a small planter who struggled to make a living on two hundred acres of low, marshy land cut from the wilderness along a minor tributary of the Potomac. That John Marshall was known to his prosperous neighbors as "John of the forest," a pejorative term used by tidewater aristocracy to describe someone less affluent who lived in the woods. In 1722 he married Elizabeth Markham, the younger daughter of a prosperous merchant from Alexandria, Virginia, and together they had six children, Thomas being the eldest. Nothing definite is known about the parents of "John of the forest," and all efforts to chart the chief justice's paternal heritage beyond the second generation have ended in genealogical quicksand. Marshall himself never traced his parentage beyond his grandfather.
By contrast, the chief justice's maternal ancestors came from the remnants of English gentry and Scottish nobility who settled Virginia's great plantations. "My mother was named Mary Keith," wrote Marshall. "She was the daughter of a clergyman, of the name of Keith, who migrated from Scotland and intermarried with a Miss Randolph of James River." Marshall's summary was as delicate as it was precise. His maternal grandmother, the "Miss Randolph of James River," was Mary Isham Randolph, the granddaughter of William Randolph of Turkey Island and Mary Isham of Bermuda Hundred — colonial grandees sometimes referred to as the "Adam and Eve of Virginia." Their descendants include not only Marshall, but Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, and numerous generations of Randolphs.
The Ishams and the Randolphs were among the first English settlers to arrive in Virginia. The first Randolph, a merchant by the name of Henry, went to Jamestown in 1635. His business flourished, and in 1659 Henry was named clerk of the House of Burgesses. William Randolph, his nephew, arrived a few years later, and trained as a lawyer. He succeeded his uncle as the burgesses's clerk and eventually became attorney general of the colony. In 1680, he married Mary Isham, the much sought after daughter of Henry Isham, one of tidewater Virginia's largest landowners and the social arbiter of the families living on the south bank of the James River.
The Randolph-Isham union proved remarkably fertile. There were nine children and thirty-seven grandchildren. Each of the children married well, and the family holdings multiplied. One son, Richard of Curles, married Jane Bolling, a great-granddaughter of Pocahontas. Another, Sir John Randolph, a distinguished lawyer and scholar, was knighted by George II in 1732, the only Virginian to be given such a rank in the colonial period. A third son, Isham Randolph, who came into possession of the vast Dungeness plantation, was the grandfather of Thomas Jefferson. The descendants of William, the eldest son, intermarried with the Blands and the Lees, spawning additional dynasties. Thomas, the second son of the original William Randolph and Mary Isham, married the wealthy Judith Fleming of New Kent county, and established one of the James River's most famous plantations at Tuckahoe. It was from the Tuckahoe Randolphs that Marshall was descended.
In the early 1730s Mary Isham Randolph, the eldest daughter of Thomas and Judith of Tuckahoe, then a young girl of sixteen or seventeen, fell in love and eloped with a slave overseer from her uncle Isham's Dungeness plantation — an Irishman by the name of Enoch Arden. The two were married secretly and had a child. Eventually they were discovered to be living on remote Elk Island in the James River. According to family chroniclers, the enraged Randolphs descended on the island, killed Arden and the baby, and took Mary back to Tuckahoe. The tragic loss of her husband and child shattered Mary's sanity.
Under careful family supervision, Mary recovered gradually, only to fall in love with yet another man deemed objectionable by the Randolphs. This time the object of Mary's affection was the Reverend James Keith. Keith was the minister of Henrico parish, one of the largest and most important parishes in Virginia. It included not only Tuckahoe and other Randolph plantations on the James but the rapidly growing town of Richmond as well. A refugee from the abortive 1719 Jacobite uprising in Scotland, the Reverend Keith was particularly effective in the pulpit. He was a bachelor, but he was seventeen years older than Mary and, like much of the Anglican clergy in colonial Virginia, enjoyed a reputation for licentiousness. Mary and James had an affair and appear to have been discovered in flagrante delicto. The Randolphs, who held two seats on the vestry of Henrico parish, forced Keith's resignation and did their utmost to prevent the pair from seeing each other. Keith resigned as minister of the parish on October 12, 1733, and departed for Maryland immediately thereafter. The episode was handled gingerly by church authorities. Commissary James Blair, the Church of England's representative in Virginia, and a former minister of Henrico parish, wrote to the Bishop of London that "Mr. Keith has privately left this parish and Country, being guilty of fornication with a young Gentlewoman, whose friends did so dislike his character that they would not let her marry him." Blair, however, soon had second thoughts about the precipitate action against Keith. On March 24, 1734, he wrote a follow-up letter to the bishop stating that "I gave your Lordship an account of the misfortune which occasioned [Rev. Keith's resignation] tho' I did not then know what I have learned since that from some of the circumstances in his case, our Governor recommended him to the Governor of Maryland." The circumstances are not mentioned by Blair, but presumably pertained to the fact that James Keith and Mary Randolph were deeply in love. The following year Blair rescinded Keith's exile to Maryland and appointed him minister of the frontier parish of Hamilton in what subsequently became Fauquier county. When Mary came of age, she and James Keith were married, and between them they had eight children, including Marshall's mother.
The Keiths flourished in Fauquier county, but Mary's troubles were not over. Years later she received a letter purporting to come from the Irishman Enoch Arden, triggering a final bout of insanity from which she never recovered. Despite the passage of time, Mary cherished the memory of Arden, and the possibility that he might still be alive filled her with despair — a despair compounded by fears that as a consequence her marriage to the Reverend Keith might be invalid. Were that to be the case, their children would be illegitimate. The question was never resolved conclusively, and for whatever reason Chief Justice Marshall rarely mentioned his tie to the Randolphs. Marshall was less reluctant to discuss his Keith heritage. James Keith, born in 1697, was the son of a professor at Marischal College in Aberdeen. Most of the Keiths, however, were soldiers: a military family whose lineal descendants bore the title Earl Marischal and who traced their roots to ancient Scottish and Saxon kings. Their soldierly exploits won wide renown and were celebrated in song and legend. Robert Keith, the first Earl Marischal, led the decisive cavalry charge at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, culminating Scotland's struggle for independence. George Keith (1553–1623), the fifth Earl Marischal, founded Marischal College. His grandson, the seventh Earl Marischal, supported the restoration of Charles II and was keeper of the privy seal of Scotland. Another grandson, John, first Earl of Kintore, held the family castle Dunnottar against Cromwell during the civil wars and preserved the regalia of Scotland, keeping it from falling into the hands of the Puritans.
After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought William and Mary to the throne, the Keiths continued to side with the Scottish James II (the Pretender) and helped to raise the armies that fought on his behalf. The Earl Marischal commanded the Jacobite forces that landed in Scotland in 1719, where they made a desperate but doomed effort to rally the highland clans to the Pretender's cause. When the rebellion failed, the Keiths fled. James Keith, Marshall's grandfather and a first cousin of the Earl Marischal, came to Virginia. His companion, James Francis Edward Keith, the Earl Marischal's younger brother, continued as a soldier, first in the Spanish, then the Russian, and finally in the Prussian army. Marshall's heritage, the union of working-class fathers and illustrious maternal forebears, was not uncommon in colonial Virginia. The ancestors of his great contemporaries — Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Madison, and Monroe — reflected similar pairings. Ambitious men of working-class origins frequently became surveyors or lawyers and "married up." Most served as officers in the militia and engaged in local politics — another means of social mobility. All speculated heavily in land, and the fortunate ones prospered. Men such as George Washington, Peter Jefferson, and Thomas Marshall, who worked as surveyors charting the wilderness, were especially well placed to locate desirable tracts and file claims. The daughters of the established gentry, with few eligible suitors to choose from, reached out to select husbands from among these rising young men.
The ancestral parallel between John Marshall and Thomas Jefferson is especially striking. Marshall's father and Peter Jefferson, the president's father, descended from the same stock of Welsh yeomanry. Both inherited modest farms from their own fathers; both became surveyors; both married Randolphs; and neither could trace his distant forebears with any degree of certainty. Peter Jefferson was twenty-two years older than Thomas Marshall and success came correspondingly sooner, but their careers followed remarkably similar paths.
Jefferson, in his own autobiographical sketch, wrote affectionately of his father, using virtually the same words as those chosen by John Marshall to describe his. "My father's education had been quite neglected," said Jefferson, "but being of a strong mind, sound judgment and eager after information, he read much and improved himself." The president noted that his father "was the 3rd or 4th settler of the part of the country in which I live," and he always took pride in his parents' status as pioneers.
Like Peter Jefferson, Thomas Marshall moved west to exploit the opportunities the frontier provided. In 1752, when "John of the forest" died, he left the bulk of his small estate to his wife Elizabeth for her lifetime, and then to Thomas. The poor land offered little promise, and with the aid of his friend George Washington, Thomas Marshall found employment as a surveyor and land agent for Lord Fairfax. In early 1753 he and his mother abandoned their homestead in Westmoreland county and resettled in the small frontier community of Germantown, in what subsequently became Fauquier county. Captain Thomas Marshall became one of its first and most prominent citizens. He divided the county into districts for tax purposes and several years later was appointed sheriff and tax collector. Since the sheriff, as tax collector, retained a portion of the fees, this was one of the most lucrative positions in colonial America. Later Thomas Marshall became Fauquier county's first magistrate and was elected to the House of Burgesses, where he represented the county virtually without interruption until the revolution. In 1754 he married Mary Randolph Keith, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Reverend James Keith and Mary Isham Randolph of Tuckahoe. John Marshall, the future chief justice, their first child, was born the following year in circumstances remarkably similar to those in which Thomas Jefferson had been born twelve years earlier.
Lord Fairfax, whose home was at Greenway Court in the Shenandoah Valley, played a pivotal role in the development of the Marshall family. The only peer of the realm to take up permanent residence in North America, "the Proprietor" — as Fairfax was known — was a generous and beloved patron. He not only provided Thomas Marshall (and George Washington as well) with a substantial income, but also offered a model of wisdom and modesty that was exceptionally rare in frontier America. Equally important, by representing his lordship in Fauquier county, Thomas Marshall acquired an immediate social standing that otherwise might have eluded him.
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Excerpted from "John Marshall"
by .
Copyright © 1996 Jean Edward Smith.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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