Posted by
Maudie in Mandeville on Tuesday, April 07, 2009 5:15:52 PM
John Marshall, the friend and biographer of Washington, a distinguished member of Congress under the administrations of Washington and Adams, and for forty years Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, saw with prophetic sagacity the evils of slavery and its future results. In an interview Harriet Martineau had with this venerable Christian judge in 1835, he made the following statement, published in a British magazine of that year. Marshall and Madison were then the only surviving representatives of the old ideas of Virginia on the subject of slavery. Miss Martineau says–
"When I knew the chief-justice, he was eighty-three–as bright-eyed and warm-hearted as ever, while as dignified a judge as ever filled the highest seat in the highest court of any country. He said he had seen Virginia the leading State for half his life; he had seen her become the second, and sink to be (I think) the fifth. Worse than this, there was no arresting her decline, if her citizens did not put an end to slavery; and he saw no signs of any intention to do so, east of the mountains at least. He had seen whole groups of estates, populous in his time, lapse into waste. He had seen agriculture exchanged for human stock-breeding; and he keenly felt the degradation. The forest was returning over the fine old estates, and the wild creatures which had not been seen for generations were reappearing; numbers and wealth were declining, and education and manners were degenerating."
Today, instead of plantations and agriculture, we have the very people Justice Marshall was concerned about, lapsing into waste and degradation, with numbers and wealth declining, and their education and manners degenerating; all specifically due to liberal government destroying the black family with welfare, the amoral black liberation theology that passes for Christianity in their churches, the continuing victimhood taught in Michelle Obama's Black Studies curriculae, black on black murders, illegitimate children, trips to Planned Parenthood, with nothing seemingly to arrest their decline.
Martineau ended by saying "It would not have surprised (Marshall) to be told that on that soil would the main battles be fought when the critical day should come (to end slavery) which he foresaw." Marshall would scratch his head to observe the fruits of this labor.