judgment for Chisholm. Jay was followed by his associates with the
exception of Iredell, J., of North Carolina. Forthwith a ferment began,
and in the very next session of Congress an amendment to the
Constitution was proposed to make such suits impossible. In January,
1798, five years after the case was argued, this amendment was declared
to be adopted, but meanwhile Jay had resigned to become governor of New
York. In December, 1800, he was again offered the chief justiceship by
John Adams, on the resignation of Oliver Ellsworth, but Jay resolutely
declined. I have often wondered whether Jay's mortification at having
his only important constitutional decision summarily condemned by the
people may not have given him a distaste for judicial life.

The Federalist attempt to enforce on the states a positive rule of
economic morality, therefore, collapsed at once, but it still remained
possible to approach the same problem from its negative side, through
the clause of the Constitution which forbade any state to impair the
validity of contracts, and Marshall took up this aspect of the task
where Jay left it. In Marshall's mind his work was simple. He had only
to determine the nature of a contract, and the rest followed
automatically. All contracts were to be held sacred. Their greater or
less importance was immaterial.

In 1810 Marshall expounded this general principle in Fletcher _v_.
Peck.[18] "When ... a law is in its nature a contract ... a repeal of
the law cannot devest" rights which have vested under it. A couple of
years later he applied his principle to the extreme case of an unlimited
remission of taxation.[19] The State of New Jersey had granted an
exemption from taxation to lands ceded to certain Indians. Marshall held
that this contract ran with the land, and inured to the benefit of
grantees from the Indians. If the state cared to resume its power of