Reviewed by Ralph Ketcham | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2

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Reviewed by Ralph Ketcham | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Ralph Ketcham, Maxwell School, Syracuse University

The Papers of John Marshall, Vol. XII: Correspondence, Papers, and Selected Judicial Opinions, January 1831–July 1835, With Addendum, June 1783–January 1829. Edited by Charles F. Hobson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 653 pages. $80.00 (cloth).

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, Volume 1, 4 March to 15 November 1809. Edited by J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 778 pages. $99.50 (cloth).

Distraught at "ultraism" about states' rights in his native Virginia, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote Justice Joseph Story in September 1832 to congratulate him on his great study of constitutional law and for his support of the Union and of "firm and solid government" (238). Marshall was surprised, though, that Story had found some passages from Thomas Jefferson's recently published writings that sustained Story's Unionist views. How, Marshall asked, had he managed to "imitate the bee in extracting honey from poison" (238)? The "insane dogmas" (248) of states' rights, Marshall said severely, were "the bitter fruits of the tree . . . planted by Mr. Jefferson" (249) in the Resolutions of 1798 and even before. Marshall had previously agreed enthusiastically with John Quincy Adams "that the declaration of independence itself is also a declaration of a previously existing union" and that "the independence of the states is a graft on the stock of the union" (96), a point Abraham Lincoln would make in terming the Declaration an "apple of gold" and the Union (or Constitution) "the picture of silver ... made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it."¹ Marshall's vision of the Union and the core of American nationhood rested on the moral purposes of 1776 framed in a Constitution that defined the power and authority to sustain those purposes. The final volume of the papers of "the great chief justice" (the phrase recurs in it) elaborates that theme throughout.

But were the words and ideas of the author of the Declaration of Independence really the "poison" in understanding its relation to the Constitution that Marshall alleged? In the documents printed in the Retirement Series, Jefferson explains how his republican principles are the foundations that help in "keeping a watchful eye over . . . wealth & ambition . . . [and] local & personal interests," thus sustaining "the cultivation of the Union, & maintenance of the authority of the laws" (100) (Jefferson wrote this statement after explaining to delegates from Washington County, Pennsylvania, how local and state resistance to the embargo had undermined the important, just, and massive exercise of federal power). In thanking a Philadelphia physician for his political support, Jefferson explained further how what he hoped had been eight years of "peaceable & wise administration" of the federal government would now allow the United States "to commence that splendid course of public improvement & wise application" (237) of the public income that was its destiny. Though the retiring president and the aged chief justice expressed in correspondence and addresses fiercely partisan views and were personally unreconciled to each other, they also endorsed a mutual understanding of the "new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to" equality, empowered to act positively and defend itself, for which Lincoln would honor them both.

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