not look the part. He was tall, loose-limbed, and raw-boned, badly dressed, none too clean, a
great gossip and gregarian. Wit he had too, and charm-in some ways he was a prototype for
Lincoln.
Adams, in his desperate struggles to keep America out of the war, and especially to avoid
sliding into a war with France by sheer accident and bad luck-the French remained provocative
and difficult-sent John Marshall, together with Pinckney and Elbridge Gerry, to Paris on an
embassy. They got short shrift from Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, the atheist ex-bishop and
aristocrat who was now the hired gun of the Revolutionaries in foreign affairs. He objected
strongly to Jay's treaty as pro-British and forced the commissioners to deal with plebeian
underlings, whom they referred to contemptuously as X, Y, and Z. The French understrappers
demanded a loan' of $12 million francs as a condition of opening serious talks, accompanied by a further, personalgift' of $250,000 to Talleyrand himself. Pinckney is said to have replied: `No,
not a sixpence-millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.' (The last bit was esprit d'escalier
and actually coined by Robert Harper, a brilliant dinner-orator and neologist who also named
Liberia and its capital Monrovia.) As a result, undeclared war broke out and Adams' new navy-
he had thirty-three warships by the end of the century-came in handy in engagements with
French commerce-raiders in the West Indies and Mediterranean. Adams had been unhappy about
his Secretary of State's handling of the XYZ Affair-he thought Pickering was being manipulated
by Hamilton-and in 18oo he sacked him and replaced him by Marshall. Finally, on the eve of his
own departure, he decided the best way he could perpetuate his spirit was by making Marshall
chief justice. This worked very well, Marshall holding the office for thirty-four years, surviving
four of Adams' successors and living to cross swords with the redoubtable Andrew Jackson, a
man for whom Adams had a peculiar hatred.
We must now look forward a little to assess the full significance of this remarkable man and his
impact on American history. If one man can be said to have wedded the United States
indissolubly to capitalism, and particularly to industrial capitalism, it was Marshall. Except for
Hamilton, all the Founding Fathers, Adams included, were suspicious of capitalism, or
suspicious of banks anyway; some hated banks. And the Southerners hated industry. Even
Washington disliked Hamilton's report on manufactures. But Marshall approved of capitalism, he
approved of banks, he approved of industry-the lot. He thought they were essential to the future
wellbeing of the United States people and that therefore their existence must be guaranteed under
the Constitution. It was, as he saw it, his job as chief justice to insure this. Marshall, like the
Founding Fathers, put his trust in property as the ultimate guarantor of liberty. But, unlike the
Fathers, he did not distinguish morally and constitutionally between types of property.
The Founders, particularly the Virginians, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, et al.,
equated property, as a moral force, with land. Their views were articulated by John Taylor
(1753-1824), like them a Virginia landowner who served in the Senate and published in 1814 a
monumental work of 700 pages, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the United States.
Taylor distinguished between natural' property, such as land, andartificial property' created by
legal privilege, of which banking wealth was the outstanding example. He saw the right to issue
paper money as indirect taxation on the people: `Taxation, direct or indirect, produced by a paper
system in any form, will rob a nation of property without giving it liberty; and by creating and
enriching a separate interest, will rob it of liberty without giving it property.' Paper-money
banking benefited an artificially created and parasitical financial aristocracy at the expense of the
hard-working farmer, and this 'property-transferring policy invariably impoverishes all laboring