of the Court, delivered by Mr. Justice Story, that the jurisdiction of the courts of admi ralty of the united States was limited by the ebb and flow of the tide. But an article pub lished in the New York Review" for Octo ber, 1838, by one who was evidently inti mate with Chief Justice Marshall, tells us: He said, (and he spoke of it as one of the most deliberate opinions of his life) at a comparatively late period, that he had al ways been of opinion that we in America had misapplied the principle upon which the admiralty jurisdiction depended •— that in England the common expression was, that the admiralty jurisdiction extended only on tide waters, and as far as the tide ebbed and flowed; and this was a natural and rea sonable exposition of the jurisdiction in England, where the rivers were very short and none of them navigable from the sea beyond the ebb and flow of the tide — that such a narrow interpretation was wholly in applicable to the great rivers of America; that the true principle, upon which the ad miralty jurisdiction in America depended, was to ascertain how far the river was navi gable from the sea; and that consequently, in America, the admiralty jurisdiction extended upon our great rivers not only as far as the tide ebbed and flowed in them, but as far as they were navigable from the sea; as, for ex ample, on the Mississippi and its branches, up to the falls of the Ohio. He also thought that our great lakes at the west were not to be considered as mere inland lakes, but were to be deemed inland navigable seas, and as such were subject, or ought to be subject, to the same jurisdiction." He thus fore shadowed the decision made in 1851 in the case of The Genesee Chief, by which the de cision in The Thomas Jefferson was explic itly overruled.1
is to his labors in exposition of the Constitu tion that the mind irresistibly reverts in recognition of the debt immense of endless gratitude" owed to him by his country. . . . As the Constitution was a written instru ment, complete in itself, and containing an enumeration of the powers granted by the people to their government — a government supreme to the full extent of those powers — i it was inevitable that the issues in that con test (as indeed in so many others) should in volve constitutional interpretation, and that finally the judicial department should be called on to exercise its jurisdiction in the enforcement of the requirements of the fun damental law. The President who took the oath of office administered by the Chief Justice, March 4, 1801, in his inaugural included among the essential principles of our government "the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administra tions for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tend encies;" and "the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad;" but it was reserved for the Chief Justice, as the organ of the court, to define the powers and rights of each, in the exercise of a jurisdiction, which he regarded as "indispensable to the preservation of the Union, and consequently of the independence and liberty of these States." The people, in establishing their future government, had assigned to the different departments their respective powers, and prescribed certain limits not to be transcend ed, and that those limits might not be mis taken or disregarded, the fundamental law was written. And. as the Chief Justice ob served, " to what purpose are powers lim ited, and to what purpose is that limitation MARSHALL AND THE CONSTITUTION. committed to writing, if these limits may, at While it is essential to the completeness of any time, be passed by those intended to be any picture of Marshall's career that every restrained?" part of his life should be taken into view, it The Constitution declared: "This Con stitution, and the laws of the United States 1 Mr. Justice Gray.
