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Reviews of Books
Reassessing John Marshall
G. Edward White
The Papers of John Marshall. Edited by Charles F. Hobson et al. Volume VIII: Correspondence, Papers, and Selected Judicial Opinions, March 1814– December 1819. Volume IX: Correspondence, Papers, and Selected Judicial Opinions. January 1820–December 1823. Volume X: Correspondence, Papers, and Selected Judicial Opinions, January 1824–April 1827. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1995; 1998; 2000. Pp. xxxviii, 420; xxxviii, 396; xlii, 449. $70.00; $70.00; $60.00.)
A Chief Justice's Progress: John Marshall from Revolutionary Virginia to the Supreme Court. By David Robarge. Contributions in American History, Number 185. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Pp. xxxvi, 364. $65.00.)
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Sometimes there are propitious historiographic
moments in the afterlives of celebrated figures, when a combination
of factors brings about the disintegration of established frameworks
for characterizing a historical personage, spawning work that approaches
that life and career from new perspectives. One such moment seems
to be arriving in the afterlife of John Marshall, chief justice
of the United States from 1801 to 1835. At this point, the most
recent scholarship on Marshall has not quite captured the moment.
Although the ground has been prepared for the construction of a
new framework, the historiographical edifice has barely taken shape.
When that structure is complete, it is very likely to produce an
impression of Marshall and the Marshall Court that will be significantly
at odds with the conventional wisdom of most of the twentieth century.
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This essay anticipates the coming
reassessment of Marshall's life and career. That reappraisal is
bound up with two large changes in the study of culture and history
in the United States. The first derives from late twentieth-century
developments in the historiography of the early republic that have
virtually obliterated the traces of a long-established "progressive"
perspective on the founding period and its actors. The second involves
more recent experiments by intellectual historians to apply the
techniques of semiotics and cultural anthropology to "unpack" and
decode the contributions of historical actors. Such techniques,
this essay argues, are just as applicable to the work of legal figures
as any other cultural actors, and particularly to judges, whose
opinions articulate the aspirations of a culture by connecting its
starting epistemological and ideological assumptions to the resolution
of contested legal and political issues. What better subject, then,
for such "unpacking" than the Marshall Court, whose formative decisions
were made in an era of intense debate over the meanings of republicanism
and liberalism—the ideological premises of the new political
and social order brought into being by the Revolution—that
historians have spent the last generation seeking to fathom? |
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