Edmund Randolph, and Robert E. Lee, his
father, Thomas Marshall, was "a planter of narrow fortune" and modest
lineage and a pioneer. Fauquier was then on the frontier, and a few
years after John was born the family moved still farther westward to a
place called "The Hollow," a small depression on the eastern slope
of the Blue Ridge. The external furnishings of the boy's life were
extremely primitive, a fact which Marshall used later to recall by
relating that his mother and sisters used thorns for buttons and that
hot mush flavored with balm leaf was regarded as a very special dish.
Neighbors of course, were few and far between, but society was not
lacking for all that. As the first of fifteen children, all of whom
reached maturity, John found ample opportunity to cultivate that
affectionate helpfulness and gayety of spirit which in after years even
enemies accounted one of his most notable traits.

Among the various influences which, during the plastic years of boyhood
and youth, went to shape the outlook of the future Chief Justice high
rank must be accorded his pioneer life. It is not merely that the spirit
of the frontier, with its independence of precedent and its audacity
of initiative, breathes through his great constitutional decisions,
but also that in being of the frontier Marshall escaped being something
else. Had he been born in lowland Virginia, he would have imbibed the
intense localism and individualism of the great plantation, and with his
turn of mind might well have filled the role of Calhoun instead of that
very different role he actually did fill. There was, indeed, one great
planter with whom young Marshall was thrown into occasional contact, and
that was his father's patron and patron saint, Washington. The appeal
made to the lad's imagination by the great Virginian, was deep and
abiding. And it goes without saying that the horizons suggested by
the fame of Fort Venango and Fort Duquesne were not those of seaboard
Virginia but of America.

Many are the great men who have owed their debt to a mother's loving
helpfulness and alert understanding. Marshall, on the other hand, was
his father's child. "My father," he was wont to declare in after years,
"was a far abler man than any of his sons. To him I owe the solid
foundations of all my success in life." What were these solid
foundations? One was a superb physical constitution; another was a taste
for intellectual delights; and to the upbuilding of b