Luther Martin

This article is about the American politician and founding father. For the German reformer see Martin Luther .

Luther Martin

Luther Martin (born February 9, 1748 in Metuchen , Province of New Jersey , † July 8, 1826 in New York ) was an American politician and one of the founding fathers of the United States . He refused to sign the United States Constitution because he felt it violated state rights. Along with Patrick Henry and George Mason , he is considered one of the leading anti-federalists, whose work led to the ratification of the Bill of Rights .

Life

Like many members of the Constituent Assembly , Martin attended the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University ), where he graduated in 1766 as the best of 35 classmates. He then moved from his native Metuchen to North Carolina to teach and study law for three years. In 1771 he was admitted to the bar in Virginia . Martin married Maria Cresap (daughter of Michael Cresap ) at Christmas 1783 . Of their five children, three daughters reached adulthood.

Political activity

Martin was an early proponent of American independence . In the fall and winter of 1771 he took part in several political meetings, including a congress in Annapolis , Maryland , at which the recommendations of the Continental Congress were discussed. In the spring of 1778, the State of Maryland named Martin Attorney General . In that capacity, he primarily prosecuted loyalists , of which there were many in the Maryland state counties. In some counties, the tensions between patriots and loyalists even led to uprisings and sometimes open fighting. Martin joined the Baltimore Light Dragoons , a militia group that joined General Lafayette's force near Fredericksburg . However, Martin probably never fought actively, as he was called back to his post by the Governor of Maryland to lead a treason case .

Until 1805 he kept the position of Attorney General in Maryland. From 1814 to 1816 he was presiding judge of the oyer et terminer court in Baltimore , a special form of criminal court that existed in some US states such as Georgia, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania until 1896. From 1818 to 1822 he was again Attorney General of Maryland.

Constituent Congress

The Maryland General Assembly elected Martin to represent Maryland at the Confederation Congress in 1785 , but his public and private commitments prevented him from visiting Philadelphia .

In June 1787, he traveled to the Philadelphia Convention as an elected representative of Maryland . Upon his arrival, he expressed suspicion about the confidentiality clause that had been imposed on the meeting. He rejected the formation of a government in which the small states could be dominated by the large states and helped formulate the New Jersey plan . On June 27, he gave a three-hour speech against the Virginia Plan , which, in his opinion, paid too little attention to the small states because it provided for a ratio of representatives in both houses of the legislature proportional to the number of inhabitants . Martin was part of the committee that was supposed to find a compromise on the number of MPs, and advocated a proposal for an even distribution in at least one chamber. Even before the end of Congress, Martin was convinced that the new government had too much power over the governments of the individual states and would endanger their individual rights, so that he and another Maryland MP, John Francis Mercer , left Congress after not having one Had received support for a Bill of Rights.

Ratification dispute

In a speech to the Maryland House of Representatives in November 1787, Martin sharply criticized the Constituent Congress not only for its intentions, but also for its approach. He broke the secrecy clause and informed Maryland MPs that the creators of the constitution had vandalized their mandate to meet to revise the Articles of Confederation with "the only and express intention".

Instead, the congressmen decided to design a completely new system of government. For Martin, such plans amounted to a coup. Although well-known politicians such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin supported the new direction of Congress, Martin warned against "not being blinded by big names so far that you run blindly into your own destruction".

In this speech and in numerous newspaper articles, Martin attacked the proposals for a new system of government in the course of 1788 and continued to fight against ratification of the constitution. He lamented the rise of national government over states and condemned what he believed to be unjust representation in Congress.

He owned six slaves and was against the proposal to use slaves as residents to calculate the number of MPs. He also believed that the lack of a jury at the Supreme Court seriously jeopardized the freedom of United States citizens. At the Congress, Martin complained that increasing some states and individuals was more important than the welfare of the country as a whole. The adoption of the term "federal" by those who preferred national government angered Martin.

Maryland's decision-makers largely ignored Martin's warning. In April 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the constitution, but on the condition that a Bill of Rights should be added. In June, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the constitution, which went into effect. Three years later, the first ten constitutional amendments, known as the Bill of Rights , were added.

Legal career

After the War of Independence, Martin continued to work as a lawyer and became one of the most successful and well-known lawyers in the country.

In the first few years of the new century , Martin worked as a defense attorney in two controversial, nationally noticed cases. In the first, he obtained the acquittal of his good friend, United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase , who was impeached in 1805. Two years later, Martin was one of Aaron Burr's defense lawyers . Burr had been charged with high treason in 1807.

After 28 years as Attorney General of the State of Maryland, Martin resigned in December 1805, the only office he had held for so long.

In 1813 he was again presiding judge of the oyer et terminer court in Baltimore. In 1818 he was reappointed Attorney General Maryland, then in 1819 Maryland in the decision of principle McCulloch v. To represent Maryland . The plaintiffs were represented by Daniel Webster , William Pinkney and William Wirt .

Towards the end of his life, Martin's situation worsened. Not only did he lose much of his fortune, but he also began to drink and go crazy. He was practically bankrupt by the mid-1820s and survived only on the proceeds of a special tax that all Maryland lawyers had to pay just to support him. Finally, Aaron Burr took him on, whom he had successfully defended in 1807 in a high treason case. Martin was driven by an irrational aversion to Thomas Jefferson, who had called him the "Federal Bulldog" in 1807, and began to sympathize with the Federalist Party , whose orientation actually contradicted everything for which he had fought to date. Since he was partially paralyzed from 1819, he resigned from the office of Attorney General Maryland in 1822.

Luther Martin died on July 8, 1826, at the age of 78 in Aaron Burr's home in New York City . He was buried in an unmarked grave in the courtyard of St. John's Church. He died four days after Thomas Jefferson and John Adams , two other founding fathers of the United States.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Literally: [Do not let] "suffer our eyes to be so far dazzled by the splendor of names, as to run blindfolded into what may be our destruction."

swell

• Luther Martin, Friday, March 28, 1788, Number III, To the Citizens of Maryland
• Luther Martin, Impeachment Trial of Justice Samuel Chase, Senate, Feb. 23, 1804, Annals 14: 429-32, 436
• Kauffman, Bill, Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008. ISBN 1933859733 ; ISBN 978-1933859736 .
• Crawford, Alan Pell, Bookshelf: Uncouth, Unheeded The Wall Street Journal , September 22, 2008, p. A21.
• Reynolds, William L., Luther Martin, Maryland and the Constitution, 47 Maryland Law Review 291 (1988).
• Paul Clarkson and R. Samuel Jett, Luther Martin of Maryland (1970).
• Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (4 vols., 1911-1937; rev. Ed. 1966).