The Concept of Statesmanship in John Marshall's Life of George Washington.

• Author: Ray, Clyde
• Position: Critical essay

By any conventional measure, Chief Justice John Marshall's Life of George Washington (1804) was a flop. Intended to be the authoritative biography of the nation's most celebrated general and president, the work was widely derided at the time of its overdue publication, and since then has been largely forgotten. (1) Surely the sense of personal embarrassment Marshall experienced must have been keen, for he admired no public figure more than Washington. Amid his Supreme Court duties, he labored for years on the Life, digging deep into American military and political history in hopes of etching in the minds of his fellow citizens the memory of the republic's foremost founder. Yet in spite of his efforts, on no other occasion were Marshall's failures more total and public. At one point, Marshall expressed the desire to publish the work anonymously, and one wonders if his wish was motivated less by self-effacement than a faint premonition of the biography's failure. (2)

Yet however unfortunate the legacy of the Life may be, we should hesitate to dismiss its insights for understanding Marshall or his understanding of leadership. After all, we see a different side of our nation's arguably most famous Chief Justice in the Life. Though Marshall often drew on the statesman's vocabulary of duty and responsibility in his Supreme Court opinions, these occurred in judicial contexts, applying more often than not to the judiciary's charge to elevate law above politics. (3) Moreover, Supreme Court opinions focused on particular parties and specific controversies hardly afford the outlet for extended analysis of statesmanship. The Life, on the other hand, permitted Marshall to adopt both a different frame of mind and point of reference. He used the opportunity to paint a wide-ranging and at times philosophical view of George Washington's leadership, spanning the battlefields of the Revolution to his retirement to Mount Vernon. Across this life of public service, Marshall does not merely document Washington's contribution to the development of the new United States. As a work of political theory as well as history, the book dwells considerably on Washington's consistent facility in preserving principle, embracing expedience, and adopting a balanced form of prudence when the occasion required. In Marshall's description of Washington's statesmanship, there is much to learn: about George Washington, John Marshall, and the lessons conveyed by the Life for those in search of better political leadership today.

Background of The Life of George Washington

The story of Marshall's authorship of the Life began with his close connection to fellow Virginian and Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington, the President's nephew. Having inherited his uncle's private papers upon his death in 1799, Bushrod approached Marshall with the idea of writing a biography of Washington, apparently out of pecuniary interest. (4) Of course, given its famous subject, much more than financial gain was at stake in the enterprise. Like most Americans, Marshall venerated Washington, and documenting his achievements for the ages while earning a profit was an offer he could hardly refuse. After all, with access to the President's papers, he had good reason to believe he could deliver material that would be fresh and engaging for its audience. (5) Moreover, Marshall was doubtless buoyed by the fact that Washington himself had expressed ample confidence in his brother-in-arms' abilities. "General Marshall is so capable of making accurate observations," Washington had once observed, "that I am persuaded his information may be relied on with certainty." (6)

Yet Marshall underestimated the consuming work of the historian, work that was made all the more challenging as he assumed the taxing duties of Chief Justice of the United States in 1801. In the following years writing the biography might have provided a temporary escape from Marshall's bigger project of building the court's authority, but it was never a labor of love. Indeed, he had a premonition early on about the vast challenge before him. As he acknowledged in a candid letter to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in 1802, "In march last Mr. Washington placd the papers of our late respected & belovd General in my hands, & requested me to enter, as soon as possible, on the very difficult task of composing the history of his life." (7) The Life was a part-time work, ever hanging over Marshall's head, and eventually turned into a plodding and uneven production that frustrated the usually calm and composed Marshall. (8) Until the end of his life, Marshall would labor painstakingly to revise and edit the biography. He lived to put the final touches on a one-volume version intended for use in schools, perhaps with the wistful hope that if the Life was no source of edification for his own generation, future Americans might read the condensed version with more favorable eyes. (9) Mostly, they have not read it at all.

Even before it went to press, the Life was controversial. Its most prominent critic was none other than Thomas Jefferson, who seethed over the mere idea of the work. Despite owning two copies of the five-volume biography, Jefferson denounced the project as a "party diatribe" redolent with "libels on one side." (10) Convinced that the work was being timed to influence public opinion before the 1804 presidential election, Jefferson and other Democratic-Republicans maneuvered to diminish the Life's influence. (11) Scathing reviews were published, deliveries of the work to its subscribers were impeded, and authors were enlisted to write alternative political histories. When the counter-histories Jefferson encouraged failed to materialize, he wrote one himself. (12) The backlash was not simply a response to Marshall's authorship, for while many Americans did admire Washington, many good republicans of the era had grown weary of hero worship. After all, long before Marshall embarked on the Life, John Adams had lambasted the public encomia of Washington and its diminishment of other Revolutionary leaders. "The History of our Revolution will be one continued Lye from one End to the other," he once predicted. "The Essence of the whole will be that Dr Franklins electrical Rod, Smote the Earth and out Spring General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his Rod--and thence forward these two conducted all the Policy Negotiations Legislation and War." (13) Thus Marshall encountered a predicament that has beset many Washington biographers, that is, finding an authorial voice that balances candor with respect for a larger-than-life subject. (14)

In truth, Jefferson and his allies had little to fear from Marshall's Life. From a retail standpoint, the work was a commercial disaster. Other biographies, notably Mason Locke Weems's fanciful A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington, proved much more lively and popular. (15) Nor has its reputation improved with age. The Life was "a general disappointment," concluded the historian Edward Corwin. (16) Describing it as "pedantic," "dull," "laborious," and "rambling," Daniel Boorstin dubbed the work the "Marshall fiasco." (17) Calling it helpful "for grasping the nationalistic mood but otherwise without profound historical meaning," Bert James Loewenberg dismissed it as simply "a bad book." (18) Stylistically, Marcus Cunliffe grouses, the volumes are "prolix, sonorous, and lacking in psychological insight." (19) The biography was far "too long, too formal, and too slowly published" to find any commercial success, adds Gordon Wood. (20) Other scholars have leveled criticisms that would make the college student of a perhaps bygone era blush, criticizing Marshall's "lack of scholarly training," including the fact that some depictions of the American Revolution appear to have been directly lifted without attribution from contemporaneous histories and The Annual Register. (21) Surprisingly, among prominent historians, only Charles Beard complimented Marshall's Life as "a great work," at least in its portrayal of the economic conflicts that led to the adoption of the Constitution. (22) Such exceptions aside, Albert Beveridge, Marshall's most famous biographer, sums up the scholarly consensus in his description of the "dismal" product as "the least satisfactory of all the labors of Marshall's life." (23)

Nonetheless, some scholars have found something of value in the work. While acknowledging that the book falls far short of the literary heights of Marshall's Supreme Court opinions, a number of authors have called attention to its merits as more than a purely historical production. Max Lerner, for instance, once described the Life as setting forth a distinctly Burkean view of Washington's leadership, particularly in those passages dealing with the impact of Jacobin ideas on the American people. (24) More to our purposes, Morton Frisch notes that the work depicts Marshall's "ideal of a statesman" steadily pursuing the public interest out of a sense of duty to his country. (25) Similarly, William Raymond Smith sees "a Homeric quality" in the Life that connects the outcome of events to "the actions of a traditional hero, thus giving the story the dramatic tension of human action instead of the grandeur and sublimity of divine action." (26) For Robert Faulkner, this heroic element of the Life is its main achievement, with the book serving a didactic function in its argument on behalf of Washington's willingness to give "duty, honor, and country priority over a concern for his own reputation." (27) Together, these more sympathetic interpretations suggest that the Life's ultimate value lies less in its historical accuracy than its philosophic education, and particularly in its treatment of the concept of statesmanship, an idea that begins with principle.

Principle

Key to any assessment of Washington's leadership is his commitment to...