[Illustration: PAGE OF JAMES MARSHALL'S ACCOUNT WITH ROBERT MORRIS SHOWING PAYMENT OF £7700 TO FAIRFAX (_Facsimile_)]
Finally Marshall's brother negotiated the loan, an achievement which Morris found "very pleasing, as it enables you to take the first steps with Lord Fairfax for securing your bargain."[541] Nearly forty thousand dollars of this loan was thus applied. In his book of accounts with Morris, James M. Marshall enters: "Jany 25 '97 To £7700 paid the Rev^d. Denny Fairfax and credited in your [Morris's] account with me 7700" (English pounds sterling).[542] The total amount which the Marshalls had agreed to pay for the remnant of the Fairfax estate was "fourteen thousand pounds British money."[543] When Robert Morris became bankrupt, payment of the remainder of the Fairfax indebtedness fell on the shoulders of Marshall and his brother.
This financial burden caused Marshall to break his rule of declining office and to accept appointment as one of our envoys to France at the time of Robert Morris's failure and imprisonment for debt; for from that public employment of less than one year, Marshall, as we shall see, received in the sorely needed cash, over and above his expenses, three times the amount of his annual earnings at the bar.[544] "Mr. John Marshall has said here," relates Jefferson after Marshall's return, "that had he not been appointed minister [envoy] to France, he was desperate in his affairs and must have sold his estate [the Fairfax purchase] & that immediately. That that appointment was the greatest God-send that could ever have befallen a man."[545] Jefferson adds: "I have this from J. Brown and S. T. Mason [Senator Mason]."[546]
So it was that Marshall accepted a place on the mission to France[547] when it was offered to him by Adams, who "by a miracle," as Hamilton said, had been elected President.[548]
[456] _Southern Literary Messenger_, 1836, ii, 181-91; also see Howe, 266.
[457] _Southern Literary Messenger_, ii, 181-91; also Howe, 266. Apparently the older lawyer had been paid the one hundred dollars, for prepayment was customary in Virginia at the time. (See La Rochefoucauld, iii, 76.) This tale, fairly well authenticated, is so characteristic of Marshall that it is important. It visualizes the man as he really was. (See Jefferson's reference, in his letter to Madison, to Marshall's "lax, lounging manners," _supra_, 139.)