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When the Court reassembled in 1803, the piddling suit of a man named Marbury, to secure a commission as District of Columbia justice of the peace which Secretary of State Madison refused to deliver to him, gave Chief Justice Marshall a chance to set his Federalist stamp on U. S. history. For the first time he asserted the right of the Supreme Court to nullify Acts of Congress as "unconstitutional." Thomas Jefferson, Marshall's distant cousin and lifelong political foe, never acknowledged that claim. If it were correct, he declared in the first great anti-Supreme Court blast, "then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo-de-se [suicide]."
Years later, still chafing at Federalist stumbling-blocks laid by the Court, ex-President Jefferson proposed a Constitutional amendment limiting the terms of Justices to six years. His Congressional followers wanted quicker action. Between 1821 and 1825 bills were introduced to curb the Court's power in Constitutional cases by giving the Senate appellate jurisdiction over it, by requiring a vote of five out of seven Justices, by "packing" it with three new Justices.
In 1830 President Andrew Jackson, who resented the Court as hotly as Thomas Jefferson had and Franklin Roosevelt does, struck at the foundation of its power by urging repeal of a crucial section of the Judiciary Act of 1789. Unsuccessful, and only partly mollified as death made vacancies for Democrats, the hard-bitten old Indian fighter crystallized his view of the Supreme Court in a traditional comment on the decision which first gave Indians their legal status as government wards, "John Marshall has made his decision," Jackson roared, "Now let him enforce it!"
By 1857 Democratic appointees ruled the Court and it was the turn of Whig-Republicans to chafe and roar. When Democratic Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, onetime slave owner, handed down his Dred Scott decision preserving Western territories to slavery despite the will of Congress, a rising Republican named Abraham Lincoln went up & down the land denouncing it, demanding that the President and Congress reverse it, calling for appointment of new, right-thinking Justices. As President, Lincoln carried his feud to the point of ordering an Army fort commander to ignore a writ of habeas corpus issued by Chief Justice Taney.
Except for the Federalist squeeze of 1800, all changes in the Court's size up to the end of the Civil War were honestly motivated by the growth of Court business. But in 1866 a Congress bent on punishing the South cut Court membership to eight solely to keep merciful President Andrew Johnson from appointing new Justices who might help to nullify the vengeful Reconstruction Acts. Two years later, with Congress still fearful of the surviving Court, the recurrent plan to curb it by requiring a two-thirds decision against Congressional measures got past the House, but died in the Senate.