Chase, Salmon P. (1808–1873)

• Author: Harold M. Hyman
• Pages: 334-336

Page 334

Born in New Hampshire, Salmon Portland Chase enjoyed an elite education as a private pupil of his uncle, Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase of Ohio, as a Dartmouth student (graduating 1826), and as an apprentice lawyer (1827?1830) to United States Attorney General WILLIAM WIRT. Subsequently, Chase rose quickly as a Cincinnati attorney, beginning also his numerous, seemingly opportunistic, successive changes in political party affiliations. Abandoning Whig, then Democratic ties, Chase became in turn a member of the Liberty party and of the Republican organizations, winning elections to the United States Senate (1848?1855, 1860?1861), and to Ohio's governorship (1856?1860). He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. ABRAHAM LINCOLN appointed Chase secretary of the treasury (1861?1864), and Chief Justice of the United States (1864?1873). Yet in 1864 Chase tried to thwart Lincoln's second term, in 1868 he maneuvered for the Democratic presidential nomination, and in 1872 he participated in the "Liberal Republican" schism against ULYSSES S. GRANT.

Such oscillations reflected more than Chase's large personal ambitions. Constitutional, legal, and moral concerns gave his public life coherence and purpose. These concerns derived from Chase's early conviction that men and society were easily corrupted, that SLAVERY was America's primary spoiling agent, and that political corruption was a close second. Although Chase, observing Wirt in the Antelope litigation (1825), found the doctrine in SOMERSET ' S CASE (1772) an acceptable reconciliation of slavery and the Constitution as of that year, later events, especially those attending fugitive slave recaptures, unpunished assaults on abolitionists, and increases in slave areas due especially to the Mexican War and the treaties that closed it off, brought him to accept ABOLITIONIST CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY. Chase concluded that slavery's expansion beyond existing limits would demoralize white labor.

The first steps on this ultimately abolitionist road came from Chase's association with and brave defenses of Ohio antislavery activists, including JAMES BIRNEY, and of fugitive slaves; such defenses won Chase the nickname "attorney general for runaway negroes." A merely opportunistic Cincinnati lawyer would have had easier routes to success than this. Defending runaways and their abettors, Chase abjured HIGHER LAW pleadings popular among abolitionists; he focused instead on technical procedures and on a carefully developed restatement of state-centered FEDERALISM in which he insisted that nonslave jurisdictions also enjoyed STATES ' RIGHTS. Slave states were able to export their recapture laws into free states via the federal FUGITIVE SLAVERY statutes. Chase argued that residents of free states also deserved to have the laws of their states concerning the status of citizens enjoy reciprocal effect and respect within slavery jurisdictions. Such a traffic of free state laws and customs across the federal system was impossible (and was to remain so until Appomattox). Chase insisted that residents of free states possessed at least the right to protect their co-residents of any race within those states from being reduced to servitude without DUE PROCESS.

Chase's evolving ideas culminated in a "freedom national" position, a general program for resolving the dilemma that slavery posed to a federal society based on assumptions of legal remedies, CIVIL RIGHTS, and CIVIL LIBERTIES. In his thinking, free labor was more than a marketplace phenomenon. It was a moral imperative, a complex of ethical relationships that the nation, under the Constitution, must nurture. Reformed, corruption-free two-party politics, with even blacks voting, was the way Chase discerned finally to nationalize...