Source: https://www.lawliberty.org/book-review/jurisprudence-as-an-expression-of-character-brookhiser-marshall-review/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 04:22:41+00:00

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Finally, there are the more biographical and personal works, the exemplar of which remains Albert Beveridge’s gargantuan, Pulitzer Prize-winning Life of John Marshall, published in 1916 (volumes 1 and 2) and 1919 (volumes 3 and 4), which has provided subsequent generations of academics ample fodder for Marshall mythmaking of a politically distinctive sort. Jean Edward Smith’s not-quite-so-meaty John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (1998) is a more recent, straightforwardly biographical study. Marshall books in this category certainly do not avoid legal and jurisprudential issues. But they also attend to Marshall the statesman, the politician, the lawyer, the friend, the confidant, and the family man. They are interested in how Marshall the man might illuminate Marshall the judge.
Richard Brookhiser’s John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court is a new entry in this last genre. Unlike its predecessors, Brookhiser’s book is an elegantly succinct, readable, and accessible account of Marshall’s life. It explores Marshall’s virtues and personal qualities, as well as some of his shortcomings, to show their contribution to his impact on the Supreme Court. It does so while largely avoiding Marshall the father, the husband, the Christian, and so on, focusing instead on those salient character traits that can be gleaned from his public service.
Indeed, there is an ambiguity in the book’s subtitle. “The man who made the Supreme Court” might signal Marshall’s outsized role in fashioning the Supreme Court in his own self-image. There are some biographies, as Kevin Walsh has noted in his review in these pages of another recent Marshall book, that read Marshall as a kind of Romantic hero—the American Werther or Cagliostro of the judiciary. But there is another, and perhaps better, interpretation of the subtitle: that distinctive features of Marshall’s character as a man subtly but powerfully influenced the Court’s development under his stewardship.
John Marshall was a loyal man, especially to George Washington, and this is a foundational piece of Brookhiser’s history. Marshall served as a captain in the Continental Army and his experience and suffering in common with other soldiers at Valley Forge impressed upon him the evils of a weak central government and the great goods of American patriotism. But the bonds of the battlefield and of soldiery also created a lasting and profound loyalty to the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.
“Most Americans admired Washington,” writes Brookhiser, but “Marshall’s reverence was personal, powerful, enduring.” His allegiance to Washington would inspire Marshall’s Virginia speeches in favor of constitutional ratification; reinforce his hostility toward French criticism of Washington’s policies of international neutrality; prompt him, against his own inclinations, to pursue higher political office; and move him, in the early 1800s, to compose his (alas) plodding biography of Washington, his only extended work of scholarship.
It was his loyalty to Washington that also fanned the flames of Marshall’s bitter and enduring enmity toward Thomas Jefferson, as different a man from Marshall as it is possible to be. Brookhiser artfully traces Marshall’s visceral loathing for Jefferson to the latter’s letter to a Florentine Anti-Federalist sympathizer, denigrating those “men who were Solomons in council and Sampsons [sic] in battle, but whose hair has been cut off by the whore England”—an obvious reference to Washington. Marshall would never forgive Jefferson for what he regarded as an act of betrayal to the great man. The hatred between these two Virginians and second cousins was mutual.
Yet the animosity was not strictly personal. Brookhiser shows how Marshall’s loyalty to Washington’s person was also loyalty to Washington’s political program and nationalizing aspirations. Together, these loyalties influenced Marshall’s own view, as the fourth chief justice of the United States, that the Supreme Court should exert a centripetal force on the nation’s politics. Those well versed in the legal issues in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Osborn v. Bank of the United States (1824), Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), Cohens v. Virginia (1821), Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), and other pillars of the Marshall jurisprudential mansion will not discover too much that is new in Brookhiser’s chapters on the cases themselves, though Brookhiser cleverly brings them to life by foregrounding the context and the colorful personalities doing battle in them. His chapter on Cohens, for example, begins with an engaging discussion of the Cohen brothers’ arrival in America and the nature of their variegated businesses in financial services and lottery-running. His attention to these details makes for a pleasing story.
It also won him judicial allies, enabling him to unify the Court to speak and act as a single organism—in Brookhiser’s fine phrase, like a “coral reef” rather than as shards of calcium carbonate. Opinions for the Court as a unit, rather than seriatim opinions, became a common practice. Dissents and separate concurrences were discouraged. Marshall’s genial ways endeared him to his colleagues, from the silent and forgettable Gabriel Duvall to the brilliant and energetic Joseph Story. Story would remain devoted to the chief justice and would gush, “I love his laugh . . . I am in love with his character, positively in love.” Marshall’s bonhomie and its salutary effect on the Court, in combination with an unusual stability in personnel from 1812 to 1823, cemented the Court’s institutional power and prestige. He would struggle to maintain that harmony in the turbulent years of Andrew Jackson’s presidency.
At several points, Brookhiser describes Marshall’s opinion-writing style as oracular and yet moving from general principles systematically to particular legal conclusions. It is this special blend of the elevated and the commonplace, the philosophical and the practical, “peaks of eloquence separated by wide thickets of detail” (Brookhiser’s description of Marshall’s massive opinion in Cohens v. Virginia), that distinguishes Marshall’s writing in many of his most famous opinions.
At times, as in The Antelope (1825)—which held that the slave trade was consistent with the law of nations (if not with the law of nature)—the Marshallian approach served ends that, though perhaps technically sound, were morally odious. At others, as in Gibbons v. Ogden, his style of opinion-writing is remarkable for its closeness and care. Marshall’s claims about congressional power under the Commerce Clause in Gibbons are impressive, but so is his choice to fix on the narrower issue of New York’s interference with Congress’s coastal licensing scheme. Magnum in parvo.
Biographies of political and legal figures that focus on the personal qualities of their subjects imply something about the nature of government. At the very least, they suggest that government and the character of its leaders are not entirely disconnected phenomena, whether for good or ill. Perhaps this is not a message with much resonance today. But Brookhiser has made a strong case for it in this splendid book.

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