John Marshall

by Harlow Giles Unger

  He is a man of a very affectionate disposition, of great simplicity of manners and honest and honorable in all his conduct. He has a strong attachment to popularity but is indisposed to sacrifice it to his integrity. . . . This gentleman, when aroused, has strong reasoning powers; they are almost unequalled.8

  Most members on both sides of the aisle agreed, commending Marshall’s logic, his all but unearthly analytical skills, and his thorough grasp of every point of law and point of view in a complex dispute.

  No one was more delighted with Marshall’s performance than the President himself. Politically isolated, Adams’s chances for reelection had all but vanished until Marshall ignited a spark of hope not only with his steadfast support but in rallying others to the President’s side by exposing the unfairness and lies that underlay criticisms of the President by both Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians.

  As reports from France began to show progress toward peace, American political antagonisms softened somewhat. Sensing an opportunity to gain a foothold in national political affairs, New York’s popular former Senator Aaron Burr Jr. organized a slate of aging popular heroes—former governors, retired generals, and so on—to stand as the state’s candidates for the Electoral College that would elect the President later in the year. With the rest of the nation evenly divided between Federalists and Republicans, Jefferson knew that New York’s Electoral College votes would determine the next President of the United States, and Jefferson asked Burr to run, assuring the New Yorker that he would win the vice presidency. Electors in the Electoral College cast all their votes for a President, and the candidate receiving the second-most votes automatically became vice president. If, as expected, Burr delivered New York to the Republicans, Jefferson would probably win the necessary majority in the Electoral College to ensure his election as President, while Burr, with his New York votes, would probably win enough votes from other states to finish second in the overall voting and accede to the vice presidency.

  Organizing the Federalist campaign was Inspector General Alexander Hamilton, the acting commander-in-chief of the American army after the death of Washington. Ironically, Burr and Hamilton had just teamed up successfully in winning acquittal of a man charged in the grisly slaying of a young lady, whose battered body had been fished out of a well.

  When Burr and Hamilton left the courthouse, however, they inexplicably left behind the last traces of their long personal and professional friendship. Comrades with John Marshall and James Monroe at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, the two heroic Men of Monmouth had remained friends until the 1800 presidential election campaign suddenly sent them veering onto paths of mutual destruction that would lead one to his death, the other to exile in a foreign land.

  It was Burr who inadvertently fired the first shot at his friend by organizing a radically new type of election campaign that would defeat Hamilton’s party. In a campaign that would set standards for election campaigns decades thereafter, Burr recruited a small army of street-corner campaigners, sending members of various ethnic groups to German, Irish, and other neighborhoods in New York City to rally voters in their own native languages. Other campaigners went door-to-door collecting funds in wealthier neighborhoods, while Burr, the immaculately dressed former US senator, walked the streets shaking hands and flattering individual voters with his presence.

  Burr also opened his palatial home to feed campaigners, coordinate their activities, and let them rest when they needed. A Federalist newspaper chastised him, calling street-corner electioneering beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate. Undeterred by critics, Burr organized an armada of wagons, carriages, and chairs to haul voters to the polls on Election Day.

  On May 1 voting results showed that Aaron Burr had changed the course of American political history. He had not only invented a new type of election campaign; he had also scored a stunning victory that ensured the first political change in government in the young republic, giving Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party New York State’s Electoral College votes and all but certain victory in the presidential election.

  Stunned by Burr’s victory, Hamilton and his Federalist supporters asked New York’s Federalist Governor John Jay to overturn the results. When warned such action might provoke civil war, one Federalist grumbled, “A civil war would be preferable to having Jefferson.”9

  But Hamilton was apoplectic. His own ambitions for retaining power in the federal government all but shattered, he warned Governor Jay that Jefferson was “an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics” who would “overthrow the government” and stage “a revolution in the manner of Buonaparte [sic].”10

  Vice President Aaron Burr Jr. faced a powerful array of forces led by Thomas Jefferson, who was intent on destroying Burr’s growing political power. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  In the eyes of some, Hamilton seemed to have crossed the line into insanity. A coauthor of the Constitution and its early champion, Hamilton now asked a governor and former US Chief Justice to ignore that document and reverse the results of a popular election. In doing so, Hamilton all but disgraced himself in the eyes of Jay, President Adams, John Marshall, and other Federalist leaders. Adams responded by purging his government of Hamiltonians. Navy Secretary Stoddard had called them “artful designing men,” and Adams now believed them to be dangerous as well.

  Not wanting to give them time to stage a European-style coup, the President sent Secretary of War McHenry what seemed an innocuous note on May 5, 1800: “The P. requests Mr. McHenry’s company for one minute.”11

  The mild-mannered McHenry responded by leaving a dinner party to go to Adams’s office, where he settled into a comfortable chair. The President stood silently at first, then began pacing the room, and finally exploded into uncontrollable rage “in such a manner . . . as to persuade one that he was actually insane.”12 Unleashing a stream of invectives that he had obviously bottled up for years, he blasted Hamilton, Hamilton’s puppets in the cabinet, ultra-Federalists in Congress, and others who opposed his policies and initiatives.

  “Hamilton is an intriguant,” the President shouted unpresidentially, “a man devoid of any moral principle—a bastard, and . . . a foreigner.” He charged Hamilton with plotting to undermine his presidency and deny his reelection. The President turned and pointed a finger at McHenry, accused him of plotting with Hamilton to destroy the peace initiative with France.

  “You are subservient to Hamilton, but I shall take care of that. You cannot, sir, remain longer in the office!”13

  As crowds gathered outside the President’s house, rumors circulated in Congress that Hamilton was planning a march on the capital to overthrow the President. Others predicted Adams would declare martial law, charge Hamilton with treason, and condemn him to death. Any of these eventualities would leave the Constitution in shreds, America’s experiment in self-government at an end, and the nation in civil war.

  John Adams acted quickly to tighten his reins on executive power, firing everyone he suspected of working with Hamilton. Four days after firing McHenry he asked for Secretary of State Pickering’s resignation, only to have Pickering refuse. He told the President that the certainty of Jefferson’s election in the fall left the Adams administration with only a few months in office and that he intended to serve his full term.

  Fired as Secretary of State by President John Adams, Timothy Pickering returned home to Massachusetts and called for the New England states and New York to secede from the United States and combine with Canada to form a new nation. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  Already incensed by Federalist newspaper editorials that called him “old, querulous, bald, blind, toothless Adams,”14 the President exploded in rage. As surviving cabinet members looked on in disbelief, he accused Hamilton of instigating the editorials and fired Pickering. To counter any plots that may have been afoot, the President exercised his powers as commander-in-chief to order demobilization of the army, and in July 1800 he forced Hamilton to resign as inspector general. Although Adam
s infuriated Hamiltonian Federalists, most Americans cheered the President and the break-up of the military, which the Treasury Department had used as a police force to collect unpopular property taxes.

  After demanding and accepting resignations from other members of his government who disagreed with his policies, the President announced he was pardoning John Fries and his two coconspirators, along with all other participants in the Fries rebellion. Citing his experience as a lawyer, the President insisted that Fries was guilty of leading only a riot, not a rebellion; there was no evidence that he or the other farmers had committed treason or intended overthrowing the government.

  Jefferson tried to take advantage of Adams’s administration turmoil by promising his editor friend James T. Callender $100 to publish a book of scurrilous essays called The Prospect Before Us. It claimed, among other things, “The reign of Mr. Adams has been one continued tempest of malignant passions. As President, he has never opened his lips or lifted his pen without threatening and scolding.”15

  Adams retaliated by ordering prosecutors to charge Callender with violating the Sedition Act. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase presided over the trial and, after pronouncing Callender guilty, fined him $200 and sentenced him to nine months in jail—the harshest penalty meted out under the Alien and Sedition Acts. Although Jefferson denied any involvement, Callender emerged from prison furious at his patron—not just for abandoning him to a trial by political wolves but also for failing to pay his fine and give him the $100 he had promised for publishing Prospect. Callender retaliated by publishing letters from Jefferson proving his instigation and complicity in writing the essays.

  Survivors of the cabinet cleansing sat in silence at their next meeting, scarcely daring to breathe in the face of President Adams’s fury. His face still twisted by anger, the President announced his intention to name John Marshall to replace McHenry as Secretary of War. Marshall, however, declined, asserting that “my private affairs claim an immediate attention incompatible with public office.”16

  By then Richmond had metamorphosed into a thriving, modern city, where Marshall reigned happily as the most beloved public figure. Unlike the tumbledown frontier town of twenty years earlier, the city boasted a magnificent statehouse that Thomas Jefferson had “designed” by copying the Maison Carré, the beautifully preserved Roman temple in Nîmes, France.

  In planning Virginia’s Capitol in Richmond (bottom), Thomas Jefferson copied the design of La Maison Carré (top), a Roman temple built in Nîmes, France, in 16 B.C.

  With Marshall the only man in government he trusted, President Adams increased the ante, responding to Marshall’s refusal to leave Richmond by offering him a higher post. Indeed, the President offered John Marshall the highest office in the American government other than the presidency itself, with more authority than any cabinet member had ever commanded in the nation’s short history.

  Marshall was to be secretary of state, with a new, additional designation: head of cabinet. Until further notice, Adams told the rest of the cabinet, they were to obey Marshall’s directives as if they came from the President’s own lips. He then left the executive mansion for a trip to inspect what would soon be the new capital in Washington City, where Marshall met him a few days later.

  Marshall had returned to Richmond to bolster his law practice and was as surprised as everyone in Washington when he received the President’s letter of appointment. Even more surprising were the powers the President had added to the secretary of state’s normal responsibilities—a clearly unconstitutional authority to act as presidential surrogate in Adam’s absence.

  Most congressmen, however, were pleased by the Marshall appointment—Republicans as well as Federalists—and Marshall himself was ecstatic. Despite his enormous power and prestige in Richmond, he called the job as secretary of state “precisely that which I wished and for which I had vanity enough to think myself fitted. . . . I determined to accept the office.”17 Although he never said as much, others in government believed his new office would eventually catapult him to the presidency.

  When the President and secretary of state–designate arrived in Washington, both stayed at Washington City Hotel, a three-story brick building that had just opened opposite the Capitol on the site of today’s Supreme Court. Together they roamed the muddy roads and, with Marshall displaying skills he had learned from his surveyor-father, they staked out squares in what they believed would one day evolve into a great city. At the time, though, it was little more than a developing outpost of civilization.

  In fact, the city was a gigantic marsh fringed by forests and perforated by islands of reclaimed land with clusters of shabby wooden boarding houses, inns, taverns, and stables near Capitol Hill.

  The two principle government buildings—the Capitol and the Executive Mansion—were still under construction on relatively high ground above the marsh. Although the north wing of the Capitol building was nearly complete, the south wing was a skeleton of its future self, and only a long, unpainted wooden shed stood where the majestic central dome would one day soar and tie the two wings together.

  There was no church, hospital, or park in Washington. Clusters of squalid slave shacks added to the horror. Snakes slithered in and out of low-lying houses; a heavy rain turned mud into torrents of ooze, the air into suffocating stench; mammoth rats competed with pigs, cattle, and other livestock for footing and food on the few slime-coated islets of high ground. Clouds of insects swarmed through the air, disease was rampant, influenza reached epidemic proportions in winter, and small pox decimated the remnants of humanity without the means of escape in summer.

  “We want nothing here,” the witty New York Senator Gouverneur Morris liked to tell visitors, “nothing but houses, cellars, kitchens, well-informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles of the kind, to make our city perfect.”18

  British Minister Anthony Merry lacked Morris’s sense of humor:

  I cannot describe . . . the difficulty and expense which I have to encounter in fixing myself in a habitation. By dint of money I have just secured two small houses on the common which is meant to become in time the city of Washington. They are mere shells of homes, with bare walls, and without fixtures of any kind, even without pump or well. . . . Provisions of any kind, especially vegetables, are frequently hardly to be obtained at any price. So miserable is our situation.19

  A French diplomat was no kinder in his appraisal: “My God!” he lamented. “What have I done to be condemned to reside in such a city?”20

  Members of Congress received only $6 a day for their services in the House and $7 in the Senate, and all but the wealthiest members had to leave their wives and families at home when they attended Congress. Forced to live as bachelors, they had settled into relatively attractive brick boarding houses when Philadelphia was the capital. Now they would have to live in cheap, squalid, wooden shanties. Affluent government officials would avoid the city as much as possible by living in nearby Georgetown.

  President Adams stayed in Washington only long enough to officiate over the formal transfer of the federal government from Philadelphia. The Residency Act of 1790 that had designated Washington the new capital had required transfer to be completed within ten years, and the President ordered government operations to begin on June 15, 1800.

  With no executive offices ready for occupancy, it was fortunate that executive-branch papers fit into only seven packing cases. Marshall found a corner for them in a small, unfinished Capitol anteroom that he converted into an office. When the President left for his Massachusetts home for the summer, he put the entire government in Marshall’s hands and charged him with prodding construction crews to finish in time for the President and Congress to take up the nation’s business in the fall.

  Though honored by the President’s trust, Marshall had to cancel plans to spend the summer with his family in the cool mountains near the Virginia Mineral Springs, about 120 miles west of Richmond. Alone and all but suffocating in the stifli
ng heat of his makeshift office, he missed Polly and the children desperately. She had given birth the previous February to their fourth son, James Keith, and although he hoped she might join him at first, he realized that Washington’s merciless heat and rampant summer diseases made it too dangerous.

  “My dearest Polly,” he wrote on August 8. “I have this moment received yours of the 5th and cannot help regretting that it affords me no hope of seeing you soon.”

  I am delighted with the account you give me of Mary’s dinner with you and of John’s good breeding. Tell him I say he is a fine boy for his attention to his sister and his love for his Mama. I approve of you sending the boys up country.

  I am my dearest Polly

  Your

  J Marshall21

  Though lonely, Marshall had more than enough government business to occupy his time—attacks on American ships by Barbary pirates and by both the British and Spanish navies, the killing of two Indian men and wounding of two children in western Connecticut, construction delays in Washington, and official letters to write, including one expressing empathy “to the King of Great Britain . . . on the fortunate escape of his majesty from the blow of an assassin.”22

  Marshall also assumed an obligation undertaken by First Lady Abigail Adams to make regular calls on Martha Washington, who still grieved for her husband.

  “I have just returned from a visit to Mount Vernon, where I passed an evening,” he reported to Polly.

  Mrs. Washington asked me to bring you to see her when you should visit this city. She appears tolerably cheerful but not to possess the same sort of cheerfulness as formerly. You as a widow would I hope show more firmness.

  Farewell my dearest Polly

  I am your ever affectionate

  J Marshall23

  Although President Adams considered it beneath the dignity of a sitting President to campaign actively, he nonetheless took a longer-than-necessary route home to Quincy, Massachusetts, for the summer. Traveling westward to York and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he reminded voters of his generous decision in favor of their neighbor John Fries. Despite the furor over cabinet firings and his angry accusations of Hamilton, Adams remained a popular President—admired as Washington’s handpicked heir to the chief magistracy and, after dismissing Pickering and Hamilton, a staunch proponent of peace and opponent of property taxes.