He held the view that the United States must be a literary
nation in the sense of having great and noble authors to leaven its
people and teach them high thoughts. His schools were chiefly down in
the Chesapeake Bay, in the county of his birth, and his teachers were
poor Presbyterian clergymen from Scotland, who at that period were the
teachers of nearly all the Middle States, from New York southward. He
knew some Latin, but not very much. One of his teachers was his own
father, who, with a large family, took delight in training this boy.
OUR JUDGE ON DRILL.
In 1775 the country hunters and boors on the Blue Ridge Mountain went to
their mustering place, and, the senior officer being absent, this young
Marshall, with a gun on his shoulder, began to show them how to use it.
Like them, he wore a blue hunting shirt and trousers of some stuff
fringed with white, and in his round hat was a buck-tail for a cockade.
He was about six feet high, lean and straight, with a dark skin, black
hair, a pretty low forehead, and rich, dark small eyes, the whole making
a face dutiful, pleasing, and modest. After the drill was over he stood
up and told those strange, wild mountaineers, who had no newspapers and
knew little of the world, what the war was about. He described to them
the battle of Lexington. They listened to him for an hour, as if he had
been some young preacher.
Thus was our great chief-justice introduced to public life.
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