On his side, after the impeachment, Jefferson showed
moderation. He might, if he had been malevolent, without doubt, have
obtained an act of Congress increasing the membership of the Supreme
Court enough to have put Marshall in a minority. Then by appointing men
like Giles he could have compelled Marshall to resign. He did nothing of
the kind. He spared the Supreme Court, which he might have overthrown,
and contented himself with waiting until time should give him the
opportunity to correct the political tendencies of a body of men whom he
sincerely regarded as a menace to, what he considered, popular
institutions. Thus the ebullition caused by Marshall's acrimony toward
Jefferson, because of Jefferson's strictures on the appointments made
by his predecessor subsided, leaving no very serious immediate mischief
behind, save the precedent of the nullification of an act of Congress by
the Supreme Court. That precedent, however, was followed by Marshall's
Democratic successor. And nothing can better illustrate the inherent
vice of the American constitutional system than that it should have been
possible, in 1853, to devise and afterward present to a tribunal, whose
primary purpose was to administer the municipal law, a set of facts for
adjudication, on purpose to force it to pass upon the validity of such a
statute as the Missouri Compromise, which had been enacted by Congress
in 1820, as a sort of treaty of peace between the North and South, and
whose object was the limitation of the spread of slavery.
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