The Marshall Story

A Biography of General George C. Marshall

Robert Payne

• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787203990
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1951, this is the story of the life and mind of George C. Marshall, soldier and statesman, as told by a distinguished writer whose own background makes him particularly qualified to discuss some of the more controversial aspects of General Marshall's work since World War II.Robert Payne carefully places George Marshall against the Virginia background from which he came and takes him from there through his education at V.M.I., his experiences as a young officer, the first indications of his genius in World War I, his work between the wars, his colossal achievement as one of the architects of victory in World War II, his ill-fated mission in China, his contribution to the Marshall Plan and his present work in the military effort.Showing in quite an extraordinary way how Marshall represents the strengths and weaknesses of the American tradition, this book's study of the life of a great contemporary American illuminates the American scene with an insight rarely equalled in a biographical work.This book will shatter some illusions about George C. Marshall, but it will also place him in the perspective of his time and demonstrate that he may be even greater than many of us have thought him to be.

 

CHAPTER ONE—THE ANCESTORS

The Pilgrim Fathers came late to America. Fourteen years before they sailed from the barbican at Plymouth, three ships, the Susan Constant, the Pinnace and the God Speed sailed from London, and the adventurers who sailed in them established a colony on a strip of coast which came to be known as the Tidewater of Virginia. They were the forerunners of the American adventure. The new colony was English to the core, conserved the English traditions, became a repository of the English character and the English habits of mind, until the subtle processes of transplantation made the Virginians more English than the English, their faults and their virtues increasing as under a magnifying glass. Among these blue misty hills, among the shaded rivers and the groves of wild strawberries and forests of cedar and scented boxwood, there grew up a race of tall, vigorous and determined men, many of them royalist refugees from a puritan England; and long after the establishment of the Republic there were men like John Randolph who spoke of “going home to England.”

The planters and the great landowners made Virginia, and left their stamp on her. A Georgian graciousness settled on the old Tidewater houses with their porticos and shaded carriage roads. Gradually the Tidewater lost its significance. Jamestown and Williamsburg fell into decay; and eventually the obscure city of Richmond became the capital of a state lopped of its former magnificence—until, in time, it became the capital of the Confederacy. Some with ancestral memories may have remembered that the War between the States had its origins in England, for once more the baffled Cavaliers were at war with the Roundheads; and in the disastrous illusion of war the Confederacy saw the expiring gesture of chivalry.

It could hardly have been otherwise. Virginia, the old Dominion, became the battleground: the place where the armies grappled, the place where ideas fought one another to an embattled standstill. The imperial domain became, by the accidents of geography and settlement, the heart of the Republic, at the mercy of all the forces which arose during the two great revolutions which have occurred on American soil. It was no accident that Virginia became the battleground in the War between the States. Nor was it an accident that a Jefferson of Virginia drafted the Declaration of Independence, that a Washington of Virginia led the army and became the first President, that a Madison of Virginia fathered the Federal Constitution, that a Marshall of Virginia became the greatest American jurist, and that a Henry of Virginia uttered the most resounding phrase of the Revolution. These men were larger than life. They had to be. They were hard, choleric men, disputatious by instinct, aristocratic and austere by tradition, free men by choice, with a streak of wildness and chivalry and romance running through them: they possessed the gift of leadership, and never made their peace with slavery. When Jefferson said that “the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions,” he was offering a rebuke. He implied that passions, boisterous passions, were unworthy of Virginians, who should be passionless and austere: he chose an austere and indefinable happiness, rather than pleasure, as man’s birthright.

The Marshalls were Virginians. They belonged to the class known in Virginia as “good people,” a label which distinguished them from the aristocratic estate of “good families.” Their origins were humble. If later there were some who claimed descent from William le Maréchal who fought at the Battle of Hastings and was rewarded with an estate on the borders of Wales, there were others like Captain John Marshall of the Forest, the grandson of the first settler, who remembered only that his grandfather came from Wales. There are family legends which say that the first settler fought for the King at Edgehill as a captain of cavalry, but no one knows for certain whether he did. It is more likely that he came as an indentured servant, serving his master for five years and at the end of this period receiving his freedom and a free gift of fifty acres of land according to the ordinances of the government of colonial Virginia. Beyond the statement that the first Captain John Marshall came from Wales there are no clues. Long before 1650, when he is supposed to have arrived in Virginia, there was a Robert Marshall who owned property at Goose Hill in Jamestown, and there were other Marshalls in the interior.

We know almost nothing about the original Captain John Marshall or of his son Thomas, a carpenter in King and Queen County. With John Marshall of the Forest the family emerges from obscurity. Born in 1700, he became a large planter, married the daughter of the sheriff of Westmoreland County, and sired nine children. In 1728, six years after his marriage to Elizabeth Markham, he acquired from John Washington and Thomas Pope some two hundred acres of uninviting land, which grew eventually to twelve hundred acres. He planted well, cut down the underbrush, bought slaves, and became a captain of militia—Campbell in his history of Virginia gives him credit for the successful termination of the Indian wars. He was a man of substance, and owed much to his wife’s connections—Elizabeth Markham’s grandfather, who formerly kept tavern at Nomini, acquired from another John Washington the lease of a plantation—but he owed more to his own strong arm. He was on speaking terms with the Washingtons, whose children played with his children, a stern man, given to rebuke, the first of the patriarchs who from time to time came to rule over the Marshall clans. When he died he left his wife the main portion of his estate together with “one Gray mair named beauty and side saddle also six hogs,” while to his third son William he left “one negro woman named sail and one negro boy named Hanable to remain in the possession of his mother until he comes to the age of twenty years.” From this third son George Catlett Marshall Jr. is descended.

William began life as a rakehell. He was handsome, well-built, a good swordsman and a good card-player, who fought duels and rode to hounds, until, wearying of the artificial life on a colonial plantation, he took to the excitement of revealed religion. He became a Baptist preacher of such vehemence that people doubted his sanity. He delighted in the ceremonies of baptism, and once baptized fifty-three people in a single day in Shenandoah. Once he fell from his horse and broke a leg. The accident did not put an end to his preaching. He demanded to be taken to the pulpit. Propped up, he delivered to an open-mouthed audience a raging sermon full of brimstone and hell-fire, his eyes flashing and his arms wheeling. In time he was thought to be deranged, and was locked up. He was released from prison on the intervention of his brother Thomas Marshall. Thomas knew the Washingtons well and fought with George Washington in Braddock’s ill-fated expedition; he became high sheriff of the county, a member of the House of Burgesses and of the council which asserted Virginia’s independence, and had a horse shot under him at Brandywine. Afterwards, when the wars were over, he set out for Kentucky as surveyor-general of the lands beyond the mountains. He was the father of Chief Justice Marshall through his marriage with Mary Randolph Keith: the marriage brought him into family relationship with the first families of Virginia, for Mary Keith descended from the Randolphs of Turkey Island. He was the accomplished soldier-politician, rich, generous and brave, and he had little in common with his brother William, the spendthrift preacher who cared nothing for worldly accomplishments.

But if Thomas was a leader of men, so was William in his own way. In 1781, at the age of forty-six, fourteen years after his marriage to Mary Anne Pickett, he was a pastor in the Upper Spotsylvania Baptist Church, sharing his duties with another pastor called Lewis Craig. On September 12, he delivered a sermon before his congregation calling upon them to abandon their evil ways and march out like the Israelites of old to the new land of Canaan. He believed that Canaan was situated in the Blue Grass region of Kentucky, and spoke so vehemently and so convincingly that the whole congregation to the number of two hundred, together with three hundred more people from the surrounding districts, set out the next day for Kentucky, moved by a sudden spiritual fervor. At Fort Chiswell they abandoned their wagons and continued the journey on foot. There were rumors of Indians in the neighborhood. Frightened, they clustered together for protection; and there were more rumors of Indian outrages when they reached Wolf Hills, where they received news of Cornwallis’s surrender. So they journeyed on, singing hymns, baptizing as they went, full of visions of a land flowing with milk and honey. They formed the largest body that had ever set out from Kentucky at one time. They reached Lexington on the third Sunday of December, having journeyed for more than two months mostly on foot; and on the day they arrived, Lewis Craig and William Marshall delivered more fiery sermons which lasted well into the night.

Of the direct ancestors of George Catlett Marshall two at least were leaders of men: one fought the Indians, and the other led his flock over the mountains to a promised land. The first died in the odor of respectability, leaving a small fortune. William Marshall came to own property in Kentucky, but was so desultory a landlord and possessed so little interest in his holdings that his children lost nearly the whole of their inheritance, partly because their father had forgotten to legalize his holdings.

There appears to be a law of descent by which children make up for the deficiencies of their fathers. William’s son Martin became a lawyer who spent his life among land titles, and did uncommonly well from his office in Augusta. Reticent and dignified, with no pronounced interest in religion, a man with a distinguished bearing, he married Matilda Battaile Taliaferro, a marriage which linked him with the fabulous fortunes of the descendants of “King” Carter of Corotoman. One of his sons, Thomas Alexander, became a judge. Another, William Champe, became a lawyer. Thomas Alexander’s son Martin was the first Marshall to enter the Virginia Military Institute. As a cadet private he fought at the battle of New Market, helping to throw General Sigel’s forces back across the Shenandoah River. In the battle ten cadets were killed or mortally wounded, and fifteen severely wounded. Part of Martin’s knee was shot away. A handsome and eager youth, his name was recorded in the battle honors. He had wanted to be a soldier; instead, he was compelled to follow his father’s trade. He became a lawyer, but to the end of his life he complained against the fortune which made him a lawyer when he would have preferred a regiment. He died at the comparatively early age of forty-nine. It was said that his early death was due to his wound.

Martin belonged to the legendary Marshalls, the men with dash and brio, like the Colonel Thomas Marshall who fought at Valley Forge, and like Louis, the brother of the Chief Justice, who wandered off to France, where he witnessed the massacre of the Swiss Guards and the fall of the Bastille and took part in duels with students in the Latin Quarter. There is a story that he was arrested and condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal, and was rescued just in time. He became the first president of Washington University until he resigned in disgust over a matter of principle. Of this Louis Marshall, the rough-riding General Basil Duke said, in words which were appropriate to a whole series of Marshalls: “His opinions were frequently inaccurate, for they were much controlled by his prejudices, but were often profound, always striking and original.”

No one ever accused William Champe Marshall of either profundity or originality. He conformed to the rules, a pure Kentucky lawyer with a flair for politics. He became a member of the Kentucky legislature and mayor of Augusta. He married the daughter of an Augusta merchant and produced nine children. With him the fire of one line of Marshalls seemed to have died out. Colorless, precise, conventional, he dominated the life of the growing city, and he had nothing in common with his distant relative, Colonel Charles Marshall, the grandson of the Chief Justice, who was Lee’s alter ego. It was Colonel Charles Marshall who prepared Lee’s farewell address. Dressed impeccably in a new uniform, Colonel Charles Marshall was present at McClean’s farmhouse on the day when Grant walked in swordless and wearing a private’s coat to confront a defeated general who wore gold epaulettes and a tasseled sword. William Champe Marshall took no part in the war; nor apparently did his fifth son, George Catlett Marshall.

There was no sudden decline in the family spirit. It had come slowly over the centuries. More than anyone else William Marshall had been responsible for the fall. Now the Marshalls were becoming urbanized, losing their wilfulness and their claims to fame, immersed among legal briefs or their small businesses, at a world’s remove from the fiery Colonel who hacked his way through a forest with a company of Virginia troops in a despairing effort to rescue Braddock from an Indian ambuscade. It seemed as though the Marshall virtue perished the further the Marshalls left their native Virginia.

George Catlett Marshall became a coal and wood dealer in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, prosperous in a small way, a Mason and a Democrat. He was a man who dreamed of the past with some bitterness; he was vain and litigious, and at the same time he had a reputation for being good company, a vestryman who took his church duties seriously and brought up his children to be devout Episcopalians. He liked to spend hours surveying the family tree, and he liked to talk especially of the extraordinary Chief Justice who had been ambassador to France under Washington and Secretary of State under John Adams. He had a surgeon’s delicacy when it came to carving a Thanksgiving turkey, but his finesse failed in business, for he sold out his coke companies to the combines without making any singular profit. There were twenty-three serious strikes in the coal-bearing regions of the Alleghenies between 1880 and 1900. All these affected his industry. Once, one of his factory managers was killed by a striker. On another occasion he was shot at in the dark, the striker aiming at the red glow of his cigar. It was the time of the “Molly Maguires,” the secret organization of Irish roughs in the Pennsylvania anthracite country, who answered the mineowners’ brutality with more brutality. In an effort to break the strikes the coal operators imported laborers from Poland and Germany. Years later, when General Marshall spoke of the sons of these immigrants who came to Uniontown in his childhood, he remembered how their fathers had been strange, gaunt men, utterly unlike the Pennsylvanians; but their sons looked like Americans. Meanwhile the satanic mills were grinding. Uniontown was caught up in the flood of a harsh, intolerant industrialism.

The town, given over to coke factories, was ugly. But then, it had never been beautiful. As long ago as 1784 General Ephraim Douglas wrote: “This Uniontown is the most obscure spot on the face of the globe. The town and its appurtenances consist of a courthouse and schoolhouse in one, a mill, four taverns, three smith shops, five retail shops, two tanyards, one saddler’s shop, two hatters’ shops, one mason, one cake woman, two widows and some reputed maids.” There was also, the general added with a final snort of disgust, only a single distillery. With its wild setting at the foot of the Alleghenies, the town deserved better. It possessed however a few laurels. Lafayette had visited it; so had Washington; Albert Gallahn’s log cabin, the beginning of New Geneva, was nearby; Whitman visited the place on a memorable occasion; Jenny Lind spent a night there and breakfasted on speckled trout fresh from a mountain stream. Here, in a house perched eerily on a mountainside, among the smokestacks and clouds of sulphur-laden smoke, George Catlett Marshall Jr. was born on December 31, 1880.

There flowed in his veins the blood of the Taliaferros, the Catletts, the Pendletons, the Markhams, the Picketts and the Carters, and all of these are names which appear among the first settlers of Virginia. The name Catlett was derived from the Elizabeth Catlett who married the eldest son of Robert Taliaferro, who came to Virginia in 1650, and from her father, Colonel John Catlett, a Kentishman who settled in Essex County around 1650. He became a colonel of the militia, a magistrate and justice of the peace; he was commissioned to settle the border dispute between Maryland and Virginia, and he accompanied John Lederer on his famous expedition through the country west of the Blue Ridge. Catlett was therefore a name to be held in honor, serving to remind him that he was a Virginian in exile. The name Marshall might mean no more than that an ancestor had been a blacksmith, the word coming from the Old High German marahscalc, meaning horse-servant; but the name bore a reputable ancestry. There was no need to search for Marshalls in English history, among the Cavaliers and the Earls of Pembroke. Their noblest claim was that they were Virginians, rooted deep in Virginian soil, and their proud boast was that they had kept faith not so much with England as with the transplanted values of courtesy, chivalry and saintliness, which had been the characteristics of the Cavaliers.

“A Virginian,” said the Marquis de Chastelux, “never resembles a European peasant. He is by birth a freeman who partakes in the government.” He might have added that it was one of the traits of the Virginians that they remembered the past, were themselves a part of the past, lived according to ancient rituals, and were never happy unless they saw the shape of the past in the present. They believed in privilege. How could they avoid it, since the traditions of the Cavaliers were so insistent? And if they desired that all men should partake of privilege, this too arose from their sense of duty, their knowledge of a harm done long ago, of a king who was violated, a sin to be punished by the ritual dethronement of still another king. Ironically, the founders of the American Republic were largely the descendants of the enemies of the Roundheads. There is some significance in the year 1650, which saw the coming to America of so many of the Virginian patriarchs: on a cold January morning of the previous year Charles had been killed with a single slice of an ax wielded by an unknown executioner who wore a mask and concealed the lower part of his face with a horsehair beard. And while Cromwell ruled over the Republic of England, Virginia was still royalist to the core.

There are mysteries here, as elsewhere. A strange, dispassionate, nervous and handsome race came to birth in Virginia. You recognized them by their long faces, the delicacy of their bones, the subtle quarrels in their blood, the panoply and the glory which surrounded them, though they pretended not to be aware of it themselves. They called themselves gentlemen, but they were given to sudden violence, and they had a lust for self-sacrifice. “The first hostile forces sent out were Virginians, and the first blood was shed by Virginians,” wrote Governor Dinwiddie of a war against France; and so it was throughout the long history of Virginia. They held their honor high, and never forgot their hurts.

As the story of General Marshall unfolds, we see behind him another Marshall larger than life, compounded of the “good families” and the “good people” of Virginia. Hard-riding landowners among Corinthian pillars, women in starched crinolines, young bloods in scarlet coats and linen ruffles, in knee-breeches of watered silk and with immense blue bows on their painted slippers: somewhere behind them is the smoke of war and the bloody scalps dangling from the hickory branches. To forget his ancestors is to forget the man; for more than any other modern American he belongs to another age, so that sometimes the General seems to disappear altogether: he becomes John of the Forest, mad William, the patriarchal Thomas and the plodding Kentucky lawyer by turns. He is all these, and more. The fire of the Taliaferros burns in him; he inherited the physical beauty of the Pendletons, the courage of the Catletts and the fierce waywardness of the Markhams, who attracted legends to themselves, inventing piratical ancestors for the pure pleasure of invention; but none of these were so important as his Virginian birthright, the knowledge that he was an appointed guardian of the new land of promise which Drayton called “Earth’s only Paradise.”

CHAPTER TWO—THE SHADOW ON THE WALL

It was the time of the marble fireplaces, the ormolu clocks, the velvet plush, and the bowls of fruit made of colored glass, of antimacassars and soft carpets and men with waxen moustaches and women in whalebone corsets, of heavy mahogany tables and great displays of silver plate in the evening gaslight, before electricity came in to give a cold pinpoint glow to the industrial revolution, a world of great joints of meat at twelve cents a pound and heavy Sunday meals and all the ornate comforts designed to deaden the roar of furnaces and coke-ovens and the incongruous voices of the multitudes of foreign-born workers. The year was 1882, with America in the full tide of industrial expansi...