THE MOST TEDIOUS SECTION OF ANY BIOGRAPHY OF A FOUNDING Father-or Confounding Father, as per Luther Martin-is that three- or four-page stretch of genealogy that we impatiently browse to get to the good stuff. I am tempted to follow Elmore Leonard's sage advice to novelists to "leave out all the parts readers skip," especially given the paucity of extant information on "all that David Copperfield" stuff about Luther Martin.
But let me instead recommend the only biography of Martin ever published-Luther Martin of Maryland (1970) by Paul S. Clarkson and R. Samuel Jett. Coauthor Clarkson was a book collector, Sherlock Holmesian, highly decorated Baker Street Irregular, and founder of the Six Napoleons of Baltimore. Clarkson and Jett did an uncommonly fine job filling in the details of Martin's legal career. Theirs was a labor of Maryland piety and of love.
What little we know of Luther Martin's early life comes from the horse's disputatious mouth, for Martin left an autobiographical fragment in the form of a curious five-part pamphlet titled Modern Gratitude (1802).
Invective-filled, freeswinging, written at white heat and white hate and directed at the cad who seduced his fifteen-year-old daughter, Modern Gratitude is the source of most of our knowledge of Martin's life before his Philadelphia summer. Rather like a blog, it lacked an editorial filter, and so the foulest calumnies are hurled at Richard Raynal Keene, the Baltimore Lothario who insinuated himself into Martin's home and stole dear Eleonora. Daddy, as was his wont, came out swinging. But more on that anon.
"I am an American born, of the fourth or fifth generation," declared Martin, lest anyone suspect front his periodic uncouthness that he was fresh off the boat. His forbears had come to the new world from the west of England as early as 1623 and settled in the Piscataqua region of what is now New Hampshire. Clarkson and Jett fix as the fall of 1666 the migration of the leading families of Piscataqua to an area east of New Brunswick, New Jersey, near the Raritan River. The settlers named their new place Piscataqua, after that which they had left. It was "an uncultivated wilderness," Martin reminds us, "inhabited by its copper-coloured aborigines." Today it is Piscataway, best known as home of the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.
"My ancestors were, and most of their descendants have been, of that class or 'sect' of people known as agriculturalists or cultivators of tire earth," writes Martin, who cannot record even such boilerplate without setting aside a clause in which he sneers at the hated "sage philosopher" Thomas Jefferson's estimation that such are "God's chosen people." Why did he detest Jefferson, the Founding deity nighest unto the Anti-Federalist persuasion? Patience, dear reader. No shortcuts via the index, please.
Martin's birth year is variously dated at 1744 and 1748, though by his own account the latter date seems accurate. Clarkson and Jett, the most trustworthy of later sources, estimate his day of birth at February 20, 1748. He was the third of nine children borne by Hannah Martin of her husband Benjamin. All lived to maturity-a rare nonuple.
In August of his thirteenth year, young man Luther "was sent to Princeton college," then known as the College of New Jersey, seedbed of the Constitutional Convention. His college chums included a fellow New Jerseyan, William Paterson, who proposed the true federalist alternative in Philadelphia in 1787, and thus is the father of the constitutional republic of the America that never happened.
Of the thirty-one (Martin says thirty-five) members of his Princeton class of 1766, Martin ranked first in languages and, by his own account, "second to none in the sciences." (Martin was as liberal in the use of italics as he was of intoxicants. Herein I've saved the reader from enduring much, but not all, of Martin's eager emphasis.) He had been an organizer, along with future convention delegates Paterson and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, who would abuse Martin in a postconvention open letter so stinging that its venom lingers to this day, of the puckishly named Well Meaning Society, whose meaning, perhaps, was understood all too well by the divines of the college, who suppressed the society and its rival, the Plain Dealing Society. (The Well Meaning Society resurfaced in 1770 as the Cliosophic Society, which to this day kisses up to influential personages.)
James Madison, Aaron Burr, Philip Freneau, Benjamin Rush: Princetonians were represented-how well we venture not to say-at the Founding. Nine delegates at Philadelphia were Princeton graduates. Republicans, if not Anti-Federalists, were grown at the College of New Jersey.
Immodestly, perhaps, Martin urged those who doubted his character to seek out his old classmates, for they would testify to "the friendliness of my disposition, the correctness of my manners ... my assiduity in my studies ... [and] my literary attainments."
Martin was graduated from Princeton five months shy of his nineteenth birthday. His resolve "fixed upon the profession of law," he sought a position in Philadelphia, vainly. But in the course of application he learned that the master of the Free-School of Queen Anne's County on Maryland's Eastern Shore had recently dropped dead. He got the job. (A Reverend Keene, uncle of the rascal who would seduce Martin's daughter, was among the school's trustees.)
Viewing the teaching post as a temporary stop on the path to the bar, Martin plied the pedagogical arts at Queen Anne's until April 1770. We have no reason at this point to doubt his sobriety, but the improvidence that would beggar him till his dying day was already in evidence. Not that Martin felt any shame about his indebtedness. "I am not even yet," he wrote in 1802, "I was not then, nor have I ever been, an economist of anything but time." The cost of food, lodging, clothing, and a twenty-one-year-old's incidentals add up, so "No person will think it a matter of surprize [sic], much less of disgrace, that I did not rigidly restrain my expenditures to my income-or that a youth of my age, of a warm and generous heart, left so totally to his own guidance, should become indebted beyond his power of immediate payment." Would that every spendthrift lad with a maxed-out credit card were as eloquent!
His creditors were unmoved. Five writs were served upon him. (Though his cumulative debts, he tells us, were a "paltry sum, not exceeding two hundred dollars!") In March 1770, they were "struck off" at the county court. Martin left Queen Anne's County shortly thereafter. The venomous Keene would imply much later that Martin's path out of town was garlanded by drink and damsels, but this likely is a roorback, for Martin seems to have been well regarded by the superintending Board of Visitors. (In 1779, Martin would engage in a brief broadside war with a critic who suggested that the young teacher left town just ahead of an irate father. Martin sprayed his accuser with an impressive staccato of invective and added, primly, that be had overcome "the extreme reluctance, which I naturally have for news-paper controversies." He professed to "hate controversies as i hate ratbane." That didn't last long.)
Martin made his way down the Eastern Shore to Virginia, where he taught for a year at the unfortunately named Onancock Grammar School. By night he studied law, and in September 1771 he was examined at Williamsburg by the formidable duo of Virginia Attorney General John "the Tory" Randolph (not to be confused with the brilliant and eccentric Tertium Quid of the same name) and George Wythe, who in fewer than five years would sign the Declaration of Independence. Martin was granted license to practice in the county courts of Virginia. Thus began the career of "one of the ablest lawyers which our country has produced."
The call of his ancestral Jersey home must have been dim indeed, for Martin determined upon a Virginia residence. In April 1772 the new lawyer traveled to Williamsburg as part of a tour "to determine on the place" where he might cast down his bucket. Here he befriended another garrulous Anti-Federalist of the future, Patrick Henry. For six months he ranged and reconnoitered through the Old Dominion, visiting friends and frontiersmen. Upon returning to the Eastern Shore he was informed that a trio of able lawyers had passed on to their rewards. New shingles were begging to be hanged. Luther Martin commenced his practice in four Eastern Shore counties, two in Virginia and two in Maryland. He made a home-for the nonce-in Somerset County, Maryland, natal place of the Maryland revolutionary Samuel Chase. Soon he was earning, by his own account, one thousand pounds per year, though as an economist of nothing but time, his creditors were never scarce.
His sympathies were squarely with the incipient revolution. In 1774 he was-"in my absence and without being consulted," he hastens to add-selected by the people of Somerset to serve as a delegate to a November statewide meeting in Annapolis that had been called by Maryland's Continental Congress delegation for the purpose of protesting British policies. Martin attended, and of his fervent patriotism he was ever proud. He was no sunshine patriot, waving flags as Johnny came marching home in victory; as he recalled in Modern Gratitude, "there was a period of considerable duration, throughout which, not only myself, but many others, acting in the same manner, did not lay down one night on their beds, without the hazard of waking on board a British armed ship, or in the other world."
Martin fought the Revolution with writ, pen, handbill, and perhaps even blunderbuss. He distributed-"at great personal risk"-the first copies of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in Somerset County. (He certainly would have agreed with Paine's famous distinction that "Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.") He self-published and distributed his response (first appearing in the September 9, 1777, Maryland Gazette) to General William Howe's pledge that the king's army would not plunder the property or "molest the persons of any of his Majesty's WELL DISPOSED SUBJECTS."
No one ever accused Luther Martin of a well disposition; he fired back against the "cruel and deceitful enemy" and reprehended His Majesty's loyalists as "base coward[s]" who were the "enem[ies] to virtue and freedom."
He would soon be in position to do something about it, if not on the field of battle (though he did serve, with something less than Valley Forge-ish arduousness, with the Baltimore Light Dragoons), then in the court of law. With the sponsorship of Samuel Chase, with whom Martin's career would intersect so many times over the years, he was appointed by Governor Thomas Johnson as attorney general of Maryland on February 11, 1778. He went after bellicose loyalists with especial vigor, but his conduct in office was generally praised.
As if coalescing the regions of his adopted state, the young Eastern Shore lawyer, now resident in Baltimore, wed the daughter of a prominent western Maryland frontier family. On Christmas Day, 1783, he married Maria Cresap, in whose home he had tarried during his postgraduate tour of the outback.
The details of Martin's attorney generalship, ably traced by Clarkson and Jett, are of limited interest to us. His courtroom comportment, however, is directly relevant. Contemporaneous observers conceded his considerable talents while dwelling on the unorthodox means he employed to achieve his goal. "Mr. Martin seemed indifferent to everything else, provided he impressed upon the Court the idea he wished to convey," recalled Roger B. Taney. Martin lacked an internal editor; he spoke without organization, throwing out anything that might stick to its target. "Martin would plunge into a case when he had not even read the record," wrote Taney, "relying on the fulness of readiness of his own mind; and, if he found unexpected difficulties, would waste a day in a rambling, pointless, and wearisome speech against time, in order to gain a night to look into the case."
We will hear more about wearisome two-day speeches.
By the mid-1780s, he was well on his way to becoming the state drunkard. Tales of his bibulosity are common, and as is often the case with tosspots they can partake of both pathos and humor, usually in some uneasy combination. In one trial he undertook a definition of his frequent condition: "A man is drunk when after drinking liquor he says or does that which he would not otherwise have said or done." If true, it will not matter how much he drinks in the taverns of the City of Brotherly Love-he meant every word he said in Independence Hall.
Money, like alcohol, ran through Luther Martin. His "chief faults," according to the Dictionary of American Biography, "were his intemperance and his improvidence in financial affairs." He never met a dollar worthy of saving. Martin's finances were as unsteady as a drunkard's gait. Having not the advantages of hereditary wealth or a nearby discount liquor store, making due as a schoolteacher and then a tyro lawyer, he was ever bobbing on a sea of indebtedness. This "want of economy in his pecuniary affairs," in James B. Longacre's cushiony phrase, "was prominent through life."
Even a sympathetic historian called him "a profligate spendthrift of the worst type." Yet he was not greedy, nor was he a chiseler. He cheated no man. He spent freely, though he sometimes spent money he had not made. Not yet. But if the gentleman creditor would just be patient, the prospects for repayment were favorable. Eftsoons, my good man, eftsoons. The check is in the mail.
If Martin took more interest in public affairs than he did in the mere accumulation of material wealth, he did not submit to the biblical injunction and take what he had and give to the poor. Like other striving Maryland men, he bought properties confiscated during the Revolution: four lots at 2,360 pounds from the estate of an English merchant in April 1781; and with three other investors, including Samuel Chase, be bought three lots that had been seized from the Principio Company, absentee British landlords. Expropriating the expropriators, you might say. Of the 3,150 pounds he had invested in confiscated property, almost 600 pounds remained unpaid to the state treasury as of 1788.
Martin, Chase, William Paca, and other Anti-Federalist speculators in confiscated land were often found on the paper money side of financial debates in Maryland in the mid-1780s, a fact seized upon by critics to establish that they, like virtually every other public figure, may have voted on occasion in self-interest. The debtors primarily owed British creditors and the tax collector-unsympathetic and, by some revolutionary reckonings, illegitimate dunners. Petitioners from rural areas entreated the governor to "mitigate the rigors of tax collection." Maryland courts were clogged with debt suits; sheriffs and taxmen cut their confiscatory swath through the distressed farmlands of the state.
As the economy slumped in the mid-1780s, the yeomanry-as well as lawyers who had speculated none too shrewdly in real estate, such as Samuel Chase-demanded state issuance of cheap paper money by which these dubious debts might be retired. Even in Maryland, by reputation oligarchic rather than populist, popular resistance grew to writ and vendue. In best American fashion, the resistance blended the communal and the libertarian. Neighbors packed public auctions of property seized for nonpayment of taxes. Officers who aided in the confiscation of private property were threatened; tax collectors slept uneasily. The redemption songs of the Shaysites were borne on the night wind.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from FORGOTTEN FOUNDER, DRUNKEN PROPHET by Bill Kauffman Copyright © 2008 by Bill Kauffman. Excerpted by permission.
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