It was in the summer of 1780 that Marshall was licensed to practice law.
During this visit to Virginia, as I have said, he met the beautiful little lady, fourteen years old, who became his wife at the age of sixteen, was to be the mother of his ten children,[7] and was to receive from him the most entire devotion until the day of her death in 1831. Some letters of her older sister, Mrs. Carrington, written to another sister, have lately been printed, which give us a glimpse of Captain Marshall in his twenty-fifth year. These ladies were the daughters of Jaquelin Ambler, formerly collector of customs at Yorktown, and then treasurer of the colony, and living in that town, next door to the family of Colonel Marshall. Their mother was that Rebecca Burwell, for whom, under the name of “Belinda,” Jefferson had languished, in his youthful correspondence of some twenty years before. The girls had often heard the captain’s letters to his family, and had the highest expectations when they learned that he was coming home from the war. They were to meet him first at a ball, and were contending for the prize beforehand. Mary, the youngest, carried it off. “At the first introduction,” writes her sister, who was but one year older, “he became devoted to her.” “For my own part,” she adds, “I felt not the smallest wish to contest the prize with her.... She, with a glance, divined his character, ... while I, expecting an Adonis, lost all desire of becoming agreeable in his eyes when I beheld his awkward, unpolished manner and total negligence of person.” “How trivial now seem all such objections!” she exclaims, writing in 1810, and going on to speak with the utmost admiration of his relations to herself and all her family, and above all, to his wife. “His exemplary tenderness to our unfortunate sister is without parallel. With a delicacy of frame and feeling that baffles all description, she became, early after her marriage, a prey to extreme nervous affection, which, more or less, has embittered her comfort through her whole life; but this has only seemed to increase his care and tenderness, and he is, as you know, as entirely devoted as at the moment of their first being married. Always and under every circumstance an enthusiast in love, I have very lately heard him declare that he looked with astonishment at the present race of lovers, so totally unlike what he had been himself. His never-failing cheerfulness and good humor are a perpetual source of delight to all connected with him, and, I have not a doubt, have been the means of prolonging the life of her he is so tenderly devoted to.”