Luther Martin and the Secret He Refused to Keep
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.
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Luther Martin arrived in Philadelphia on June 9, 1787, two weeks late and already suspicious.
He was Maryland’s attorney general, a Princeton graduate, and by most accounts the best trial lawyer in the state. Chief Justice Roger Taney would later rank him first among the great men of the bar. Carl Van Doren described him more plainly: short, burly, slovenly, rough-voiced, gifted, learned if pedantic — a torrent in speech, a lover of brandy and taverns.
He was not a pamphleteer or a theorist. He was a courtroom fighter who had spent twenty years inside the machinery of power. He knew how institutions worked. He knew how they could be bent. When he arrived at the State House, he spent his first ten days in silence, studying Madison’s Virginia Plan and interviewing the delegates he had missed.
Then he erupted.
THE CONTEXT
The Convention had imposed a strict oath of secrecy on every delegate. Sentries were posted at the doors. No one was to speak of what happened inside. The stated purpose was prudence — free debate required confidentiality. Martin understood it differently. A government built in secret, he believed, was a government being built against the people it would govern.
What he saw alarmed him. Madison’s Virginia Plan did not propose to revise the Articles of Confederation, as the delegates had been authorized to do. It proposed to scrap them and build something new. The word “national” appeared in the original resolutions. It was later struck, Martin would write, because the men who put it there thought it might tend to alarm.
The Convention was not revising a government. It was constructing one.
And it was doing so behind closed doors, on authority it had never been given.
THE DECISION
Martin walked out on September 3, 1787, fourteen days before the final document was signed. He and fellow Maryland delegate John Francis Mercer left together. His explanation was direct: the principles of the Constitution were so well established that no alteration was to be expected. He had lost every argument he had made. He would not put his name on it.
But walking out was not enough. In November 1787, Martin appeared before the Maryland House of Delegates and told them everything. He named what had happened. The delegates, he said, had been sent to revise the Articles of Confederation. Instead they had created an entirely new national government — by authority they did not have. He called it, in effect, a coup.
He did not stop there. The full account — titled Genuine Information, Delivered to the Legislature of the State of Maryland — was serialized in eleven installments in the Baltimore Maryland Gazette beginning December 28, 1787. It was reprinted in newspapers across Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Historian Bill Kauffman later called it “the Anti-Federalist Paper.”
What Martin put into Genuine Information was something no other Anti-Federalist could offer: a first-hand account of the Convention’s deliberations, its arguments, its compromises, and its evasions. He exposed the deal that kept the slave trade open until 1808. He documented how the word “national” had been hidden. He warned that the Supremacy Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause would become engines of federal domination. He warned against a standing army, an unchecked federal judiciary, and a president who could accumulate the influence of a monarch.
He told the Maryland legislature not to be blinded by the men who had endorsed the document. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin had backed the new Constitution. Martin’s response was precise: we should not suffer our eyes to be so far dazzled by the splendor of names as to run blindfolded into what may be our destruction.
THE AFTERMATH
Maryland ratified in April 1788. The vote was 63 to 11. Martin arrived at the ratification convention with severe laryngitis and could not rise to speak. It did not matter. The outcome had been decided before the doors opened.
The Federalists attacked him in print. Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut published anonymous broadsides under the pen name “Landholder.” Martin responded in kind. Jefferson called him the Federal Bulldog — an insult that landed only because Martin had proved so effective.
He went on to win two of the most consequential legal fights of the early republic. In 1805 he successfully defended Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase against Jefferson’s impeachment, establishing that judicial removal requires genuine high crimes and misdemeanors. In 1807 he saved Aaron Burr from a treason conviction before Chief Justice John Marshall.
Then, in 1819, came his last stand. McCulloch v. Maryland brought Martin before the Supreme Court to argue that the federal government had no constitutional authority to create a national bank. He reminded the Court that the Tenth Amendment had been added precisely to assure the states of their reserved powers — and that the loose interpretation of the Necessary and Proper Clause he had warned against in 1787 was now being used to expand federal power in ways that, fairly avowed at the time, would have prevented the Constitution’s adoption. He lost. Marshall’s ruling was everything Martin had predicted the Constitution would produce.
By 1820 he had suffered a stroke. The Maryland legislature passed a law requiring all licensed attorneys in the state to contribute five dollars annually to a fund for his support. He resigned as attorney general in 1822. He died on July 10, 1826, in Aaron Burr’s home in New York City — in an unmarked grave. Six days earlier, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had died on the Fourth of July, within hours of each other, mourned by a nation. Martin’s death went largely unnoticed.
THE MEANING
Historian Gordon Wood said Martin was full of predictions and most of them came true. The Bill of Rights he demanded was ratified in 1791. The federal supremacy he warned about drove American politics for the next seventy-five years and produced the Civil War. The standing army he opposed became permanent. The presidency he described as tending toward monarchy has been tested in every generation since.
He was not a simple man. He owned six slaves while calling the slave trade inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution. He was a drunk and a wild man and he gave his enemies ample ammunition. He broke an oath he had sworn to keep.
What he could not do was stay silent about what he had seen. He had been in the room. He believed the public had a right to know what had happened there — that their republic had been built on decisions made in secret, by men who had exceeded their authority, counting on the prestige of Washington and Franklin to carry a document that might not have been adopted if the country had known what it truly contained.
Nobody thanked him. Maryland ratified the Constitution anyway. He died in a borrowed room, in a city not his own, in an unmarked grave.
Genuine Information survived him. It remains one of the most detailed first-hand accounts of the Constitutional Convention ever written. Without it, historians would know far less about what actually happened in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.
He told the truth.
The republic he was trying to protect did not protect him.
He told it anyway.
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Sources: Genuine Information (Baltimore Maryland Gazette, Dec. 28, 1787–Feb. 8, 1788); Bill Kauffman, Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin (ISI Books, 2008); Max Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. 3 (Yale University Press); Maryland State Archives, MSA SC 3520-875; Teaching American History (teachingamericanhistory.org); Clarkson & Jett, Luther Martin of Maryland (1970).
Next in this series: John Peter Zenger — the printer who refused to call the truth a crime.
About the Author
Charles C. Jett is an author, executive coach, and civic educator. He is the founder of criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com, author of six books, and host of three podcast series covering constitutional history, civic education, and executive leadership. He is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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