Page:The Supreme Court in United States History vol 1.djvu/203

Rh his determination to retire from public life on account of his advanced age and infirmities. Under such circumstances, nobody but Mr. A. would have made the nomination without consulting Mr. Jay.... As Mr. Jay will certainly refuse the Chief Justiceship, I presume Judge Paterson will be appointed; and his vacancy, I am disposed to think, will be filled either from New York or Pennsylvania. If from the former, perhaps by Judge Lawrence." One of Hamilton's adherents wrote to him: "Either Judge Paterson or General Pinckney ought to have been appointed ; but both those worthies were your friends." Failing to obtain Jay's acceptance and unwilling to consider the appointment of any man in the Hamiltonian faction of the Federalist party. President Adams surprised his associates and the country in general by sending to the Senate on January 20, 1801, as his second choice for Chief Justice, the name of his Secretary of State, John Marshall of Virginia. To Elias Boudinot of the New Jersey Bar, who had written that the Bar would like to see Adams himself in the position, Adams wrote that he was too old, too long away from active practice, and that he had nominated "a gentleman in the full vigor of middle age, in the full habits of business and whose reading of the science is fresh in his head." Marshall was forty-five years old, and, while having held no judicial office, had practiced at the Bar for twelve years with such success that, as early as 1796, Charles Lee had written to Washington that he was "at the head of his profession in Virginia." Most of the Federalist leaders, however, resented the nomination, believing that Judge Paterson should have been promoted to the Chief Justiceship, for which he was so eminently fitted. "I think it a pity," wrote James Hillhouse of Connecticut, "that the feelings