Thomas Alexander Marshall was born on January 15, 1794 in Kentucky. He was the son of Humphrey Marshall, 1760-1841, and of his wife Mary, who was a sister of John, Louis, and James Markham Marshall. Thomas profited much from the position of influence and wealth of his father.
He was sent to the celebrated school in Mercer County conducted by Joshua Fry and was there prepared for college. He was then sent to Yale College, where he received the B. A. degree in 1815. Returning to Kentucky, he read law and the next year established himself in Frankfort.
Since Frankfort at this time had a full supply of able lawyers and was besides not particularly friendly to the Humphrey Marshall tradition, he removed to Paris, Bourbon County, in 1819. In 1827 he was elected to the lower branch of the legislature and served for two years. Finding that the Whig party came closest to the doctrines his father had advocated, he acted with it. He was elected to the Twenty-second and Twenty-third congresses, from 1831 to 1835, but was defeated for the Twenty-fourth. At Washington he attained a position of some influence. He served first on the committee on private land claims and then as chairman of the committee on Revolutionary claims. He spoke frequently and sometimes at great length, upholding the orthodox Whig position. He was active in the tariff debates of 1832 and often advocated rates higher than were obtained. He also spoke in favor of the United States Bank. He showed, perhaps, his greatest interest in the veterans of the Revolution who were seeking pensions or adjustments of claims. He had a judicial turn of mind that could be better satisfied elsewhere than in the excitement of active politics. Following his defeat for a third term in Congress he was offered an appointment to the Kentucky court of appeals, which he readily accepted and was commissioned in March 1835. When his position became elective under the state's new constitution of 1850 he was elected and continued to serve until 1856. During his uninterrupted term of twenty-one years he was twice chief justice, once through appointment, 1847-51, and the second time through the operation of the provision in the constitution that provided each justice should serve his last two years as chief justice. Shortly after becoming a justice he accepted in addition a professorship of the law of pleadings, evidence, and contracts in Transylvania University, which he held from 1836 to 1849. On retiring from the court, he went to the rapidly developing city of Chicago, but, failing to be satisfied there, he soon returned to Kentucky. He settled in Louisville, where he spent the period of the Civil War. He became a Union man and took an inconspicuous part in the politics of the times by serving as a Louisville representative in the lower house of the legislature from 1863 to 1865. Eschewing the radicalism that gripped some of the Kentuckians after the war he joined the Conservatives. On February 12, 1866, Gov. Thomas Bramlette appointed him chief justice of the court of appeals to fill the vacancy caused by the death of William Sampson. In the following August at the regular election he ran for the full term of six years, but his Unionism during the war was too much for Kentucky now turned Confederate so he was defeated. His active career ended with this reverse. He died at his home in Louisville, but his remains were buried in Lexington.
On November 26, 1816, he was married to Eliza Price, a sister-in-law of Henry Clay and a grand-daughter of Thomas Hart, one of the proprietors of Transylvania.
1760 – July 3, 1841 Was a politician from the U.S. states of Virginia and Kentucky.
29 September 1757 - 28 September 1824
1 May 1795 - 17 November 1875
15 August 1819 - 4 January 1897
1837 - 1899
20 November 1822 - 9 November 1856
4 November 1817 - 11 November 1873
