John Marshall

by Harlow Giles Unger

  The Republican Aurora led the Adet campaign: “The American nation has been debauched by Washington,” avowed owner Benjamin Franklin Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. A fierce opponent of centralized government, Bache had opposed ratification and sought to stem the growth of federal government authority.

  “If ever a nation has suffered from the improper influence of a man,” Bache railed, “the American nation has suffered from the influence of Washington. If ever a nation was deceived by a man, the American nation has been deceived by Washington.” Calling Washington “the source of all the misfortunes of the country,” the Aurora replied to the President’s farewell address with vitriol:

  If ever there was a period for rejoicing, this is the moment. Every heart in unison with the freedom and happiness of the people ought to beat high with exultation that the name of Washington from this day ceases to give currency to political iniquity and legalized corruption.15

  The press attacks on Washington combined with the French ambassador’s meddling in the election to produce effects exactly opposite to those intended. Most Americans—even political opponents of the President—revered the “Father of Our Country” and bridled at the Aurora’s insults. Meanwhile Federalist newspapers condemned the French ambassador for attempting to “wean us from the government and administration of our own choice and make us willing to be governed by such as France shall think best for us—beginning with Jefferson.”16 One Federalist newspaper warned that a Jefferson presidency would be “fatal to our independence now that the interference of a foreign nation in our affairs is no longer disguised.”17

  Voters responded by electing John Adams President and relegating Thomas Jefferson to the obscurity of the vice presidency. New York’s Aaron Burr Jr., finished fourth behind Federalist Thomas Pinckney, the younger brother of former South Carolina Governor Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, whom Washington had appointed American emissary to France to replace James Monroe.

  At sunrise on February 22, 1797, Washington’s last birthday in office, church bells pealed and cannons boomed in the capital of Philadelphia; at noon an endless line of militiamen marched to the music of parading bands. Across the nation flags flew from every perch in every city, town, and village. Americans rejected the harsh words of the Aurora and the rest of the opposition press: they had tired of arguments, riots, and chaos continuously disrupting their lives, and they inundated Washington with testimonies of appreciation for his service to the nation.

  President Washington toasts members of his administration at his farewell dinner, on the eve of Vice President John Adam’s inauguration as the nation’s second President. Adams is seen here in profile seated opposite the President, and Martha Washington is seated at the foot of the table on extreme left. Although Washington’s close friend Alexander Hamilton did not attend the dinner, the artist nonetheless depicted him to the President’s immediate right, with Secretary of State Pickering to the President’s left. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  On the eve of his departure from office the Washingtons entertained for the last time in the presidential residence:

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the President raised his glass to the political notables at the table, “this is the last time I shall drink your health as a public man. I do so with sincerity, and wishing you all possible happiness.” He then toasted President-elect John Adams, the man who, in the Continental Congress of 1775, had selected Washington to lead the Continental Army. According to one witness, tears ran down the cheeks of those present as they tried to sip from their glasses.18

  Just before noon on Saturday, March 4, 1797, President Washington walked to Congress Hall in a black suit, a military hat, his hair powdered as usual. Greeted by ear-splitting cheers and applause, he climbed the speaker’s platform and took his seat. The new vice president, Thomas Jefferson, loser to Adams in the presidential election, followed without expression and sat between Washington and the Speaker’s chair.

  President-elect Adams appeared last, sat momentarily in the Speaker’s chair, then rose to take the oath of office. None of Jefferson’s supporters uttered a word of protest. The presidential structure that Washington had built stood rock solid; the crowd of onlookers was orderly, watching the peaceful transition of elected governments with deep, silent respect, knowing they themselves had raised the new President to power without firing a shot. It was one of the most remarkable moments in world history.

  “A solemn scene it was indeed,” President Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, “and it was made affecting to me by the presence of the general, whose countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day. He seemed to me to enjoy a triumph over me. Methought I heard him say, ‘Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!’”19

  To the new President’s deep disappointment, however, the smooth transfer of power did little to calm the chaos that seemed to hold the nation—indeed, the world—in its unyielding grip. Within days of taking office Adams learned that the French government had rejected Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s credentials, expelled him from the country as an undesirable alien, and ordered stepped-up attacks on American shipping. Although the bloodbath of the French Terror had ended with the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, the French Revolution gained new momentum with the rise to power of Paul Barras.

  America’s second President, John Adams, called his inauguration “a solemn scene” in which he imagined the beleaguered outgoing President George Washington rejoicing, “I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!” (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  A sly aristocrat-turned-revolutionary who lurked on the fringes of Jacobin leadership, Barras organized the coup that overthrew Robespierre and sent him to the guillotine. Barras then seized control of the Paris National Guard and key government ministries before partnering with a popular young Corsican colonel, Napoléon Bonaparte. Barras promoted Bonaparte to general and gave him command of the army. Thereafter Bonaparte ensured Barras the military support to sustain his political power, while Barras ensured Bonaparte the political support to sustain his military power.

  To cement their partnership, Barras gave Bonaparte his mistress, Joséphine de Beauharnais, actually giving the bride away at the wedding. With Bonaparte’s guns to back him, Barras dissolved the Convention, or national assembly, and replaced it with a new “republican government” led by a five-member executive committee of political allies called the Directoire, or Directory.

  A British blockade of French ports, however, had crippled French foreign trade and drained the French treasury. Inflation and starvation had spread across France, provoking a wave of peasant insurrections. Bonaparte assuaged their anger and hunger with dazzling oratory that promised rich pastures in neighboring lands. “You have no shoes, uniforms or shirts and almost no bread,” he called out to the people of France.

  Our stores are empty while those of our enemies are overflowing. I will lead you into the most fertile plains in the world. Rich provinces and great cities will be in your power. There you will find honor, glory, and wealth. It is up to you to conquer. You want to conquer. You will conquer. Let us march! Marchons! Marchons!20

  By the thousands, starving peasants rallied to his side, and in lightning strikes that overwhelmed western Europe, Bonaparte’s armies, inflated by hungry peasant mobs, overran and plundered Holland, the Rhineland, Switzerland, Italy, Venice, Dalmatia, and the Ionian Islands. They seized the Papal States and Vatican City, captured Pope Pius VI, and stripped him of his temporal powers. When Bonaparte’s armies had advanced to about sixty miles from Vienna in the spring of 1797, Russia, Austria, and Spain sued for peace.

  In Philadelphia John Adams had just taken the reins of America’s government from George Washington.

  Napoléon Bonaparte’s conquests restored the French national economy. Hundreds of millions of francs in reparations poured into France from conquered lands—60 million francs of currency from northern Italy alone, along with 10 million more in looted gold
, silver, and jewels. Backed by Bonaparte’s bayonets, Barras eliminated political dissent, anointing himself “King of the Republic.” He appointed Bonaparte Chief of the French Armies and named the wily Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord minister of foreign affairs.

  A friend of Barras from the Jacobin revolution, Talleyrand was part of a small, steady stream of aristocrat émigrés who returned from exile to reclaim ancestral lands and their roles in national leadership. During the butchery of Robespierre’s Terror, Talleyrand had spent two years in exile in the United States. Apart from fluency in English, he laid claim to considerable knowledge of North American affairs, but little else. After falling prey to several investment swindles while in the United States, he grew to hate America and everything American.

  “If I have to stay here another year,” he despaired in a letter to his friend, French novelist Madame de Staël, “I shall die.”21

  An injury to his foot when Talleyrand was an infant left him with an ugly limp to complement his grotesque face. Although unfit for military duty, his aristocratic origins opened doors to the church, and his seductive voice, brilliant wit, and persuasive political skills won him, at thirty-four, a prestigious bishopric that made him chief spokesman for the French clergy. The post fed his greed for wealth, pleasure, and power with a fortune in gifts, commissions, bribes, and flocks of mistresses and sycophants. When the French Revolution began, he displayed chameleonic instincts by discarding his clerical robes, renouncing the church, and swearing allegiance to secularism, state, and revolution.

  When Barras and Bonaparte came to power, Talleyrand revived the concept of France’s mystical “natural right” to give law to the world and echoed Bonaparte’s call to recover the nation’s colonial empire of the 1750s. With western Europe in thrall, only the British blocked French return to glory, and by ensuring British access to American raw materials, the Jay Treaty would bolster British military strength. Calling the Jay Treaty an act of war, Bonaparte ordered the French navy to disrupt Anglo-American trade on the Atlantic and in the Caribbean by seizing American ships bound for Britain.

  By the time John Adams took his oath as second American President, the French had seized more than 340 American ships with cargoes valued at more than $55 million. Hundreds of American seamen were languishing in prisons in Brest, Bordeaux, and the French West Indies. Insurance rates for Caribbean-bound ships increased five-fold in two years, from 6 percent to 35 percent of cargo values, and priced American exports out of world markets. The President called an urgent meeting of his cabinet and a special session of Congress to respond.

  Born an aristocrat, the wily French Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord had been a bishop in the church and fled to the United States when the French Revolution erupted. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  In what proved the first of many self-destructive political decisions, Adams retained Washington’s cabinet to ensure government stability during the change of administrations. What he did not know was that Alexander Hamilton was manipulating the three most important cabinet officials like marionettes: Secretary of State Pickering, Secretary of War McHenry, and Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott. None took a breath, much less made a decision, without consulting Hamilton.

  An outspoken Republican who had refused to sign the Constitution, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts was nonetheless a close friend of Federalist President John Adams and one of the President’s appointees to the three-man commission to negotiate peace with France. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  Having served as American envoy in France, however, Adams knew far more about France than his cabinet and, ignoring cabinet suggestions, he appointed a bipartisan, three-man commission, with two Federalists and one Republican, to negotiate rapprochement with France. Each was a symbol of American policies and politics. Adams named a personal friend and fellow Harvard graduate, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. An outspoken friend of France and a staunch Republican, Gerry had refused to sign the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention because it lacked a bill of rights.

  “France has already gone to war with us,” John Adams instructed Gerry. “She is at war with us but we are not at war with her.”22

  To demonstrate national pride, Adams rejected the French government’s expulsion of Pinckney as American envoy by ordering his return to Paris as a member of the peace commission. And for the third member, Adams looked to Virginia, America’s largest and most powerful state—the home of Washington and Jefferson, two French favorites. Although Adams had never met him, he appointed John Marshall, Virginia’s unquestioned Federalist leader and a steadfast Washington loyalist.23

  To Polly’s shock and distress, her husband accepted. She was three months pregnant, frail and frightened after having miscarried once and losing two infants shortly after childbirth. She could not cope with the three boisterous children who had survived infancy—Thomas, now thirteen, Jacquelin, ten, and Mary, three. Her husband was the family’s foundation. He had never left them, save for three quick trips to Philadelphia for Supreme Court hearings.

  John tried reassuring her and reasoning with her. Their devoted head slave, Robin Spurlock, he said, was fully capable of running the household and had, in fact, been doing so for years. In addition, Polly’s parents and all three of her sisters lived nearby and would visit regularly to help care for her and the children. In any case, he told Polly firmly, he had made up his mind and was leaving for Europe—with or without her blessing.

  Having fought in battle for his nation’s independence, Marshall believed it his duty to obey his President’s call to defend his nation’s honor at the international conference table. In addition, he stood to gain enormous political and financial benefits. Politically the mission promised him national and international prominence and a voice in the nation’s highest councils. As for financial gains, the Philadelphia banker Robert Morris, who had promised to finance the Marshall family’s acquisition of the Fairfax Manor Lands, was now bankrupt. The Marshalls would have to find another source for the £20,000 to consummate the purchase, but the Anglo-French war had made cash scarce in every western European country except Holland.

  John’s younger brother James Markham, who had married Robert Morris’s daughter Hester, was already scouring Dutch banks and financial markets for funds, but for reasons that remain unclear, he needed his brother’s help. With formal diplomatic relations between France and the United States suspended, John Marshall would have to sail to Holland first, then apply for French permission to proceed to Paris for the negotiations, and that would give him time in Holland to help his brother raise the funds they needed.

  As Polly sank into a mire of despair and depression, Marshall left Richmond for Washington on June 21, 1797—without his wife’s blessing and hating himself for having hurt the woman he loved so entirely.

  On his first evening in the nation’s capital he met John Adams for the first time. They formed an instant friendship; the President insisted that Marshall stay for dinner, after which Marshall wrote to Polly: “I dined on Saturday in private with the President, whom I found a sensible, plain, candid, good tempered man and was consequently much pleased with him.”24

  While President Adams and Secretary of State Pickering worked out instructions for Marshall, Pinckney, and Gerry, Vice President Jefferson sent the French government a secret warning that a new Franco-American treaty would open the way for unfettered American commerce with Britain and ensure British victory in the war with France. In what was tantamount to treason, Jefferson told Joseph Létombe, the French consul in Philadelphia, to urge his government to “listen to them and then drag out the negotiations” with the American peace commission to permit the French navy to intercept American ships bound for England.25

  Still racked by guilt over his abrupt separation from Polly, Marshall sent Polly six long letters over the next ten days. “Had you been with me,” he wrote of a visit to Mount Vernon to see George and Martha Washington, “I should have been as happy as I cou
ld be.”

  Do tell me and tell me truly that the bitterness of parting is over and your mind is at rest—that you think of me only to contemplate the pleasure of our meeting and that you will permit nothing to distress you while I am gone. I cannot help feeling a pang when I reflect that every step I take carries me further and further from what is to me most valuable in this world. . . . I am thinking of you always.26

  Two days later he wrote, “I have been extremely chagrinned at not having yet received a letter from you. . . . I have much reason to be satisfied and pleased with the manner in which I am received here but something is wanting to make me happy. Had I my dearest wife with me I should be delighted indeed. Not having that pleasure, why do you not give me what is nearest to it?”27

  Almost three weeks after he had left he at last heard from Polly: “I thank heaven that your health is better,” he replied, but asked for “assurances that your mind has become tranquil and as sprightly as usual. . . . Remember that . . . melancholy may inflict punishment on an innocent for whose sake you ought to preserve a serene and composed mind. . . . Tell the boys I please myself with the hopes of their improvement during my absence and kiss little Mary for your ever affectionate J. Marshall.”28

  Before sailing, he pleaded that she “let me hear often that you are well, and I shall be happy. Farewell my dearest Polly. My heart is incessantly offering prayers for you. . . . Farewell my much loved wife.”29

  After Marshall’s ship reached Amsterdam on August 29, he found his brother James Markham, and together they obtained the funds to consummate the Fairfax Manor Lands deal before John left for Paris.

  On October 8, 1797, Talleyrand agreed to see the three American peace commissioners at his palatial Paris mansion off the Place de la Révolution, now the Place de la Concorde. When they arrived, however, an aide told them he was in conference and to return two hours later. When he finally saw them, Talleyrand announced he would not receive them officially or open negotiations until he received instructions from Barras and Bonaparte. Evidently unimpressed by the ornate surroundings, Marshall noted only, “The conversation which continued about fifteen minutes was perfectly unimportant. The minister in his manners was polite and easy.”30