Source is Chapter Eighteen of Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times by Joel Richard.

I went in expecting this to be dry, but it’s one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. It’s oozing with the faux-cordial schoolgirl drama of the early Republic, including anecdotes like one where Marshall’s second cousin and bitter rival Thomas Jefferson missed him for a meeting at his hotel and wrote on a calling card that he was “lucky to find him out” – but then realized his mistake and clumsily corrected it to “UN-lucky”. Marshall later remarked that it was only time Jefferson had ever come close to telling the truth.

The book describes Marshall’s The Life of George Washington – which he wrote dually as a favor to Bushrod Washington and to pay down his own land debt – as a “glutinous” five-volume, 1000-page advance subscription series whose first volume was delivered two years too late, which starts at Pre-Columbian history but gives scraps for Washingon’s early life (“Washington sprang full-grown in volume two and immediately plunged into the Revolutionary War”), and which gives “flat descriptions” of the war which he participated in alongside Washington.

I love this book.