Without Precedent by Joel Richard Paul

Author:Joel Richard Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

HIGH CRIMES

After Republicans had canceled the Supreme Court’s term in 1802, Chief Justice Marshall rode the circuit from Virginia to North Carolina. He usually traveled on horseback with his slave Peter, leaving Robin Spurlock in Richmond to manage the household. Life on the road was difficult as travelers had to stay overnight in inns that were often dirty, crowded, and inconvenient. While spending the night at a tavern in Raleigh, Marshall discovered that Peter had failed to pack any breeches for him to wear in court. He had nothing but his riding clothes. So he sought out a tailor to sew a new pair of pants as quickly as possible. There was no time to sew a proper pair of dress pants. “I thought I should be a sans culotte only one day,” he joked, referring to the French revolutionaries who wore working-class trousers. Unfortunately, all the tailors in Raleigh were too busy for the chief justice. “I have the extreme mortification to pass the whole term without that important article of dress,” he wrote Polly.1

In June 1802, Marshall’s father passed away on his farm in Kentucky. Thomas Marshall died with significant landholdings in Virginia and Kentucky, which passed to his sons. John Marshall, as the eldest, inherited more than one thousand acres at Oak Hill in Fauquier County. That summer Marshall moved the family to Oak Hill, near what today is Delaplane, to escape the heat and the noise of Richmond. Marshall’s family gathered in the same house that Marshall had left twenty-seven years earlier to join the Virginia militia. Marshall’s eldest son, Thomas, had just finished Princeton, and Jaquelin, Marshall’s second son, was preparing to leave for Harvard that fall. Polly worried that Jaquelin would fall under the influence of the New England secessionists who were threatening to secede out of growing resentment toward southern Republicans.2

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