The annotations to this letter at Founders Online includes background information on these two legal disputes.

National Archives and Records Administration, accessed July 8, 2019.

“From George Washington to John Marshall, 17 March 1789,” Founders Online, National Historical Publications & Records Commission, U.S.

Jared Sparks (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847).įor more about the legal disputes discussed in this letter, see:

George Washington, The Writings of George Washington: Being his Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private, Selected and Published from the Original Manuscripts With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, ed.

Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of George Washington (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1974).

Contains a chapter on Washington's inauguration.

Carol Berkin, A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution (New York: Harcourt, 2002).

For more about George Washington's inauguration and the early years of his presidency, see: As the letter indicates, however, he was also busy trying to resolve legal disputes regarding a debt that he was owed and land that he held a claim to in the Ohio River Valley. Īt the time that he received this letter from Marshall, George Washington was likely preparing for his inauguration as the first President of the United States, which took place on April 30, 1789, one month after this letter was sent. Hogan, eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution Digital Edition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), accessed July 8, 2019. Constitution: A Bibliography (Washington, D.C.: Federal Judicial Center, 1986). Wheeler, The Writing and Ratification of the U.S. Constitution: Practical Virtue in Action (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012). Vile, The Writing and Ratification of the U.S.

Kaminski and Richard Leffler (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012). Jürgen Heideking, The Constitution Before the Judgment Seat: The Prehistory and Ratification of the American Constitution, 1787-1791, ed.Michael Burrage, Revolution and the Making of the Contemporary Legal Profession: England, France, and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).įor more about the ratification of the U.S.Hoeflich, ed., Sources of the History of the American Law of Lawyering (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2007).

For more about the practice of law in the early United States, see: In the year before this letter was sent, Marshall served as the Recorder of the Hustings Court in Richmond, and also served as a delegate to the Virginia convention to ratify the U.S. At the time that John Marshall wrote this letter to George Washington, Marshall was in private law practice in Richmond, and involved in public life in Virginia.

Chief justice marshall