The Life of John Marshall, Volume 4: The building of the nation, 1815-1835

The last years of Marshall's life were clouded with sadness, almost despair. His health failed; his wife died; the Supreme Court was successfully defied; his greatest opinion wa...

It is the legitimate business of government to see that contracts are fulfilled, that charters are kept inviolate, and the foundations of human confidence not rudely or wantonly...

At six o'clock in the evening of August 9, 1803, a curious assembly of curious people was gathered at a certain spot on the banks of the Seine in Paris. They were gazing at a st...

Though every one of these Bugbears is an empty Phantom, yet the People seem to believe every article of this bombastical Creed. Who shall touch these blind eyes. (John Adams.)

"It will be difficult to find a character of firmness enough to preserve his independence on the same bench with Marshall."[156] So wrote Thomas Jefferson one year after he had...

The United States ... form a single nation. In war we are one people. In making peace we are one people. In all commercial regulations we are one and the same people. (Marshall.)

The government of the Union is emphatically and truly a government of the people. In form and substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exer...

I have always thought, from my earliest youth till now, that the greatest scourge an angry Heaven ever inflicted upon an ungrateful and a sinning people, was an ignorant, a corr...

If we can believe our Democratic editors and public declaimers it [Bank of the United States] is a Hydra, a Cerberus, a Gorgon, a Vulture, a Viper. (William Harris Crawford.)

The defects of our system of government must be remedied, not by the judiciary, but by the sovereign power of the people. (Judge William H. Cabell of the Virginia Court of Appea...

War and Marshall's career--Federalists become British partisans--Their hatred of France--Republicans are exactly the reverse--The deep and opposite prejudices of Marshall and Je...

These transactions took place eighteen years before Hunter secured from Virginia the grant of Fairfax lands, twenty-five years before the Marshall compromise of 1796, thirty-eig...