It was in the autumn of 1775 that Marshall, as lieutenant in a regiment of minutemen, of which his father was major, marched down through the country to the seaboard to resist Lord Dunmore’s aggressions. They were clothed, we are told, in green home-spun hunting-shirts, having the words “Liberty or Death” in large letters on the breast, with bucks’ tails in their hats, and tomahawks and scalping-knives in their belts. The enemy at Norfolk feared, it is said, for their scalps, but they lost none.[5]
He was thus in the first fighting in Virginia, in the fall of 1775, at Norfolk; afterwards he served in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York; and again in Virginia toward the end of the war. He was at Valley Forge, in the fighting at the Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Stony Point, and Paulus Hook, between 1776 and 1779. He served often as judge advocate, and in this way was brought into personal relations with Washington and Hamilton. A fellow officer and messmate describes him, during the dreadful winter at Valley Forge, as neither discouraged nor disturbed by anything, content with whatever turned up, and cheering everybody by his exuberance of spirits and “his inexhaustible fund of anecdote.” He was “idolized by the soldiers and his brother officers.”
President Quincy gives us a glimpse of him at this period, as he heard him described at a dinner with John Randolph and a large company of Virginians and other Southern gentlemen. They were talking of Marshall’s early life and his athletic powers. “It was said in them that he surpassed any man in the army; that when the soldiers were idle at their quarters, it was usual for the officers to engage in matches of quoits, or in jumping and racing; that he would throw a quoit farther, and beat at a race any other; that he was the only man who, with a running jump, could clear a stick laid on the heads of two men as tall as himself. On one occasion he ran in his stocking feet with a comrade. His mother, in knitting his stockings, had the legs of blue yarn and the heels of white. This circumstance, combined with his uniform success in the race, led the soldiers, who were always present at these races, to give him the sobriquet of ‘Silver-Heels,’ the name by which he was generally known among them.”