Marshall’s father had a good mind, not much education; but he was a great reader, and especially loved poetry, and he taught his son to commit poetry to memory, and to model his mind on the clear diction and heroic strain of poets like Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope.  In these books of poetry the great chief-justice found the springs to freshen his own good character.  To the last day of his life he loved literature, and was especially fond of novels, and of books written by females.  He held the view that the United States must be a literary nation in the sense of having great and noble authors to leaven its people and teach them high thoughts.  His schools were chiefly down in the Chesapeake Bay, in the county of his birth, and his teachers were poor Presbyterian clergymen from Scotland, who at that period were the teachers of nearly all the Middle States, from New York southward.  He knew some Latin, but not very much.  One of his teachers was his own father, who, with a large family, took delight in training this boy.

OUR JUDGE ON DRILL.

In 1775 the country hunters and boors on the Blue Ridge Mountain went to their mustering place, and, the senior officer being absent, this young Marshall, with a gun on his shoulder, began to show them how to use it.  Like them, he wore a blue hunting shirt and trousers of some stuff fringed with white, and in his round hat was a buck-tail for a cockade.  He was about six feet high, lean and straight, with a dark skin, black hair, a pretty low forehead, and rich, dark small eyes, the whole making a face dutiful, pleasing, and modest.  After the drill was over he stood up and told those strange, wild mountaineers, who had no newspapers and knew little of the world, what the war was about.  He described to them the battle of Lexington.  They listened to him for an hour, as if he had been some young preacher.

Thus was our great chief-justice introduced to public life.  He had come to serve, and found that he must instruct.  When he marched with the regiment of these mountaineers, who carried tomahawks and scalping-knives, the people of Williamsburg trembled for their lives.  At that time, the country near Harper’s Ferry was the Far West.  In a very little while, these mountaineers, by mingled stratagem and system, defeated Lord Dunmore, very much as Andrew Jackson defeated the British at New Orleans thirty-five years later.  Marshall then went with the army to the vicinity of Philadelphia; was in the battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and in the long Winter of Valley Forge.  Almost naked at that place, he showed an abounding good-nature, that kept the whole camp content.  If he had to eat meat without bread, he did it with a jest.  Among his men he had the influence of a father, though a boy.  He was so much better read than others that he frequently became a judge advocate, and in this way he got to know Alexander Hamilton, who was on Washington’s staff.  Marshall was always willing to see the greatness of another person, and Judge Story says that he said of Hamilton that he was not only of consummate ability as both soldier and statesman, but that, in great, comprehensive mind, sound principle, and purity of patriotism, no nation ever had his superior.