The Life of John Marshall Volume I Part 2

Into this structure of Virginia society Fate began to weave a new and alien thread about the time that Thomas Marshall took his young bride to the log cabin in the woods of Prince William County where their first child was born. In the back country bordering the mountains appeared the scattered huts of the pioneers. The strong character of this element of Virginia's population is well known, and its coming profoundly influenced for generations the political, social, industrial, and military history of that section. They were jealous of their "rights,"

impatient of restraint, wherever they felt it, and this was seldom.

Indeed, the solitariness of their lives, and the utter self-dependence which this forced upon them, made them none too tolerant of law in any form.

These outpost settlers furnished most of that cla.s.s so well known to our history by the term "backwoodsmen," and yet so little understood. For the heroism, the sacrifice, and the suffering of this "advance guard of civilization" have been pictured by laudatory writers to the exclusion of its other and less admirable qualities. Yet it was these latter characteristics that played so important a part in that critical period of our history between the surrender of the British at Yorktown and the adoption of the Const.i.tution, and in that still more fateful time when the success of the great experiment of making out of an inchoate democracy a strong, orderly, independent, and self-respecting nation was in the balance.

These American backwoodsmen, as described by contemporary writers who studied them personally, pushed beyond the inhabited districts to get land and make homes more easily. This was their underlying purpose; but a fierce individualism, impatient even of those light and vague social restraints which the existence of near-by neighbors creates, was a sharper spur.[98] Through both of these motives, too, ran the spirit of mingled lawlessness and adventure. The physical surroundings of the backwoodsman nourished the non-social elements of his character. The log cabin built, the surrounding patch of clearing made, the seed planted for a crop of cereals only large enough to supply the household needs--these almost ended the backwoodsman's agricultural activities and the habits of regular industry which farming requires.

While his meager crops were coming on, the backwoodsman must supply his family with food from the stream and forest. The Indians had not yet retreated so far, nor were their atrocities so remote, that fear of them had ceased;[99] and the eye of the backwoodsman was ever keen for a savage human foe as well as for wild animals. Thus he became a man of the rifle,[100] a creature of the forests, a dweller amid great silences, self-reliant, suspicious, non-social, and almost as savage as his surroundings.[101]

But among them sometimes appeared families which sternly held to high purposes, orderly habits, and methodical industry;[102] and which clung to moral and religious ideals and practices with greater tenacity than ever, because of the very difficulties of their situation. These chosen families naturally became the backbone of the frontier; and from them came the strong men of the advanced settlements.

Such a figure among the backwoodsmen was Thomas Marshall. Himself a product of the settlements on the tidewater, he yet was the personification of that spirit of American advance and enterprise which led this son of the Potomac lowlands ever and ever westward until he ended his days in the heart of Kentucky hundreds of miles through the savage wilderness from the spot where, as a young man, he built his first cabin home.

This, then, was the strange mingling of human elements that made up Virginia society during the middle decades of the eighteenth century--a society peculiar to the Old Dominion and unlike that of any other place or time. For the most part, it was idle and dissipated, yet also hospitable and spirited, and, among the upper cla.s.ses, keenly intelligent and generously educated. When we read of the heavy drinking of whiskey, brandy, rum, and heady wine; of the general indolence, broken chiefly by fox-hunting and horse-racing, among the quality; of the coa.r.s.er sport of c.o.c.k-fighting shared in common by landed gentry and those of baser condition, and of the eagerness for physical encounter which seems to have pervaded the whole white population,[103] we wonder at the greatness of mind and soul which grew from such a social soil.

Yet out of it sprang a group of men who for ability, character, spirit, and purpose, are not outshone and have no precise counterpart in any other company of ill.u.s.trious characters appearing in like s.p.a.ce of time and similar extent of territory. At almost the same point of time, historically speaking,--within thirty years, to be exact,--and on the same spot, geographically speaking,--within a radius of a hundred miles,--George Mason, James Madison, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and George Washington were born. The life stories of these men largely make up the history of their country while they lived; and it was chiefly their words and works, their thought and purposes, that gave form and direction, on American soil, to those political and social forces which are still working out the destiny of the American people.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For instance, the Indians ma.s.sacred nine families in Frederick County, just over the Blue Ridge from Fauquier, in June, 1755.

(_Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser_, July 24, 1755.)

[2] Marshall, i, 12-13; Campbell, 469-71. "The Colonial contingents were not nearly sufficient either in quant.i.ty or quality." (Wood, 40.)

[3] Braddock had won promotion solely by gallantry in the famous Coldstream Guards, the model and pride of the British army, at a time when a lieutenant-colonelcy in that crack regiment sold for 5000 sterling. (Lowdermilk, 97.)

[4] "The British troops had been looked upon as invincible, and preparations had been made in Philadelphia for the celebration of Braddock's antic.i.p.ated victory." (_Ib._, 186.)

[5] Washington to Robinson, April 20, 1755; _Writings_: Ford, i, 147.

[6] The "wild desert country lying between fort c.u.mberland and fort Frederick [now the cities of c.u.mberland and Frederick in Maryland], the most common track of the Indians, in making their incursions into Virginia." (Address in the Maryland House of Delegates, 1757, as quoted by Lowdermilk, 229-30.) c.u.mberland was "about 56 miles beyond our [Maryland] settlements." (_Ib._) c.u.mberland "is far remote from any of our inhabitants." (Washington to Dinwiddie, Sept. 23, 1756; _Writings_: Ford, i, 346.) "Will's Creek was on the very outskirts of civilization.

The country beyond was an unbroken and almost pathless wilderness."

(Lowdermilk, 50.)

[7] It took Braddock three weeks to march from Alexandria to c.u.mberland.

He was two months and nineteen days on the way from Alexandria to the place of his defeat. (_Ib._, 138.)

[8] "All America watched his [Braddock's] advance." (Wood, 61.)

[9] For best accounts of Braddock's defeat see Bradley, 75-107; Lowdermilk, 156-63; and Marshall, i, 7-10.

[10] "Of one hundred and sixty officers, only six escaped." (Lowdermilk, footnote to 175.)

[11] Braddock had five horses killed under him. (_Ib._, 161.)

[12] "The dastardly behavior of the Regular [British] troops," who "broke and ran as sheep before hounds." (Washington to Dinwiddie, July 18, 1755; _Writings_: Ford, i, 173-74.)

[13] Washington to John A. Washington, July 18, 1755. (_Ib._, 176.)

[14] "The Virginia companies behaved like men and died like soldiers ...

of three companies ... scarce thirty were left alive." (Washington to Dinwiddie, July 18, 1755; _Writings_: Ford, i, 173-74.)

[15] Lowdermilk, 182-85; and see Washington's _Writings_: Ford, i, footnote to 175. For account of battle and rout see Washington's letters to Dinwiddie, _ib._, 173-76; to John A. Washington, July 18, 1755, _ib._; to Robert Jackson, Aug. 2, 1755, _ib._, 177-78; also see Campbell, 472-81. For French account see Hart, ii, 365-67; also, Sargent: _History of Braddock's Expedition_.

[16] Washington to John A. Washington, July 18, 1755; _Writings_: Ford, i, 175.

[17] "The Defeat of Braddock was totally unlooked for, and it excited the most painful surprise." (Lowdermilk, 186.)

[18] "After Braddock's defeat, the Colonists jumped to the conclusion that all regulars were useless." (Wood, 40.)

[19] See Stanard: _Story of Bacon's Rebellion_. Bacon's Rebellion deserves the careful study of all who would understand the beginnings of the democratic movement in America. Mrs. Stanard's study is the best brief account of this popular uprising. See also Wertenbaker: _V. U.

S._, chaps. 5 and 6.

[20] "The news [of Braddock's defeat] gave a far more terrible blow to the reputation of the regulars than to the British cause [against the French] itself." (Wood, 61.)

[21] "From that time [Braddock's defeat] forward the Colonists had a much less exalted opinion of the valor of the royal troops."

(Lowdermilk, 186.) The fact that the colonists themselves had been negligent and incompetent in resisting the French or even the Indians did not weaken their newborn faith in their own prowess and their distrust of British power.

[22] _Autobiography._

[23] Campbell, 494. "It is remarkable," says Campbell, "that as late as the year 1756, when the colony was a century and a half old, the Blue Ridge of mountains was virtually the western boundary of Virginia." And see Marshall, i, 15; also, _New York Review_ (1838), iii, 330. For frontier settlements, see the admirable map prepared by Marion F.

Lansing and reproduced in Channing, ii.

[24] Humphrey Marshall, i, 344-45. Also Binney, in Dillon, iii, 283.

[25] See _infra_, chap. II.

[26] Humphrey Marshall, i, 344-45.

[27] He was one of a company of militia cavalry the following year, (Journal, H.B. (1756), 378); and he was commissioned as ensign Aug. 27, 1761. (Crozier: _Virginia Colonial Militia_, 96.) And see _infra_, chaps, III and IV.

[28] Paxton, 20.

[29] A copy of a letter (MS.) to Thomas Marshall from his sister Elizabeth Marshall Martin, dated June 15, 1755, referring to the Braddock expedition, shows that he was at home at this time.

Furthermore, a man of the quality of Thomas Marshall would not have left his young wife alone in their backwoods cabin at a time so near the birth of their first child, when there was an overabundance of men eager to accompany Braddock.

[30] Washington MSS., Lib. Cong.

[31] Simon Kenton, the Indian fighter, was born in the same county in the same year as John Marshall. (M'Clung: _Sketches of Western Adventure_, 93.)

[32] Neither the siege of Louisburg nor the capture of Quebec took such hold on the public imagination as the British disaster on the Monongahela. Also, the colonists felt, though unjustly, that they were ent.i.tled to as much credit for the two former events as the British.

[33] The idea of unity had already germinated. The year before, Franklin offered his plan of concerted colonial action to the Albany conference.

(_Writings_: Smyth, i, 387.)

[34] Wood, 38-42.

[35] For these genealogies see Slaughter: _Bristol Parish_, 212; Lee: _Lee of Virginia_, 406 _et seq._; Randall, i, 6-9; Tucker, i, 26. See Meade, i, footnote to 138-39, for other descendants of William Randolph and Mary Isham.