America’s ‘Great Chief Justice’ Was an Unrepentant Slaveholder

John Marshall is America’s most important jurist. Biographers are universally laudatory of the “Great Chief Justice.” A recent documentary about him (in which I am interviewed) is subtitled The Man Who Made the Supreme Court.

This icon of jurisprudence is central to America’s constitutional development. For nearly three and a half decades, longer than any other chief justice, he led the Court and shaped constitutional law. A bronze statue of him sits outside the Supreme Court Building, and a marble one stands inside. He has appeared on four postage stamps, a commemorative silver dollar, a $20 Treasury note, and a $500 Federal Reserve note. Two centuries after he wrote them, Marshall’s opinions are still read and cited. Five of the 10 opinions most cited by the Court itself are Marshall’s.

But the country must now reevaluate this venerated figure in American history. A few institutions have already begun to do so. Of the three law schools named after him, one—John Marshall Law School, at the University of Illinois at Chicago—announced last month that it would now be known as simply the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Law. Another, the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, at Cleveland State University, is considering a change as well. Franklin & Marshall College, in Pennsylvania, is also weighing a new name. Though some will surely deride these decisions as “cancel culture,” they are part of an earnest and deserved reckoning, the result of an effort to fully understand Marshall’s jurisprudence and his personal life, and to examine whether his profound impact on American law was not as honorable as we have previously believed.

The motivation comes, in part, from information I revealed in my 2018 book, . Earlier biographers argued that he did not seek