=The Doctrine of Implied Powers.=—­While restraining Congress in the Marbury case and the state legislatures in a score of cases, Marshall also laid the judicial foundation for a broad and liberal view of the Constitution as opposed to narrow and strict construction.  In McCulloch vs. Maryland, he construed generously the words “necessary and proper” in such a way as to confer upon Congress a wide range of “implied powers” in addition to their express powers.  That case involved, among other things, the question whether the act establishing the second United States Bank was authorized by the Constitution.  Marshall answered in the affirmative.  Congress, ran his reasoning, has large powers over taxation and the currency; a bank is of appropriate use in the exercise of these enumerated powers; and therefore, though not absolutely necessary, a bank is entirely proper and constitutional.  “With respect to the means by which the powers that the Constitution confers are to be carried into execution,” he said, Congress must be allowed the discretion which “will enable that body to perform the high duties assigned to it, in the manner most beneficial to the people.”  In short, the Constitution of the United States is not a strait jacket but a flexible instrument vesting in Congress the powers necessary to meet national problems as they arise.  In delivering this opinion Marshall used language almost identical with that employed by Lincoln when, standing on the battle field of a war waged to preserve the nation, he said that “a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

SUMMARY OF THE UNION AND NATIONAL POLITICS

During the strenuous period between the establishment of American independence and the advent of Jacksonian democracy the great American experiment was under the direction of the men who had launched it.  All the Presidents in that period, except John Quincy Adams, had taken part in the Revolution.  James Madison, the chief author of the Constitution, lived until 1836.  This age, therefore, was the “age of the fathers.”  It saw the threatened ruin of the country under the Articles of Confederation, the formation of the Constitution, the rise of political parties, the growth of the West, the second war with England, and the apparent triumph of the national spirit over sectionalism.

The new republic had hardly been started in 1783 before its troubles began.  The government could not raise money to pay its debts or running expenses; it could not protect American commerce and manufactures against European competition; it could not stop the continual issues of paper money by the states; it could not intervene to put down domestic uprisings that threatened the existence of the state governments.  Without money, without an army, without courts of law, the union under the Articles of Confederation was drifting into dissolution.  Patriots, who had risked their lives for independence, began to talk of monarchy again.  Washington, Hamilton, and Madison insisted that a new constitution alone could save America from disaster.