JOHN MARSHALL

How fitting that John Marshall contemplates the grounds of the Capitol, where the Supreme Court met during his years on the bench. When Mr. Wentzel photographed the statue in 1935, Marshall appropriately gazed from the west terrace toward the White House. As in life, he kept a sharp eye on “the President’s Palace,” and he never blinked. In any case, he no longer sits there. This statue was moved inside the Supreme Court and a copy of it was placed outside in Judiciary Square in 1984.

Born in Fauquier County, Virginia, in 1755, John Marshall served in the American Revolution, briefly studied law at William and Mary, and was called to the bar on what was then the western frontier. Elected a delegate to the Virginia assembly in 1782, he married and moved to Richmond, thence-forth his home. He served in all three branches of the government over a three-year period. He was elected to Congress as a Federalist in 1799. The next year, he became Secretary of State and in 1801 he was named Chief Justice.

Marshall led the court until his death in 1835, establishing its right to review the constitutionality of state and federal law. A loyal Federalist, he vastly expanded the central government’s powers by his interpretation of the Constitution, which he held to be both a precise document and a living instrument of government.

The five-foot statue of Marshall is not his only brazen image on Capitol Hill. He also appears on the Supreme Court’s 3,000-pound half-doors. Nearly twenty feet tall, the doors are decorated with bronze low-relief panels illustrating great moments in the history of the law: the Justinian Code; the signing of the Magna Carta; Lord Coke barring King James from the high court; and “Marshall and Story.” In this last panel, sculptor John Donnelly shows John Marshall delivering the court’s verdict in Marbury vs. Madison, the first in which an act of Congress was declared unconstitutional. Joseph Story is depicted as a participant in this scene, but this is historically incorrect.

Joseph Story was not on the court in 1803, at the time of Marbury vs. Madison; he served from 1811–1845. Surely it was a cozy thought all the same, putting Story in a picture with Marshall, whose devoted adherent he was, considering that Justice Story was the father of William Wetmore Story, the Boston sculptor who created the statue of John Marshall that stands on the Capitol grounds seen here.

PHOTOGRAPH BY VOLKMAR K. WENTZEL (CC ‘74); TEXT BY JUDITH W. FRANK (WASHINGTON BY NIGHT)

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