The house that Marshall’s father built at Oakhill is still standing, an unpretending, small, frame building, having connected with it now, as a part of it, another house built by Marshall’s son Thomas. At one time the farm comprised an estate of six thousand acres.[1] Since 1865 it has passed out of the hands of the family. It is beautifully placed on high, rolling ground, looking over a great stretch of fertile country, and along the chain of the Blue Ridge, close by. To this region, where his children and kindred lived, about a hundred miles from Richmond, Marshall delighted to resort in the summer, all his life long. In the autumn of 1807, after the Burr trial, he writes to a friend, “The day after the commitment of Colonel Burr for a misdemeanor, I galloped to the mountains.” “I am on the wing,” he tells Judge Story in 1828, “for my friends in the upper country, where I shall find rest and dear friends, occupied more with their farms than with party politics.”
When Marshall was about eighteen years old he began to study Blackstone; but he quickly dropped it, for the troubles with Great Britain thickened, and, like his neighbors, he prepared for fighting.
He seems to have found a copy of Blackstone in his father’s house, as he had found there much other sterling English literature. It was then a new book, but already famous. Published in England in 1765-69, a thousand copies had been taken in this country;[2] and just now the first American edition was out (Philadelphia, 1771-72), in which the list of subscribers, headed by the name of “John Adams, barrister at law, Boston,” had also that of “Captain Thomas Marshall, Clerk of Dunmore County.” Dunmore County, now Shenandoah, was then a very new county, just over the Blue Ridge from Fauquier; and it is believed that there was but one Captain Thomas Marshall in those parts.
The earliest personal description of Marshall that we have belongs to this period. It is preserved in Horace Binney’s admirable address at Philadelphia, after Marshall’s death. He gives it from the pen of an eyewitness, a “venerable kinsman” of Marshall. News had come, in May, 1775, of the fighting at Concord and Lexington. The account shows us the youth, as lieutenant, drilling a company of soldiers in Fauquier County:--