Best known as the Chief Justice whose historic decisions established the power and durability of the Supreme Court as an independent and equal branch of government, and who gave the bare bones of the Constitution flesh and blood, John Marshall is less known for the human qualities that made him a warm-hearted and fun-loving man whose entire life was a romantic adventure.

With the accent of the man and the personal experiences that shaped his achievements, this inspiring biography shows how an unschooled backwoods boy with an uncommon genius for common sense learned form the time and place in which he lived a courage, directness and clear-mindedness that weighed more in his judgments than technical knowledge of law.

Born in the Virginia wilderness he hardly left until he was a young man, a virile son of the frontier, Marshall grew with the nation he loved and helped found. Here is the lively story of his adventures as a fighting minuteman, his courage as an officer in the ordeal of Valley Forge, his debates with Patrick Henry in the Virginia legislature as he fought to bring the Constitution into being.

A key figure in the secret agent intrigues of the fiction-like X, Y, Z Affair, in which Marshall matched wits in Revolutionary France with Napoleon's Talleyrand, he was also George Washington's voice in Congress, John Adams' Secretary of State, and the presiding judge at the treason trial of Aaron Burr. James Monroe was his boyhood pal, George Washington his father's surveying companion and his own friend, Thomas Jefferson his cousin and political enemy.

But this is also the biography of John Marshall the poet, the non-conformist in manner and dress, the avid theater-goer, the ardent lover whose lifelong courtship of the girl he married was a Virginia legend of devotion. And, as much as it is the story of the great Chief Justice, it is also the story of the early years of this Republic, a time of anxiety, fear, and dissension; but a time, too, of hope, under leaders like John Marshall.

From the dust jacket