Some reference has already been made to his earliest reported argument in court, in 1786. In the Virginia Federal Convention, in 1788, Marshall’s principal speeches related to the subjects of taxation, the militia, and the judiciary. These, so far as preserved, are found in the third volume of Elliot’s Debates, and in Dr. Grigsby’s very interesting History of that Convention, in the tenth volume of the “Virginia Historical Collections.” Nothing remains of a famous speech in support of Jay’s treaty, at a public meeting in Richmond in 1795. A summary of his strong but unsuccessful argument in 1796, in the case of Ware _v_. Hylton (3 Dallas 199), as to the claims of British creditors, his only case before the Supreme Court of the United States, is preserved in the volume of reports. This argument attracted much attention among the statesmen at Philadelphia. “I then became acquainted,” he wrote to a friend, “with Mr. Cabot, Mr. Ames, Mr. Dexter, and Mr. Sedgwick of Massachusetts, Mr. Wadsworth of Connecticut, and Mr. King of New York.... I was particularly intimate with Mr. Ames.” After Washington’s death in 1799, Marshall, in a short and well-known speech, moved the resolution of the House of Representatives. A little afterwards he made a great and admirably thorough address in a matter which then deeply affected the public mind; from this, his greatest public speech,[17] a quotation is given below. It was made March 4, 1800, in defense of the President’s action in the case of Thomas Nash, _alias_ Jonathan Robbins. This person, a British subject, but claiming to be an American citizen, and to have been impressed into the British navy, was charged with piracy and murder on board a British ship of war in 1791. Being found in Charleston, S. C., he was arrested in 1799, at the instance of the British consul, and held to await an application for his extradition under article 27 of the treaty with Great Britain of 1795. That article bound the two countries reciprocally to deliver up, on request of the other, persons charged with murder committed within the jurisdiction of that other. Evidence of criminality was first to be furnished, such as would justify commitment for trial on the same charge in the country where the accused was found.