Toward the end of 1779, owing to the disbanding of Virginia troops at the end of their term of service, he was left without a command, and went to Virginia to await the action of the legislature as to raising new troops. It was a fortunate visit; for at Yorktown he met the young girl who, two or three years later, was to become his wife; and he was also able to improve his leisure by attending, for a few months in the early part of 1780, two courses of lectures at the college, on law and natural philosophy. This was all of college or university that he ever saw; but later, from several of them, he received their highest honors. In 1802 the college of New Jersey (Princeton, where his oldest son, Thomas, was to graduate in 1803), in 1806, Harvard, and in 1815, the University of Pennsylvania, made him doctor of laws.[6] Marshall’s opportunity for studying law, under George Wythe, at William and Mary College, seems to have been owing to a change in the curriculum, made, just at that time, at the instance of Jefferson, governor of the State, and, in that capacity, visitor of the college. The chair of divinity had just been abolished, and one of law and police, and another of medicine, were substituted. On December 29, 1779, the faculty voted that, “for the encouragement of science, a student, on paying annually 1000 pounds of tobacco, shall be entitled to attend any school of the following professors, viz.: of Law and Police; of Natural Philosophy and Mathematics,” etc. Marshall chose the two courses above named; he must have been one of the very first to avail himself of this new privilege. He remained only one term. In view of what was to happen by and by, it is interesting to observe that this opportunity for education in law came through the agency of Thomas Jefferson.
The records of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at William and Mary College, where that now famous society had originated less than a year and a half before, show that on the 18th of May, 1780, “Captain John Marshall, being recommended as a gentleman who would make a worthy member of the society, was balloted for and received;” and three days later he was appointed, with others, “to declaim the question whether any form of government is more favorable to public virtue than a Commonwealth.” Bushrod Washington and other well-known names are found among his associates in this chapter, which has been well called “an admirable nursery of patriots and statesmen.”