A question on the minds of politicians and voters in 1832 America was whether the Second Bank of the United States, the country’s second “Hamiltonian” federal bank, was constitutional. Although Chief Justice John Marshall had ruled it so in his 1819 landmark McCulloch v. Maryland opinion, a September 18, 1832, letter from Marshall to his son James Keith, acquired for the John Marshall Historical Collection, reveals the subject of the federal bank’s potential demise was on Marshall’s mind, too.