Brave Men and Women: Their Struggles, Failures, And TriumphsFuller, Osgood E. (Osgood Eaton)
History
Brave Men and Women: Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs
Fuller, Osgood E. (Osgood Eaton)
Biography
It became Marshall's duty, in the course of twenty-five years, to try
for high treason the man who killed his friend Hamilton, but he
conducted that trial with such an absence of personal feeling that it
was among the greatest marvels of our legal history. He could neither be
influenced by his private grief for Hamilton, nor by Jefferson's
attempts as President to injure Burr, nor by Burr himself, whom he
charged the jury to acquit, but whom he held under bond on another
charge, to Burr's rage. Marshall was in the battle of Monmouth, and at
the storming of Stony Point, and at the surprise of Jersey City. In the
army camps, he became acquainted with the Northern men, and so far from
comparing invidiously with them, he recognized them all as
fellow-countrymen and brave men, and never in his life was there a
single trace of sectionalism.
HIS MARRIAGE.
Near the close of the Revolution, Marshall went to Yorktown, somewhat
before Cornwallis occupied it, to pay a visit, and there he saw Mary
Ambler at the age of fourteen. She became his wife in 1783. Her father
was Jacqueline Ambler, the treasurer of the State of Virginia. She lived
with him forty-eight years, and died in December, 1831. He often
remarked in subsequent life that the race of lovers had changed. Said
he: "When I married my wife, all I had left after paying the minister
his fee was a guinea, and I thought I was rich." General Burgoyne, whom
Marshall's fellow-soldiers so humiliated, wrote some verses, and among
these were the following, which Marshall said over to himself often when
thinking of his wife:
"Encompassed in an angel's frame,
An angel's virtues lay;
Too soon did heaven assert its claim
And take its own away.
My Mary's worth, my Mary's charms,
Can never more return.
What now shall fill these widowed arms?
Ah, me! my Mary's urn."
LAW LECTURES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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