Among the various influences which, during the plastic years of
boyhood and youth, went to shape the outlook of the future Chief
Justice high rank must be accorded his pioneer life. It is not
merely that the spirit of the frontier, with its independence of
precedent and its audacity of initiative, breathes through his
great constitutional decisions, but also that in being of the
frontier Marshall escaped being something else. Had he been born
in lowland Virginia, he would have imbibed the intense localism
and individualism of the great plantation, and with his turn of
mind might well have filled the role of Calhoun instead of that
very different role he actually did fill. There was, indeed, one
great planter with whom young Marshall was thrown into occasional
contact, and that was his father's patron and patron saint,
Washington. The appeal made to the lad's imagination by the great
Virginian, was deep and abiding. And it goes without saying that
the horizons suggested by the fame of Fort Venango and Fort
Duquesne were not those of seaboard Virginia but of America.

Many are the great men who have owed their debt to a mother's
loving helpfulness and alert understanding. Marshall, on the
other hand, was his father's child. "My father," he was wont to
declare in after years, "was a far abler man than any of his
sons. To him I owe the solid foundations of all my success in
life." What were these solid foundations? One was a superb
physical constitution; another was a taste for intellectual
delights; and to the upbuilding of both these in his son, Thomas
Marshall devoted himself with enthusiasm and masculine good
sense, aided on the one hand by a very select library consisting
of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, and on the other by the
ever fresh invitation of the mountainside to healthgiving sports.