The Value of a Portrait

Abstract

Allen W. Moger teaches at Washington and Lee University. In "The Value of a Portrait" he relates a poignant incident of the postwar South involving Washington College, Robert E. Lee, and the descendants of Chief Justice John Marshall. The Value of a Portrait ALLEN W. MOGER the tragic CTvTi. WAB, which has been described as "an appeal from the judgments of Marshall to the arbitrament of war," left much of the South in ruins and many prominent families in want. When Robert E. Lee became president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, four months after Appomattox, he found that his greatest problem was the financial stringency of the college and its students. Warren Newcomb, a prominent business man of New Orleans and New York who sent General Lee $10,000 to endow ten scholarships, wrote: "My object in contributing to your college was to have the pleasure of giving a scholarship to the sons of some of my old friends whom I knew in affluence and have since been reduced to poverty." One man, in referring to the problem of how to pay his son's expenses, wrote Lee that "we have fought ourselves out of everything but Children and Land." Another wished Lee to accept a mortgage on his land of $3.00 an acre to pay his college expenses. Pride was forgotten, and family silver and other precious heirlooms were sacrificed to secure education for the youth of the New South. This is well illustrated in the family of John Marshall. Chief Justice Marshall left his children vast acres in Fauquier County, Virginia, where on September 24, 1955, seven estates which had been owned by his children or grandchildren were opened to the public in observance of the 200th anniversary of his birth. However, the end of the Civil War found the family so reduced in circumstances that they used a prized portrait of the Chief Justice to pay the college expenses of his great-grandson. During the last decade of Marshall's life several artists painted his portrait. Among these was William J. Hubard, an Englishman who had married and settled in Virginia. Hubard made portraits of prominent Virginians and Daniel Webster, and 435 436ALLEN W. MOGEB the bronze statute of Washington at the Virginia Military Institute is one of his replicas of the Houdon Statue in the Virginia State Capitol. One of his paintings of Marshall is now in the Marshall House in Richmond. Another which was painted for the Marshall family in Fauquier was in 1870 the property of an eighteen-year-old great-grandson, John Marshall Young John was an orphan who had lost everything during the war. His aunt and guardian, Mrs. Ann L. Jones of Fauquier, wrote General Lee offering to sell the Hubard painting to enable her nephew to spend two years at Washington College. She thought the portrait would have value in one of the literary societies at the college of which her great-uncle and the brother of Chief Justice Marshall, Dr. Louis Marshall, had been president in the 1830's. She wrote: "I have four sons of my own to educate, and am doing all I can for John and his brother but have not the means to give John such an education as I would wish. For no other consideration than that mentioned could I be induced to part with the portrait" In reply General Lee expressed willingness to do anything possible "to facilitate the education of the descendants of Chief Justice Marshall, a man more highly venerated by the citizens of his native State than any other save one." The college would greatly desire to have his portrait, and if Mrs. Jones would put a price upon it he suggested that an arrangement might be made to pay for it in tuition. He also offered to give John a scholarship. Mrs. Jones immediately accepted the scholarship and offered to sell the portrait for $500 to meet all of John's other college expenses for two years. "John is, I am sure," she wrote, "mentally and morally worthy of the effort we are making to educate him, is an orphan—and no doubt will in after years...