But at the time when the Constitution was made, the importance to which the judicial power would attain in the political system of the United States could not be foreseen.  The form was devised, but, like the nation itself, its full proportions remained to be developed.  In that development, so far as it has been made by the judiciary, one man was destined to play a pre-eminent part.  This man was John Marshall, under whose hand, as James Bryce has happily said, the Constitution “seemed not so much to rise ... to its full stature, as to be gradually unveiled by him, till it stood revealed in the harmonious perfection of the form which its framers had designed.”  For this unrivalled achievement there has been conceded to Marshall by universal consent the title of Expounder of the Constitution of the United States; and the general approval with which his work is now surveyed is attested by the tribute lately paid to his memory.  The observance on the 4th of February, 1901, by a celebration spontaneously national, of the one hundredth anniversary of his assumption of the office of Chief Justice of the United States, is without example in judicial annals.  It is therefore a matter of interest not only to every student of American history, but also to every American patriot, to study his career and to acquaint himself with that combination of traits and accidents by which his character and course in life were determined.

John Marshall was born Sept. 24, 1755, in Fauquier County, Virginia, at a small village then called Germantown, but now known as Midland, a station on the Southern Railway not far south of Manassas.  His grandfather, John Marshall, the first of the family of whom there appears to be any record, was an emigrant from Wales.  He left four sons, the eldest of whom was Thomas Marshall, the father of the Chief Justice.  Thomas Marshall, though a man of meagre early education, possessed great natural gifts, and rendered honorable and useful public service both as a member of the Virginia Legislature, and as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, in which he rose to the rank of colonel.  His son, John Marshall, was the eldest of fifteen children.  Of his mother, whose maiden name was Keith, little is known, but it has been well observed by one of Marshall’s biographers, that, as she reared her fifteen children—­seven sons and eight daughters—­all to mature years, she could have had little opportunity to make any other record for herself, and could hardly have made a better one.

Subsequently to his birth, Marshall’s parents removed to an estate called Oak Hill, in the western part of Fauquier County.  It was here that in 1775, when nineteen years of age, he heard the call of his country and entered the patriot army as a lieutenant.  We have of him at this time the first personal description, written by a kinsman who was an eye-witness of the scene, and preserved in the eulogy delivered by Mr. Binney before the Select and Common Councils of Philadelphia