Albert Beveridge

This surrounding hostility immediately puts the gun into their hands,... and thus by defending their property, they soon become professed hunters; ... once hunters, farewell to the plough.

On the contrary, he was conscious of a certain wealth not found in cities or among the currents of motion.

Certain it is that even as a beardless young soldier, offering his life for his country's independence, he already had grasped the master truth that order is a necessary condition of liberty and justice.

Pioneer and backwoodsman though he was, and, as we shall see, true to his class and section, he yet acquired more balanced ideas of liberty, better manners, and finer if not higher views of life than the crude, rough individualists who…

During all these years, however, young Marshall was getting another kind of education more real and more influential on his later life than any regular schooling could have given him.

In a speech of startling power he attacked the bill and carried with him every member from the up counties.

The up-country members to a man rallied about Patrick Henry and fought beneath the standard of principle which he had raised.

Henry's fifth resolution was the first written American assertion of independence, the virile seed out of which the declaration at Philadelphia ten years later directly grew.

But again Patrick Henry became the voice of America.

Thomas Marshall was no fanatic, no fancy-swayed enthusiast resolving highly in wrought-up moments and retracting humbly in more sober hours.

He was a man who looked before he leaped; he counted the costs; he made up his mind with knowledge of the facts.

When Thomas Marshall decided to act, no unforeseen circumstance could make him hesitate, no unexpected obstacle could swerve him from his course; for he had considered carefully and well; and his son was of like mettle.

And so we find father and son ready for the field and prepared to make the ultimate argument of willingness to lay down their lives for the cause they believed in.

He was against both irresponsible autocracy and unrestrained democracy.

In short, he was what would now be termed a liberal conservative (although, of course, such a phrase, descriptive of that demarcation, did not then exist).

Blood had been shed in New England; blood, they knew, must soon flow in Virginia.

When news of Concord and Lexington finally trickled through to upper Virginia, it found the men of her hills and mountains in grim readiness; and when, soon after, Henry's flaming words came to them, they were ready and eager to make those…

He had learned the elementary truths of liberty in the school of the frontier; his soul was on fire with the burning words of Henry; and he poured forth his immature eloquence not to a company of peaceful theorists, but to a group of…

Its premises were freedom and independence; its conclusion was action.

The young soldier in this brief time saw a flash of the great truth that liberty can be made a reality and then possessed only by men who are strong, courageous, unselfish, and wise enough to act unitedly as well as to fight bravely.

He began to discern, though vaguely as yet, the supreme need of the organization of democracy.

With this experience of what war meant, John Marshall could have returned to the safety of Oak Hill and have spent, at that pleasant fireside, the red years that were to follow, as indeed so many in the colonies who then and after merely…

But it was not in the Marshall nature to support a cause with lip service only.

Father and son chose the sterner part; and John Marshall was now about to be schooled for four years by grim instructors in the knowledge that strong and orderly government is necessary to effective liberty.

He was to learn, in a hard and bitter school, the danger of provincialism and the value of Nationality.