The Life of George Washington. John Marshall
many of his accomplishments. The Life of Washington is therefore an account of men and events by one who saw much at first hand and saw with a knowing eye. Marshall once wrote to Gouverneur Morris (October 2, 1816) on “the inferiority of modern to ancient history”; . . . it is not “written by practical statesmen” who have actually “engaged in the great & interesting events” they write about. The Life is the only published assessment of Washington’s whole work in war and peace by a wise observer himself active in both. While there are differing twentieth-century estimates of the book, the prominent historian Charles Beard had good reason to call Marshall “a historian of masterful acumen.”
Actually, the Life is about much more than Washington. Washington was father of his country, and Marshall’s Life of Washington is political history as well as biography. The Life is the only comprehensive account by a great statesman of the full founding of the United States—of the founding of an independent people as well as of its government. We see the war that freed and partly formed, and then the political deeds that made of tenuous union a self-governing country. We see these from the governing point of view: of the Commander in Chief and founding President without whom, Marshall suggests, neither would have happened. There is no other concentrated history of the essentials by such an authority on American institutions. It is a historical-political companion to that old bible of American institutions, The Federalist Papers.
One should add that Marshall’s epic is instructive about more than Washington and his political work. It can be seen as a case study of the relation between democracy and human greatness. To what extent does democracy depend upon extraordinary leaders? How do a leader and a democracy overcome the tensions inherent in such a relation? Superior leaders’ claims to superiority rub against a democracy’s pride in equal rights, majority rule, and popular consent. But it is a fact that the American democratic republic depended upon the great man Washington, and it sustained him. How success was possible is the question Marshall proposed to answer in the Life.
The Life began as what would now be called an authorized biography. Washington’s executor selected Marshall for the writing, and Marshall alone among the early biographers was permitted access to Washington’s own papers. He took this special responsibility seriously. He sifted the papers, reviewed what histories there were, inquired of those who had served Washington in war and in politics, and sought accuracy and even exactitude in describing details of a battle or responsibility of a politician. Where generals differed in their recollections, historians in their estimates of casualties, or parties in their political interpretations, Marshall presented the different sides. The Life was to be authoritative as well as authorized.
This one-volume version is Marshall’s final revision, completed a year or two before his death in 1835. It was the last of several revisions. The first edition in five volumes had been hurried out from 1803 through 1807, just when Marshall undertook his new duties as Chief Justice and as an ex officio justice on the North Carolina and Virginia circuit courts. It was somewhat ill conceived—Washington was not introduced until volume two—and burdened by printing errors and clumsiness. This is one reason that some historians have disdained the Life. But an embarrassed Marshall bent himself to correct and improve. A reprinting in 1805 allowed him to eliminate the worst errors in production and composition. In 1824 he spun off the first volume as a history of the colonies; in 1832 he reissued the revised biography proper as compressed into two volumes. This may be regarded as his definitive version. Then, during the remaining three years before his death, the aging Chief Justice shortened more and simplified more in order to prepare this one-volume edition for schools. Simplifying did not mean what now would be ridiculed as “dumbing down.” While Marshall cut out elaborate wording, some analyses, and the occasional incident, he retained from the two-volume work the three great parts (war, governing, character), much of the language, and the important diagnoses and events. “Written entirely” by the Chief Justice (according to the original publisher’s notice) and published from his manuscript in 1838, the one-volume edition was a success. It went through seven reprintings in six months and twenty reprintings in all, the last in 1849—and then it reappeared, with another publisher and without the subtitle “written for the use of schools,” in three printings from 1857 to 1859. This Liberty Fund edition makes available for the first time in over 140 years Marshall’s most approachable version of the Life and his final effort to keep before his countrymen the example of Washington’s character and principles.
Marshall had had plenty of opportunities to observe Washington in action. Their lives were intertwined despite the facts that Marshall was twenty-three years younger and that his deeds as Chief Justice came in the four decades after Washington’s death. Both men were Virginians. Marshall’s father had been Washington’s friend and eventually a trusted advisor and his Supervisor of Revenue for the District of Ohio. Marshall himself served as lieutenant and captain at a number of the battles described in the Life, including the defeat of Lord Dunmore near Norfolk in 1775 and the intense campaign of 1777, directed by Washington, to deny Philadelphia to the British. He endured with Washington the terrible winter camp of 1777–78 at Valley Forge. After the war Marshall too returned to Virginia, where he became prominent in state politics and eventually, at the Virginia ratifying convention of 1787, one of the leading younger defenders of the proposed Constitution. He became a member of the Legislature and the Council of State, Brigadier-General in the Militia, leader of the Richmond Bar, and, by the 1790s, President Washington’s most important supporter in Virginia. But he had made investments in land that led to large debts. Pleading his private finances, he declined Washington’s offers of such federal posts as Attorney General and Ambassador to France (as well as President John Adams’s nomination, in 1798, to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court).
Still, Marshall had accepted appointment by Adams in 1797 to the so-called XYZ mission to France, and this mission made Marshall famous on a national scale. While the French government toyed with the envoys, reports of these humiliations abroad extracted political victory at home. Many hitherto enraptured with France’s democratic Revolution turned for the time from the Republican party which had espoused the cause of France; it is “a shock on the republican mind, as has never been seen since our independence,” Jefferson wrote to Madison (April 6, 1798). It was Marshall who had composed the chief negotiating documents and the reports home, and who had shepherded the Americans in keeping the onus on the French while appearing open to real negotiation. When returned to Virginia, determined to rescue his private affairs, the newly prominent Marshall was nevertheless persuaded to run for Congress. According to his little autobiography only the entreaties of Washington himself, pressed unrelentingly at Mount Vernon, brought him around. In the present “crisis” of parties and policy, Washington had insisted, “every man who could contribute to the success of sound opinions was required by the most sacred duty to offer his services to the public.” The clinching argument came when Washington reminded Marshall of Washington’s own (immeasurably greater) sacrifices of “private feeling” for “public duty.”
Within three years of his entry into national office, Marshall was Chief Justice of the United States, charged to protect the Washingtonian Constitution. He had run for Congress as a moderate Federalist and won, had become, in a very divided House, the unofficial leader without whom nothing could be done, and was selected to offer the House’s eulogy upon Washington’s death. After turning down a nomination by Adams for Secretary of War, he acquiesced in that of Secretary of State and then, as the Federalist era and the presidency of Adams completed their course, he accepted without hesitation a nomination in January of 1801 as Chief Justice. In the most unpromising circumstances ever to greet a Chief, succeeding two comparatively ineffectual predecessors, he went on to develop the semisacred authority of the Supreme Court and the fundamental outlines of a semisacred constitutional law. But founder as he was, and famous as he had become, Marshall himself looked up to Washington as founding father and political hero.
Is Marshall’s Life a shrewd diagnosis of a great founding or—as critics suggest—a partisan treatise intended to extol the Federalists and defame the Republicans? Is it, as these critics object, a one-sided history written by a public man advocating the particular principles of his party? To this objection there is an obvious reply. Even if the Life were partisan history, it helps us understand a great party,