The Washington Post reports:
Most students of judicial review agree that American constitutional history in 1789-1801 was marking time, as though the audience at a play was awaiting the appearance of the star. John Marshall, chief justice of the United States until his death in 1835, was that star. His jurisprudence shaped national policy and national sentiment, and his philosophy affected every facet of American life and continues to do so today. He was fundamental in forging the new nation and in determining the status blacks would have in it.There's more:
Marshall was a slave holder. He inherited slave property, and he also bought slaves. When the American Colonization Society was organized in 1816 to rid the nation of its "wretched" Free Negro population -- Justice Bushrod Washington of the Supreme Court was its president -- an auxiliary society was soon organized in Richmond and Chief Justice John Marshall was its president to his death.There much more:
With the stinging defeat of the Federalist Party in 1800, Chief Justice John Marshall became, through the Supreme Court, the bastion and last redoubt of Federalist power in the central government. In case after case, he rendered decisions in favor of the primacy of property rights in slaves, and the primacy of the central government over that of the states.Will the Cancel Culture come for Chief Justice Marshall? Will judicial review have to go? Will Marbury v. Madison and Mcculloch v. Maryland have to go?
And so the roll call of slavery cases began: Scott v. Negro London, 1806; Scott v. Negro Ben, 1810; Wood v. Davis, 1812; Mima Queen v. Hepburn, 1813; Negress Sally v. Ball, 1816.
In not one of the cases in which blacks petitioned for their freedom did Chief Justice Marshall free them. He remanded them back to the oblivion of slavery. Incontrovertibly, the legitimation of slavery takes place here under Marshall: by his protection of the doctrine of vested rights and the sanctity and sacredness of property and by his protection of the primacy and supremacy of the central government over state government.
It appears clear that Chief Justice Marshall abhorred slavery. But slaves were property and property was sacred. Federalist doctrine held, furthermore, that the role of the judiciary was to serve notice on the legislative branch that it would tolerate no attacks on property.
It is also clear that Chief Justice Marshall abhorred the slave trade. Yet in the Antelope case of 1825, which dealt with the disposition of slaves on a ship that came into American waters, even as Marshall condemned the slave trade as immoral and against the law of nature he insisted that such concerns were for "moralists": "a jurist must search for its legal solution." He found that the international slave trade was legal, and he devised a mathematical formula by which the claimants received the "property" on board.