John Marshall and His Papers

Abstract

John Marshall and His Papers Charles F. Hobson The Papers of John Marshall is the first scholarly edition of the correspondence and pa­ pers of the eminent jurist who served as Chief Justice of the United States from 1801 to 1835. Sponsored by the College ofWilliam and Mary and the Institute of Early American History and Culture, the edition is published by the Univer­ sity ofNorth Carolina Press. The eight volumes published to date record Marshall’s life and ca­ reer through 1819. Another four volumes will complete the series, sometime early in the new century. The first five volumes embrace the pe­ riod prior to his appointment as Chief Justice; the remaining volumes cover the Supreme Court years. A point to be emphasized is that the Mar­ shall Papers was never intended to be a docu­ mentary history of the Supreme Court for the years 1801 to 1835. Its scope does not entail reprinting all 500 opinions Marshall delivered on the Court, the full texts of which are avail­ able in the official U.S. Reports. The manu­ scripts ofthe great majority ofhis opinions have not survived, which precludes a more accurate rendering of the texts we already have. Most of the eighty-eight extant autograph opinions, moreover, do not reflect a first or working draft but rather the final version given to the reporter for publication. Yet we never seriously contem­ plated excluding altogether the Supreme Court opinions from an edition of Marshall’s papers. As a workable compromise, the editors adopted a plan of publishing in full most of the constitu­ tional opinions (about thirty), along with a rep­ resentative sample ofnonconstitutional opinions that reflect Marshall’s jurisprudence in such fields as international law, contracts and com­ mercial law, procedure, and real property. The edition also presents calendar entries for all the opinions given by the Chief Justice during the years covered by a volume. More space is given to opinions in the United States Circuit Courts for Virginia and North Carolina. Marshall spent the greater part of his judicial time on circuit—holding court each spring and fall in Richmond and Raleigh, re­ spectively—yet this side of his career is rela­ tively unknown and the documents less ac­ cessible. More than sixty manuscript circuit opinions are extant and are being printed in full. An earlier edition of these opinions, published by John Brockenbrough in 1837, is extremely rare. Although Brockenbrough’s reports have been reprinted in Federal Cases, the alphabetical arrangement ofthat series scat­ ters Marshall’s opinions over many volumes. JOURNAL 1996, VOL. 2 31 The staffof The Papers ofJohn Marshall is pictured above from left to right: Charles F. Hobson, editor-in-chief; Susan Holbrook Perdue, managing editor; and Robert Smith, research assistant. Brockenbrough also took certain liberties with Marshall’s drafts, regularizing his spelling and punctuation, for example, and occasionally im­ proving what he regarded as infelicitous phras­ ing. The editors believe that bringing together the circuit court opinions in the present edition and presenting texts that more faithfully adhere to the original drafts serve a sound documentary purpose. Besides judicial opinions, the other princi­ pal category of“papers” published in the edition consists of correspondence. Unfortunately, the assembled Marshall archive is much smaller than one would expect from so eminent a personage. Compared to those of his fellow Virginians George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, the Marshall collection is mea­ ger fare indeed. Apparently oblivious of the needs of an inquiring posterity, the ChiefJustice seems to have made no attempt to preserve his personal papers. In all likelihood there never was a voluminous collection that was subse­ quently dispersed or destroyed after his death. No letterbooks containing copies of his letters have been found, and only a handful of letters addressed to him have turned up. The surviving personal correspondence consists principally of recipients’ copies of letters he wrote that have been found in widely scattered collections. With numerous and often large gaps, this corpus falls short of providing a full and continuous record of Marshall’s life. Precisely because there is no large body of personal papers, however, it is all the more im­ portant that students have convenient...