Albert Beveridge

He rode among the troops inspiring, calming, strengthening, steadying.

Perhaps at no time in his life, except at Braddock's defeat, was his peculiar combination of cool-headed generalship and hot-blooded love of combat so manifest in a personal way as on this blazing June day at Monmouth.

The support of Louis XVI was a staff upon which, substantial as it was, the people of the States leaned too heavily.

It was his experience, then, on the march, in camp, and on the battlefield, that taught John Marshall the primary lesson of the necessity of efficient government.

But four years of fighting and suffering showed him that, without a strong and practical government, democracy cannot solve its giant problems and orderly liberty cannot live.

The ramshackle Revolutionary establishment was, he found, no government at all.

Not only did each State do as it pleased, as we have seen, but these pompous sovereignties actually interfered in direct and fatal fashion with the Continental army itself.

Thus it is that, in his service as a soldier in the War for our Independence, we find the fountain-head of John Marshall's National thinking.

There was a quality in him that inspired confidence.

Those who at first had been so disappointed in his dress and manners soon forgot both in his wholesome charm.

He liked people, and wanted people to like him.

He was full of fun and hearty laughter; and his rare good sense and sheer manliness furnished solid foundation to his lighter qualities.

From the moment he loved my sister he became truly a brother to me....

Our whole family became attached to him, and though there was then no certainty of his becoming allied to us, we felt a love for him that can never cease....

Writing twenty years later of economic conditions during the period now under review, Marshall says: "Real property was scarcely vendible; and sales of any article for ready money could be made only at a ruinous loss....

He had practically no equipment except his intellect, his integrity, and his gift for inspiring confidence and friendship.

Marshall made an elaborate argument, and since it is the first of his recorded utterances, it is important as showing his quality of mind and legal methods at that early period of his career.

Thus he showed, in his first reported legal address, his most striking characteristic of going directly to the heart of any subject.

The very filing of the bill, therefore, was an admission of the title, and the appellants, by prosecuting it, still continue to admit it....

That decision did not create or extend Lord Fairfax's right, but determined what the right originally was.

The bounds of many patents are doubtful; the extent of many titles uncertain; but when a decision is once made on them, it removes the doubt, and ascertains what the original boundaries were.

If this be a principle universally acknowledged, what can destroy its application to the case before the court?

Those who explore and settle new countries are generally bold, hardy, and adventurous men, whose minds, as well as bodies, are fitted to encounter danger and fatigue; their object is the acquisition of property, and they generally succeed.

But no one had a sounder judgment, a more engaging personality, or a broader view of the drift of things than John Marshall.

He signed the Council records in large and dashing hand with flourishes--it is the handwriting of a confident, care-free, rollicking young man with a tinge of the dare-devil in him.