The Supreme Court

One need understand only a few of its cases to understand the Supreme Court's role in our nation's history. But one must assuredly understand the case of Marbury v. Madison. This case established the authority of the federal courts to declare a law passed by Congress unconstitutional and therefore void. The vitally important legal principle of the case can be condensed into a sentence or two, and the justification for the doctrine espoused by Chief Justice John Marshall in his opinion for the Court can be comprehended in a page or two. But like so many abstractions standing alone, these tend to go in one ear and out the other when people have no regular need to repair to such doctrine. I think that a fuller understanding of the doctrine itself may be gained by a knowledge not only of the facts of the case but also of the historical setting.

Those who have seen the city of Washington in the early part of the twenty-first century, firmly ensconced as a metropolis of four million at the southern end of the eastern "urban corridor" of the United States, may have difficulty envisioning the city as it existed in 1803, the year the Supreme Court decided the case of Marbury v. Madison. The Constitution adopted by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 had provided for the creation of a "district" not exceeding ten miles square to become "the seat of the Government of the United States," but it had left the location of that district to Congress. Congress decided that the site of the government should be moved from New York to Philadelphia in December 1790, and ten years later that it should be moved again to the District of Columbia, a ten-mile-square territory on both sides of the Potomac River. Maryland ceded the necessary territory on the north side of the river, including the city of Georgetown, and Virginia the necessary territory on the south side of the river, including the city of Alexandria.

It is easy today to think of Washington at the opening of the nineteenth century as a somewhat smaller version of the Philadelphia and New York of that time. But nothing could be further from the truth. There were, as just noted, two honest-to-goodness cities already in the District--Georgetown in the northwestern part with a population of about three thousand, and Alexandria in the southern part with a population of about five thousand. But the major part of the District of Columbia designated to be the federal city, and named after George Washington, was still largely a wilderness. The census of 1800 gave it a population of just over three thousand. Philadelphia at this time had existed for more than a century, and had a population of more than forty thousand; New York had existed for a century and a half, and had a population of nearly eighty thousand.

The various departments of government began moving to Washington from Philadelphia during the year 1800, and John Adams was the first president to occupy the newly built President's House, as it was then called. His wife, Abigail, arriving there for the first time in November 1800, observed:

I arrived about 1 o'clock at this place known by the name of the city, and the Name is all that you can call so. As I expected to find it a new country, with Houses scattered over a space of 10 miles, and trees and stumps and plenty with a castle of a house--so I found it--The President's House is in a beautiful situation in front of which is the Potomac with a view of Alexandria. The country around is romantic but wild, a wilderness at present. [Junior League of Washington, p. 81]

Albert Gallatin, designated by Thomas Jefferson to be secretary of the treasury as soon as Jefferson assumed the presidency in March 1801, said upon his arrival in the city to take up the duties of his office:

Our local situation is far from being pleasant or even convenient. Around the Capitol are 7 or 8 boarding houses, 1 tailor, 1 shoemaker, 1 printer, a washing woman, a grocery shop, a pamphlet and stationery shop, a small dry goods shop and an oyster house. This makes the whole of the federal city as connected with the Capitol. [Junior League, p. 87]
A contemporary traveler observed that "the entrances or avenues, as they are pompously called, which lead to the Am. seat of Gov't, are the worst roads I passed in the country. . . . Deep ruts, rocks, and stumps of trees every minute impede yr. progress and threaten yr. limbs with dislocation" (Junior League, p. 82).

Jenkins Hill, a prominent elevation roughly in the center of the District, had been chosen as the site for the Capitol building, but by the time of Jefferson's first inauguration, only the north, or Senate, wing had been completed. The south wing was a temporary brick structure known as the "oven" and occupied by the House of Representatives. A list of Washington buildings drawn up in November 1801 showed a total of 621 houses standing on private land.