John Marshall

American Founding Father and jurist who was the fourth Chief Justice of the United States from 1801 to 1835, establishing judicial review in Marbury v. Madison. He earlier served as a congressman and as Secretary of State under John Adams.

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Biography

John Marshall was born in 1755 in Germantown in the Colony of Virginia. When the Revolutionary War began he volunteered with the 3rd Virginia Regiment and rose to captain in the Continental Army, fighting at Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth and enduring the winter at Valley Forge. Late in the war he was admitted to the bar.

He was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1782 and then to the state's Council of State, while building a busy law practice in Richmond. At the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788 he worked with James Madison to secure approval of the federal Constitution, and in the 1790s he organised the Federalists in Virginia, turning down offers to become US attorney and attorney general.

In 1797-1798 he was one of three envoys to France whose refusal to pay the bribes demanded by Talleyrand's agents became the XYZ Affair. Elected to Congress in 1798, he became John Adams's secretary of state in 1800 and was appointed chief justice early in 1801.

Over 34 years Marshall made the Supreme Court a co-equal branch of government. His court replaced separate opinions with a single opinion of the court; Marbury v. Madison (1803) asserted judicial review, and McCulloch v. Maryland and Gibbons v. Ogden upheld broad federal power. He presided over Aaron Burr's treason trial in 1807, which ended in acquittal, and died in Philadelphia in 1835 as the longest-serving chief justice.