Humphrey Marshall

Humphrey Marshall (1760 – July 3, 1841) was a politician from the U.S. states of Virginia and Kentucky. He served in the state legislatures of both states and represented Kentucky in the United States Senate from 1795 to 1801. He was a member of the Marshall political family which included his cousins Chief Justice of the United States John Marshall, federal judge James Markham Marshall, and noted educator Louis Marshall. All the prominent members of this family were Federalists. Marshall was also the father of Congressman Thomas Alexander Marshall and the grandfather of Congressman and Confederate General Humphrey Marshall.

During the Revolutionary War, Marshall served with the Virginia State Regiment of Artillery. After the war, he moved to the Kentucky District of Virginia where he became extremely wealthy as a farmer and surveyor. He was a delegate to two of the ten Kentucky statehood conventions and was one of only three delegates from the Kentucky District to vote in favor of ratifying the U.S. Constitution at the 1788 Virginia Ratifying Convention. After Kentucky gained statehood in 1792, Marshall was elected to the state legislature despite the fact that he was a Federalist and zealously antireligious – both of which made him unpopular with many Kentuckians. The Federalist cause received a slight boost when federal forces were successful in quashing the Whiskey Rebellion and ending the Indian threat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. As a result, the General Assembly elected Marshall to the U.S. Senate in 1794. As a senator, Marshall clung to Federalist principles, supporting the Alien and Sedition Acts and voting to ratify the Jay Treaty. For the latter action, his constituents stoned him and tried to throw him in the Kentucky River. In 1801, he was defeated for reelection by John Breckinridge. He would once again be elected to the state legislature in 1807, 1808, and 1823. During the 1809 legislative session, a disagreement between him and Henry Clay led to a duel between the two men in which both were slightly wounded.

As early as 1786, Marshall had been implicating several prominent Kentucky politicians in a scheme to take Kentucky out of the Union and into alliance with Spain. After the expiration of his Senate term, he resumed these charges through the pages of the Western World newspaper. His allegations resulted in a legislative investigation of Kentucky Court of Appeals judge Benjamin Sebastian, who was found to be receiving a pension from Spain and resigned from the bench. Federal judge Harry Innes was also a target of Marshall's allegations, and the two became embroiled in a legal battle that lasted almost a decade. Innes hired William Littell to write and publish a book giving Innes' version of his dealings with Spain. Marshall countered by publishing his History of Kentucky in 1812. Although blatantly partisan, it became the most widely read history of the state at the time. Marshall and Innes ended their legal battle with an agreement, signed in 1815, that neither would publish anything negative about the other again. Innes upheld his part of the agreement, but in 1824, years after Innes' death, Marshall published an updated edition of his History of Kentucky which was just as vitriolic as the previous version had been. Marshall faded from public life during his later years. He died at the home of his son in Lexington, Kentucky on July 3, 1841.

Early life Humphrey Marshall was born in Orlean, Virginia in 1760. He was the son of John and Mary (Quisenberry) Marshall and apparently named in honor of his maternal grandfather, Humphrey Quisenberry. Marshall's father was a man of meager means despite being a member of a prominent Virginia family. Little is known of Marshall's early years, but one tradition holds that he had no formal education during his childhood and that his cousin Mary (later, his wife) taught him to read. Eventually, John sent Humphrey to live with his brother, Thomas Marshall, and to be educated by the same Scottish tutors that educated Thomas' children. Among Thomas' children (Humphrey's cousins) were John Marshall, future Chief Justice of the United States; James Markham Marshall, future federal judge; and Louis Marshall, a noted educator. The unit was under the command of his uncle Thomas, who held the rank of colonel. He ended his military service in 1782, and was rewarded with of land on the western frontier.

In 1782, Marshall moved to present-day Kentucky and became deputy surveyor of Fayette County, again serving under his uncle Thomas. On September 18, 1784, he married his cousin, Anna Maria ("Mary") Marshall, Thomas' daughter.

Shortly after the creation of Woodford County, Marshall moved within its borders and was appointed county surveyor by Virginia Governor Beverley Randolph. In this capacity, he surveyed and claimed significant additional tracts of land, becoming one of Kentucky's most wealthy citizens. He wrote pamphlets denouncing religion of all kinds and published them at his own expense. His later descendants were so embarrassed of his anti-religious writings that they had his personal papers burned. The letter continued that the defeat convinced Marshall that he could not win elected office in Fayette County and that he subsequently lobbied for the creation of Bourbon County, hoping that he might gain an office in that new county. In that year, he discovered a flaw in the original 1774 survey of the town of Frankfort. He apparently was not accepted for membership in the Danville Political Club, although some sources report that he was accepted as a member after initially being rejected.

Around 1786, Marshall gained public attention by expressing his suspicions about James Wilkinson's negotiations with Spain for free use of the Mississippi River and the possibility of Kentucky's secession from the United States to affiliate with Spanish possessions. The first favored an immediate separation with or without Virginia's consent, while the other favored waiting for legal approval from Virginia and the U.S. Congress. The proposed constitution was very unpopular in all parts of Kentucky except Jefferson County, but Marshall openly favored its ratification. In the pages of the Kentucky Gazette, Marshall called on Harris to publish the letter. Neither shot injured Marshall, who retaliated by beating Harris with a stick severely enough to force his retreat from the encounter. Ten other Kentucky delegates opposed ratification and one abstained. The final convention vote was 89–79 in favor of ratification. The most notable piece of legislation he authored was an act that simplified the classification and taxation of land. Later that year, the Federalists in the General Assembly nominated Marshall for the United States Senate. On the first ballot, Marshall garnered 18 votes, compared with 16 for Democratic-Republican John Breckinridge, 8 for John Fowler, and 7 for incumbent John Edwards. No known copies of the pamphlet are extant, and related surviving documents do not relate the exact nature of the charges. The Senate appointed a committee to recommend action on the memorial, and the committee found that the charges against Marshall were not specific, that the authors had provided no evidence upon which to evaluate the charges, that no one was empowered to prosecute the charges in the Senate, and that further action by the Senate was inappropriate. On March 22, 1796, the Senate approved the committee's report by a vote of 16–8. Muter and Sebastian never filed formal charges against Marshall for perjury.

Although Marshall was not frequently active in debate on the Senate floor, he was a strong advocate of nearly every Federalist measure considered in that body. Many of these were unpopular in Kentucky, including the Alien and Sedition Acts. In 1806, however, he resumed his attacks on suspected participants in the Spanish Conspiracy. Federal judge Harry Innes, a frequent object of Marshall's suspicions, testified against Sebastian before the committee. Both cases dragged on for several years in the courts.

Buoyed by his involvement in the exposure of Benjamin Sebastian, Marshall declared his candidacy for a seat in the Kentucky House in 1807. Friends of Innes and others implicated by Marshall in the Spanish Conspiracy recruited Nathaniel Richardson, a lawyer turned farmer, to oppose Marshall. Marshall's biographer records that "the records of Humphrey Marshall's services in the Legislature at this time are scanty, the journals of the session being not in existence, as it is believed; or, at any rate, extremely rare." He is believed to have introduced a measure that reduced the limitation on ejectments from twenty years to seven. Expectations of a confrontation between Marshall and fellow representative Henry Clay were high during the session, owing to tensions between the two dating back to Clay's defense of Aaron Burr during the Burr conspiracy. George D. Prentice, in his biography of Clay, records that some of Clay's allies in the House refused to vote for him for Speaker of the House so that Clay would remain on the chamber floor, from whence he was better able to counter Marshall. Although Clay typically wore finer garments than Marshall, for the duration of the debate on his motion, Clay wore simple homemade clothes.

The duel took place in Indiana on January 19, 1809, just across the Ohio River from Shippingport, Kentucky. On the first shot, Marshall missed and Clay lightly grazed Marshall's stomach. From 1812 to 1813, he served on the board of trustees for the city of Frankfort. He made another unsuccessful run for the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1813, losing to John Arnold.

After a long absence from politics, Marshall was called to one final act of public service. Upon the death of Martin D. Hardin who had been elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1823 but died before he could take office, Marshall pursued an abbreviated campaign for the vacant seat and defeated Jeptha Dudley by a margin of 3 votes. Newspapers sympathetic to the Democratic-Republicans soon derided the American Republic as "The Snake".

Resolution of legal disputes Harry Innes' libel suit against Joseph Street was not fully adjudicated in the Jessamine County Circuit Court until 1811. The jury found in Innes' favor and awarded $750 in damages, although Innes' counsel, Henry Clay and Robert Wickliffe, insisted that Innes only desired the vindication of a guilty verdict against Street and would not collect the damages. Rather than retry the case, Marshall and Innes signed an agreement to end the legal battle in 1815. His wife had died the previous year, and soon after selling his newspaper, he became paralyzed by a palsy on one side. He died at his son's home on July 3, 1841. He was buried at Glen Willis, his estate in Leestown, Kentucky. In 1888, the General Assembly allocated $300 to rebury Marshall's remains in Frankfort Cemetery and place a marker above the grave, but his family members asked that his remains be undisturbed.