ocracy was the coming thing) (Newmyer, 1968, 10-21).
Marshall's life represents one of the great American images, the child born in a log cabin (in this case on the Virginia frontier) who would rise to great prominence. Thomas Marshall, the father, would have a great influence on his son, as John Marshall would later acknowledge when he wrote, "To him I owe the solid foundations of all my own success in life" (Brown, 1968, 11). There is evidence that the family rose to a level of comfortable wealth in the colonies, and one proof was that John Marshall was elected to public office by his neighbors and served as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. The family later moved further west and Thomas served as county clerk (Brown, 1968, 11).
However, John Marshall spent most of his formative years in a simple and crude environment, and he grew strong from his outdoor life. Frontier life offered many advantages, but it did not provide for a formal education so that home influence and parental education became all the more important. John's parents taught him to read and write, and he had no formal schooling until he was in his teens. When John was fourteen, a young Scot named James Thompson came to stay with the family and offered as much formal instruction as he could. He was the clergyman for the local Anglican parish. Later, John went to a school in Westmoreland County (Brown, 1968, 12-13).
Marshall would later describe the Virginia of his youth as an antifederalist stronghold, though he himself had a different view, as he notes in his autobiography:
When I recollect the wild and enthusiastic democracy with which my political opinions of that day were tinctured, I am disposed to ascribe my devotion to the union, and to a government competent to its preservation, at least as much to casual circumstances as to judgment. I had grown up at a time when a love of union and resistance to the claims of Great Brit...