ABSTRACT
John Marshall's is not American political thought in the usual sense. He was great in the law, and his best thought is legal thought. Marshall's doctrine of legal construction clarifies the point. His general rule was: Respect for the letter of the law must be combined with a devotion to its "spirit" or intent. The thought guiding Marshall's work had as its touchstone human liberty, understood in the sober manner of the Framers' classical liberalism. Government should attend to the basic needs and thus the natural rights of men: protecting the lives, the liberties, the property, of as many people as possible. Marshall watched the experiment's progress from the inauguration of George Washington to Andrew Jackson's war upon the "monster Bank". With the demise of political buffers protecting public powers from the popular will, legal checks became all the more important.
