Volume I Part 6 (2/2)

He heard of them from his father's lips. Henry's inspired speech, which still burns across a century with undiminished power, came to John Marshall from one who had listened to it, as the family cl.u.s.tered around the fireside of their Oak Hill home. The effect on John Marshall's mind and spirit was heroic and profound, as his immediate action and his conduct for several years demonstrate.

We may be sure that the father was not deceived as to the meaning of it all; nor did he permit his family to be carried off the solid ground of reality by any emotional excitement. Thomas Marshall was no fanatic, no fancy-swayed enthusiast resolving highly in wrought-up moments and retracting humbly in more sober hours. He was a man who looked before he leaped; he counted the costs; he made up his mind with knowledge of the facts. When Thomas Marshall decided to act, no unforeseen circ.u.mstance could make him hesitate, no unexpected obstacle could swerve him from his course; for he had considered carefully and well; and his son was of like mettle.

So when Thomas Marshall came back to his Fauquier County home from the fateful convention of 1775 at Richmond, he knew just what the whole thing meant; and, so knowing, he gravely welcomed the outcome. He knew that it meant war; and he knew also what war meant. Already he had been a Virginia ranger and officer, had seen fighting, had witnessed wounds and death.[216] The same decision that made him cast his vote for Henry's resolutions also caused Thomas Marshall to draw his sword from its scabbard. It inspired him to do more; for the father took down the rifle from its deerhorn bracket and the hunting-knife from its hook, and placed them in the hands of his first-born. And so we find father and son ready for the field and prepared to make the ultimate argument of willingness to lay down their lives for the cause they believed in.

FOOTNOTES:

[104] Story, in Dillon, iii, 334.

[105] The records of Westmoreland County do not show what disposition Thomas Marshall made of the one hundred acres given him by his mother.

(Letter of Albert Stuart, Deputy Clerk of Westmoreland County, Virginia, to the author, Aug. 26, 1913.) He probably abandoned it just as John Was.h.i.+ngton and Thomas Pope abandoned one thousand acres of the same land. (_Supra._)

[106] Westmoreland County is on the Potomac River near its entrance into Chesapeake Bay. Prince William is about thirty miles farther up the river. Marshall was born about one hundred miles by wagon road from Appomattox Creek, northwest toward the Blue Ridge and in the wilderness.

[107] Campbell, 404-05.

[108] More than forty years later the country around the Blue Ridge was still a dense forest. (La Rochefoucauld, iii, 173.) And the road even from Richmond to Petersburg, an hundred miles east and south of the Marshall cabin, as late as 1797 ran through ”an almost uninterrupted succession of woods.” (_Ib._, 106; and see _infra_, chap. VII.)

[109] John, 1755; Elizabeth, 1756; Mary, 1757; Thomas, 1761.

[110] Binney, in Dillon, iii, 284.

[111] The ancient trunks of one or two of these trees still stand close to the house.

[112] British map of 1755; Virginia State Library.

[113] See La Rochefoucauld, iii, 707. These ”roads” were scarcely more than mere tracks through the forests. See chap. VII, infra, for description of roads at the period between the close of the Revolution and the beginning of our National Government under the Const.i.tution.

Even in the oldest and best settled colonies the roads were very bad.

Chalkley's _Augusta County (Va.) Records_ show many orders regarding roads; but, considering the general state of highways, (see _infra_, chap. VII) these probably concerned very primitive efforts. When Thomas Marshall removed his family to the Blue Ridge, the journey must have been strenuous even for that hards.h.i.+p-seasoned man.

[114] She was born in 1737. (Paxton, 19.)

[115] At this time, Thomas Marshall had at least two slaves, inherited from his father. (Will of John Marshall ”of the forest,” Appendix I.) As late as 1797 (nearly forty years after Thomas Marshall went to ”The Hollow”), La Rochefoucauld found that even on the ”poorer” plantations about the Blue Ridge the ”planters, however wretched their condition, have all of them one or two negroes.” (La Rochefoucauld, iii, 135.)

[116] Personal inspection.

[117] Mill-sawed weather-boarding, held by cut nails, now covers the sides of the house, the original broad whip-sawed boards, fastened by wrought nails, having long since decayed.

[118] Practically all log cabins, at that time, had only one story.

[119] See _infra_.

[120] Six more children were born while the Marshalls remained in ”The Hollow”: James M., 1764; Judith, 1766; William and Charles, 1767; Lucy, 1768; and Alexander, 1770.

[121] Nearly twenty years later, ”Winchester was rude, wild, as nature had made it,” but ”it was less so than its inhabitants.” (Mrs.

Carrington to her sister Nancy, describing Winchester in 1777, from personal observation; MS.)

<script>