Luther Martin

Luther Martin was an American lawyer, anti-federalist delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and the longest-serving attorney general of Maryland. Born in Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1748 to a farming family of English descent, he graduated at the head of his class from the College of New Jersey, the future Princeton, in 1766 and taught school in Maryland and Virginia while reading law on his own.

Admitted to the Virginia bar in 1771, he relocated permanently to Maryland and was appointed the state's first attorney general in 1778, a post he held with two interruptions until 1822. He was sent to Philadelphia as one of Maryland's five delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and there gave a speech of more than two days defending small-state representation and warning against an overpowered central government.

He left the convention before signing the document and led Maryland's anti-federalist opposition during ratification, publishing a long objection titled The Genuine Information. As a private advocate he argued for the defense in the 1805 impeachment trial of Justice Samuel Chase and for Aaron Burr in the 1807 treason trial in Richmond, and he represented the state in McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819, losing to Daniel Webster and the unanimous Marshall Court.

His legal practice deteriorated under heavy drinking after 1815, and a stroke in 1819 ended his career. The Maryland legislature passed a per-attorney levy to fund his support, and he died in New York in 1826 at age seventy-eight.

The name Luther is a Germanic name from Hlothari, combining hlud meaning famous with heri meaning army or warrior, and was adopted in English-speaking Protestant families in honor of the reformer Martin Luther. He carried the famous-warrior root through a courtroom voice that could fill a room for two days.