Review

General Books

David Robarge's purpose in writing this book is to provide an interpretive "half-life" biography that "emphasizes the formative influences on John Marshall during the years before he became chief justice." Marshall, born in 1755, was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1801 when more than one half of his life was over. His experience, the author writes, "as a child of the Virginia gentry, a militiaman and Continental Army officer during the Revolution, a prominent lawyer and lawmaker in the Old Dominion, and a leading Federalist and diplomat...deeply affected his life and work as chief justice." Marshal's pre-court years, he goes on, "deserve detailed examination...for their intrinsic interest as well as for their relationship to his era and his later historical significance." Robarge's book fills a gap in Marshall studies. It provides a picture of an outstanding Federalist in the age of Federalism. Marshall comes to life as a nationalist dedicated to promoting his country's cause in addition to advancing his own private fortune. He championed the Union, for example, with the same dedication that he showed in acquiring a landed estate in Virginia's Northern Neck. Teachers of American constitutional history in law schools, liberal arts colleges, and high schools will be able to make good use of this book. Librarians should place it on their acquisitions lists.	1
In his final chapter Robarge discusses the major themes of Marshall's early life and their impact on his contribution to constitutional law. Marshall's Federalist philosophy, his beliefs as a Colonizationist, his legal expertise, his vision of the Union as an instrument of national security, of continental empire, and of economic development, are among the topics dealt with. Marshall must be counted as one of the creators of the liberal-capitalist state in the Euro-American form that serves as a global model for state builders today. This model was articulated almost simultaneously in the American and French Revolutions. Major innovations included a fundamental written law to provide the framework for the institutions and the operations of the nation-state. The ideas in France's A Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen were also a keystone of constitution building in the United States. But many Federalists, and Marshall was among them, had little use for the Bill of Rights. They saw it as a necessary concession to an Antifederalist demand. Absent this concession neither the New York nor the Virginia ratifying assemblies would have endorsed the Constitution. Without these key states there would have been no Federal Union.	2
Barron v. Baltimore was one of the last cases that Marshall decided before his retirement in 1833; it eloquently records his view of the Bill of Rights. Barron was the owner of a profitable wharf in the eastern Baltimore harbor. He sued the City of Baltimore for damages when massive changes made in the city's drainage system caused the waters adjacent to his wharf to silt up, thereby rendering it valueless. When the Baltimore County Court rejected Barron's suit, the plaintiff took an appeal to the Supreme Court, claiming that his property rights were protected by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which states that no person shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." In his decision Marshall echoed the long-prevailing Federalist view that the Bill of Rights was adopted solely to guard against abuse of power by the Federal government; and that states had no obligation whatsoever to abide by its provisions when they made their own law. Marshall's decision went far beyond the issue of damage to a wharf. Slaves, for example, were people by the million whose status was defined by the slave codes of the Southern states, not by the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.	3
This was the situation which, after 1835, the American people were beginning to confront. But Robarge fails to present Marshall's contribution within the wider context of the struggle for freedom. Thirty years after his death in 1835, the Barron decision was overthrown by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Human liberty was proclaimed as a national right falling under the protection of the federal government itself. In the end, Marshall's Union survived only because it championed the freedom of America's slaves.	4
Holland, Massachusetts   John Anthony Scott

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