John Marshall: remarks of October 6, 2000.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Author: Rehnquist, William H.
• Date: 01 March 2002

Thank you, Dean Reveley, for the kind introduction. It is a great pleasure to be here. Next January will be the two hundredth anniversary of the appointment of John Marshall as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. I am quite convinced that Marshall deserves to be recognized along with George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson as one of the "Founding Fathers" of this country. Admittedly, he does not have the name recognition of Washington, Hamilton, or Jefferson, but a strong case can be made for the proposition that his contribution to our system of government ranks with any of theirs. I shall try to make that case this evening.

Of these Founders, Washington had the experience as a military commander and the reputation for public rectitude that were essential in our first President. Jefferson was a philosopher, championing lofty political ideals which could catch the public imagination. Hamilton was a hardheaded master of finance whose vision of the economic future of the nation--manufacturing--proved far truer than Jefferson's idealization of a nation of yeoman farmers and artisans. Marshall derived from the Constitution--a document largely authored by James Madison--a roadmap of how its checks and balances should be enforced in practice.

Today, the federal judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court, is regarded as a coequal branch of the federal government, along with Congress and the Executive Branch. But in the first decade of the new republic--from 1790 to 1800--it was very much a junior partner. The Court's present-day status is due in large part to John Marshall, who served as Chief Justice for thirty-four years--from 1801 until 1835.

During the first decade of the new republic, the Supreme Court got off to a very slow start. It decided a total of sixty cases in this ten-year period--not sixty cases per year, but about six per year, because there was so little business to do. The Justices met in the national capital for only a few weeks each year. They spent the rest of their time riding circuit and sitting as trial judges in their respective circuits--from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Savannah, Georgia.

John Jay, the first Chief Justice, was appointed by George Washington in 1789. Jay was a rather elegant New Yorker. In two conference rooms of the Supreme Court, there are portraits of each of the early Chief Justices, and only Jay is shown as wearing a red robe. He had held most of the important positions in the state government of New York, and was half English and half Dutch--just the right combination for political success in New York at that time.

In 1794, Washington decided that he needed a special ambassador to go to the Court of St. James and negotiate with Great Britain various disputes that had come up as a result of the Treaty of Paris which had ended the Revolutionary War. He picked John Jay, and Jay sailed for England in the spring of 1794, and did not return until the summer of 1795. There is no indication that he was greatly missed in the work of the Supreme Court during this time. When he returned, he found that he had been elected Governor of New York in absentia--can you imagine that sort of thing happening today? Jay resigned the Chief Justice post to assume what he regarded as the more important job--Governor of New York.

The next Chief Justice who actually served was Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut. He had been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in the First Congress. But Ellsworth, too, was selected for a special ambassador mission--this time to France--by President John Adams, who succeeded George Washington. Ellsworth left for France in the fall of 1799, and fell ill while there. He submitted his resignation to President John Adams in December of 1800. Though Thomas Jefferson had defeated John Adams in the presidential election of 1800, Adams remained a "lame duck" President until March 1801. In...