His private life was worthy of the exalted character he sustained in public station. The unaffected simplicity of his manners; the spotless purity of his morals; his social, gentle, cheerful disposition; his habitual self-denial, and boundless generosity towards others; the strength and constancy of his attachments; his kindness to his friends and neighbours; his exemplary conduct in the relations of son, brother, husband, father; his numerous charities; his benevolence towards all men, and his ever active beneficence; these amiable qualities shone so conspicuously in him, throughout his life, that, highly as he was respected, he had the rare happiness to be yet more beloved. There is no more engaging figure in American history, none more entirely free from disfiguring idiosyncrasy, than the son of Thomas Marshall. CHAPTER IX Epilogue In the brief period of twenty-seven months following the death of Marshall the Supreme Court received a new Chief Justice and five new Associate Justices. The effect of this change in personnel upon the doctrine of the Court soon became manifest. In the eleventh volume of Peters's Reports, the first issued while Roger B. Taney was Chief Justice, are three decisions of constitutional cases sustaining state laws which on earlier argument Marshall had assessed as unconstitutional. The first of these decisions gave what was designated "the complete, unqualified, and exclusive" power of the State to regulate its "internal police" the right of way over the "commerce clause" ¹; the second practically nullified the constitutional prohibition against "bills of credit" in deference to the same high prerogative ²; the third curtailed the operation of the "obligation of contracts" clause as a protection of public grants. ³ Story, voicing "an earnest desire to vindicate his [Marshall's] memory from the imputation of rashness," filed passionate and unavailing dissents. With difficulty he was dissuaded from resigning from a tribunal whose days of influence he thought gone by. 4 During the same year Justice Henry Baldwin, another of Marshall's friends and associates, published his View of the Constitution, in which he rendered high praise to the departed Chief Justice's qualifications as expounder of the Constitution. "No commentator," he wrote, "ever followed the text more faithfully, or ever made a commentary more accordant with its strict intention and language.... He never brought into action the powers of his mighty mind to find some meaning in plain words ... above the comprehension of ordinary minds.... He knew the framers of the Constitution, who were his compatriots," he was himself the historian of its framing, wherefore, as its expositor, "he knew its objects, its intentions." Yet in the face of these admissions, Baldwin rejects Marshall's theory of the origin of the Constitution and the corollary doctrine of liberal construction. "The history and spirit of the times," he wrote, "admonish us that new