Louis Marshall was an American physician and teacher.
Background
Louis Marshall was the youngest of the fifteen children of Mary Randolph (Keith) and Thomas Marshall. He was a brother of John and of James Markham Marshall, a cousin of Humphrey Marshall, 1760-1841, and of the mother of Duff Green, and was related to many other distinguished men of Virginia and Kentucky. He was born on the family estate, "Oak Hill, " in Fauquier County, Va. In 1785 he went with his family to Kentucky and settled at "Buckpond" in Woodford County.
Education
Kentucky he was given his early educational training principally by his father and by Scotch tutors, among whom was Dr. Ebenezer Brooks. In 1793 he went to Philadelphia and spent a year with his brother, James Markham Marshall, and soon thereafter went abroad for study. After pursuing literary studies in Edinburgh he went to Paris, where he took courses in medicine and surgery.
Career
During the Revolution he was sent to prison and was in danger of execution when his brothers, John and James Markham Marshall, obtained his release. He returned to America. His father gave him the "Buckpond" estate, but, being by nature unsuited to the business of planting, he devoted his attention to the practice of medicine. He was, however, much more interested in education than he had ever been in anything else, so he soon set up a classical school for boys at "Buckpond, " which became celebrated not only for the fame afterwards attained by some of its graduates, but also for its rigid discipline and standards. Becoming president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) at Lexington, Va. , in 1830, he entirely deserted the system of discipline and education he had employed at "Buckpond. " According to his new methods there were no classes in groups unless a group so desired. Instead, individuals came at any time to the professor to recite or to obtain aid. Rules were discarded, and a state of nature was declared. His purpose was to develop an untrammeled individualism in the college, but he devastated the time and enthusiasm of the members of his faculty and raised up bitter opposition. The students, however, made of him a hero of the first magnitude. He played with them on the terms of the most complete familiarity; and in his class room, fitted up with a great arm-chair and a bed, pipe in mouth he received them as he lounged. Yet when his students began to take too many liberties, he began to meet them with sneers and sarcasm. Having lost the applause of his students and the support of his faculty, he set out for his Kentucky home in the summer of 1834 and never returned. In Kentucky he began teaching boys again, and in 1838 Transylvania University elected him professor of languages and president pro tempore for two years. Thereafter he wandered among his kinsmen, spending a considerable part of his time in Covington, Ky. , where he did some teaching. During the Civil War he was a Unionist with many reservations. He died at "Buckpond" and was at first buried there but was later removed to Frankfort.
Achievements
Religion
In France he had changed his name from Lewis to Louis, and had become an agnostic. On returning to America, however, he seems to have become genuinely religious and was long an elder in the Presbyterian Church. He expounded the Bible much to his students and gave especial attention to the prophecies.
Personality
He actually set the date when the world would be destroyed. He was bitterly opposed to whiskey. He had an irregular temper, which got him into many duels in France, the scars from which he carried through life. In Kentucky he killed a person in a duel, and contemptuously refused to shoot at Gen. Thomas Bodley in another. He was eccentric in manners and speech, singular in his views, arbitrary and impatient of contradiction, yet a man of great intellectual attainment and force of character.
Connections
In 1800 at Frankfort he married Agatha, the daughter of Francis Smith, a Virginian who had moved to Kentucky. They had five sons and one daughter. In 1844 his wife died.