Salmon Portland Chase

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Contents

CHAP. PAGE.

I. Early Life 1

II. The Western Lawyer 13

Chapter I Eakly Life

In the course of the sixty-five years of his life, from 1808 to 1873, the lot of Salmon Portland Chase was cast in many places. In his boyhood his family lived successively in two towns in New Hampshire, and he went to school and college in three others ; as a lad he lived in Ohio, first in a village and then in a city ; his earliest manhood and much of his senatorial term he spent in Washington ; his professional years, in Cincinnati ; his four years' service as governor, in Columbus ; and during the last twelve years of his life he had his permanent home in or near Washington.

Few American public men have had so multifarious an experience, and few illustrate so many types of national character. Chase was endowed with a New England tradition of learning and statesmanship, a Western knowledge of the power of organization, and a national insight into the meaning of the American system of government. His abilities, courage, and good fortune gave him many opportunities to show his powers : as leader of the political abolitionists of Ohio from 1841 to 1849, as Ohio senator from 1849 to 1855, as governor of Ohio from 1856 to 1860, as secretary of the treasury from 1861 to 1864, and as chief justice of the United States from 1864 to 1873, he moved in the midst of great events, which he helped to make and to modify.

The Chase family was of the purest American stock. In 1660 Aquila Chase, an Englishman, came to Newbury, Massachusetts, and there built and commanded a ship. He left a son Moses, from whom sprang Daniel; and from Daniel, Samuel, who married Mary Dudley. Their son Dudley emigrated in 1763 from Sutton, Massachusetts, with his wife, Alice Corbett, and seven children, to the wilds of the upper Connecticut, and helped to found the new town of Cornish, named by the Chases for the English town or county from which their ancestors sprang. From the loins of Dudley sprang nine stout sons, of whom Ithamar, born in 1763, married Janet Ralston, daughter of a Scotch settler of Keene, and on January 13, 1808, became the father of Salmon Portland Chase.

Few families have given to their communities such a proportion of energetic leaders. Chase's father, Ithamar, was a man of substance, a farmer and small manufacturer, for years a stout Federalist and member of the governor's council. The most noted of the kindred were uncle Dudley, twice a United States senator, and uncle Philander, one of the most striking figures in the development of the West. The boy, Salmon, was heir to a noble tradition of learning, of public spirit, and of usefulness. Chase's birthplace, in what one of his friends once called " hill-ridden New Hampshire," lies in the last roll of the mountain billows which sweep from Monadnock and Kearsage down westward to the fertile river bottoms of the Connecticut. From these hill and valley towns have sprung numerous rugged men of affairs, who have made their fortunes in other States; and near by was Dartmouth College, nursery of many great men, and among them of Daniel Webster, with whom Chase once touched elbows for a few weeks in the Senate.

About 1816 his father removed to Keene, New Hampshire ; but when the boy was nine years old the father died, leaving to his widow a slender property and ten children, the oldest of whom was a son of twenty-five years. The boy's education had already begun in 1816 : a dame school ; a district school in Keene ; a better school in Windsor, Vermont, where he began Latin, a language which he always liked to quote ; a tutor in Keene, with whom he began Greek, — under such training passed the years till 1820. At this time an influence came in which probably determined Chase's career : Uncle Philander appeared as the good genius of the family and took the boy out to his Ohio frontier bishopric " in partibus" Later generations know a great deal about the ruder side of the religious development of the West, — about camp-meetings and Peter Cartwright ; they do not remember the gentle, more refined, yet upbuilding work of Bishop Chase and his coadjutors. He was poor as Jean Valjean's bishop, so that he almost envied a friend his " good fat living of $1000 a year as clerk in the Navy Department ; " he had an official ecclesiastical income which did not pay his postage ; yet he was a man who knew how to unite the secular with the religious, to carry on farms and mills side by side with his school and his churches.

In the bishop's school at Worthington, near Columbus, the boy simultaneously did farm work and studied Greek. Two years passed in monotonous life, for which the boy had no love. In 1822 Bishop Chase was appointed president of Cincinnati College. Evidently the requirements of Cincinnati College were not exacting, for the fifteenyear-old lad quickly became a sophomore. The bishop's new activity, however, gave him so little satisfaction that he resigned at the end of a year, and young Chase returned to his New England home in Keene. He never expressed any enthusiasm over his boyhood experience in the West, and the only important direct effect from it that can be traced is that it probably led him later to settle in Ohio.

On his return to New Hampshire, at sixteen years of age, the boy forthwith became a man, for he began to support himself, at least in part. One of many children, and much away from home, Chase felt his mother's influence less than most boys ; but her shrewd and affectionate character is revealed in some letters of the period written to him. She struggled hard to get her children started in life, and in 1824 put Salmon into Dartmouth College. Entering as junior, he taught in country schools during the long winter vacations, and in 1826 he was graduated.

Dartmouth College was a wholesome school, in which young men studied a little classics, mathematics, and belles-lettres, and got good from each other and from the characters of their instructors. A fellow collegian of Chase said of it in 1826 : " We meddled little with the history, government, or politics of our country ; I think not enough to prepare us for the active side of life." Certainly none of Chase's college teachers seem to have impressed him, and of President Tyler there is not a mention in his reminiscences. Chase was only a moderate student and took no high rank in college. Of his private reading, the " Mysteries of Udolpho " was all that stood in his memory in after life. On the whole, his intellectual advantages were unusual for that time, and in the end he got an excellent education, though it came chiefly from men and books after he had left college ; at least, throughout his life he had the enjoyment of academic brotherhood with men everywhere who had been stamped with the same collegiate training as his own.

The next step in his life was of especial consequence, for it was to make a cultivated man of the world out of the country boy. When he graduated he had already made up his mind to study law; but he could no longer accept his mother's sacrifices, and the readiest way to earn his living for the time was to teach school. Uncle Philander, like a genius of the lamp, appeared at the right moment to give him guidance and letters of introduction ; and Chase went to Washington. There he had no better resource than to announce " a select classical school," for which but one pupil was entered. In discouragement he applied to his uncle, Senator Dudley Chase, to get him a government clerkship, and received a warning never to enter government service, with the offer of "fifty cents to buy a spade." The good bishop's letters were more serviceable, however, for through his influence Chase became the proprietor of an established boys' school, and for three years he was a schoolmaster.

By this time some of the habits of Chase's life were forming: fondness for good company; love of reading; a habit of letter-writing; interest in affairs; a share in the financial burdens of his family; acquaintance with public men; and the keeping of a diary. He even spoke to some friends of "a wonderful vision of meeting in the halls of legislation." Chase's later life was distinctly serious, for he was then absorbed in the moral side of existence, and in the hard, practical work of social and political organization. These three years in Washington, however, have an altogether different tone ; the young man's writings are light and almost frivolous. Perhaps the episode of Parisian gayety in a Puritan life was chiefly due to the family of Chase's patron, nominal preceptor, and friend, William Wirt of Virginia, attorney-general of the United States. In Wirt's family were several lively daughters, whose Southern archness and banter were very agreeable to the young Yankee. In praise of two of them he published a poem, which was no worse than the stock material of the annuals of the day, and closed with fashionable gloom : —

" Even so — I thought, and with the thought a heavy sigh Came from my inmost heart — must fade away All that the earth of the beautiful inherits, And so must these bright creatures pass from earth."

In the warmth of this delightful family, this "pure and gentle and refined and cultivated circle," the young man basked, and it was a keen disappointment to him when they left Washington in 1829, at the end of Wirt's term of office. All his life long he remembered Mr. Wirt, " one of the handsomest men and one of the completest gentlemen of his time ; " and in the furious debates of 1854 in the Senate, Chase paid him a tribute as a type of the lovable slaveholder.

Through the Wirts, his uncle Dudley, and Henry Clay, Chase entered into the pleasant society of the national capital. The town was still raw, ugly, and unclean ; but it was a period of much refined hospitality, and he was welcomed by members of the cabinet and at presidential levees. Thus he went to Secretary Porter's, where, as he notes, Daniel Webster tossed off a full glass of whiskey, supposing it to be wine; and he was invited to " the scene of ceremonious frivolity at Mr. Clay's." The picture of Washington society thus drawn in a contemporary diary is on the whole pleasing, and makes one wish that Mrs. Trollope could have had access to the Wirt household.

Chase's record of the political conditions of the time is interesting, and especially important because it covers the transition period from Adams to Jackson, as seen by the young schoolmaster. An early entry in his diary, under the date of January 28, 1829, is as follows : —

" As Mr. Adams was soon to go out of office, his last Drawing-room was numerously attended. . . . The whole avenue to the palace-door was filled with carriages of those who had arrived before us, and we had only the meagre satisfaction of not being the last of the train. Nearly fifteen minutes elapsed before we were able to reach the door. At length we were set at liberty and entered the house. An immense crowd was present. Three rooms were full of guests. Music was heard in the great, and yet unfurnished, East-Koom, inviting the dancers to engage in the cotillion. Many accepted the invitation, and soon many light feet were tripping over the floor. At ten o'clock, the dance broke off, and the supper room was thrown open.

Long tables were spread in a spacious apartment, covered with everything that could please the eye or gratify the taste. They were soon surrounded by a crowd by no means reluctant to disburden them of their load. As each company was satisfied and departed, others filled the vacant places, and the banquet did not end until after eleven o'clock. Then the dance was resumed for a little while, until, one by one, the gay group diminished, when the music played 'Home, Sweet Home,' as a finale, and the pleasures of the evening were ended."

It was the fortune of the young observer, who was of course an Adams man, to see the first reception of another President, and to be shocked at the uproar in the White House after the inauguration of Jackson. A few weeks later he notes that a " more savage spirit breathes in the administration, and as a natural consequence distrust has come in place of confidence." Of Jackson himself Chase wrote, " In his manners, he is graceful and agreeable, and much excels his predecessor in the art of winning golden opinions from all sorts of men." Van Buren, whom Chase was ardently to support for President in 1848, seemed to him, in 1829, "cold, selfish, base, and faithless. May he never," he exclaims, " reach the golden reward to which he so vehemently aspires." Chase notes the universal belief that Van Buren was really responsible for the policy of removals from office ; and he relates that one of his own acquaintance was informed by

Jackson that the President could not conscientiously remove an incumbent in order to make a place for the applicant.

Chase's opinion of several other public men deserves record. He thought it strange that John Kandolph was "allowed to exercise his fantastic humors in the House without check and almost without rebuke — an aristocrat at heart, and disordered in intellect, the scorn of the wise ; the laughing-stock of the gay, and the abhorrence of the good." Calhoun was " an unfortunate politician, yet a very good man. Few men in our party are gifted with more splendid abilities — all that he does and utters and imagines is marked by his grand, characteristic, impetuous energy." When he heard Webster for the first time, in an argument before the Supreme Court, he observed : " He states his case with great clearness, and draws his inferences with exceeding sagacity. His language is rich and copious ; his manner dignified and impressive ; his voice deep and sonorous ; and his sentiments high and often sublime. He argues generally from general principles, seldom descending into minute analysis where intricacy is apt to embarrass and analogy to mislead. He is remarkable for strength rather than dexterity, and would easier rend an oak than untie a knot. If I could carry my faith in the possibility of all things to labor, so far as to suppose that any degree of industry would enable me to reach his height, how day and night should testify of my toils ! "

While thus interested in political events and public men, young Chase was learning his own tastes and was taking in the social world about him. He listened to concerts and felt sure that he understood why he enjoyed them. He hobnobbed with artists. He visited the first completed two miles of the Baltimore and Ohio Kailroad, and mused on the new system, which " removes the Alleghanies," and "makes Cincinnati and Baltimore neighboring cities." Sometimes he indulged also in the natural dreams of a gifted youth. " Knowledge may yet be gained," he writes, " and golden reputation. I may yet enjoy the consciousness of having lived not in vain. Future scenes of triumph may be mine."

Already the road to distinction had been chosen, for in 1827 he began to study law, ostensibly as a student of William Wirt, but really as a neglectful private reader. Neither his diary nor his later reminiscences conceal the fact that his law studies were scanty, and that his preceptor Wirt had asked him only one question in the two years of their relation. Indeed, Chase frankly admits that " very seldom had any candidate for admission to the bar presented himself with a slenderer stock of learning ; " and after the ordeal was over he lamented that the cramming process " had given strength to a habit of superficial reading." When he presented himself for admission to the bar, kindly Justice Cranch demurred, either at the weakness of the preparation or at the shortness of the time of study ; but he gave way, and thus, on December 14, 1829, Chase became a lawyer.

With his admission to the bar closed the first period of Chase's life. In twenty-two years he had developed a handsome though still awkward person, an observant mind, a habit of reflection, and a clear though still somewhat artificial style. In this formative period are seen already the foundations of the strong and versatile character of the later man. He worked hard, if spasmodically ; he read a little ; he showed perseverance, address, and devotion to principle; he held himself well in hand; and his most intimate correspondence shows him to have been upright without priggishness. He had had opportunities of education and culture such as came to few young men of that period ; he had been among men who could impress his character. Out of it all he had brought a wholesome sense of his own deficiencies, expressed in somewhat exaggerated self-examination in the closing entry of his diary for 1829. "I am almost twenty-two, and have, as yet, attained but the threshold of knowledge. I have formed few settled opinions, and have examined but few subjects. The night has seldom found me much advanced beyond the station I occupied in the morning, and the end of the year has at length come round and finds me almost in the very spot I was in at its commencement. I have learned little, and have forgotten much, and, really, to conclude of the future from the past, I almost despair of making any figure in the world."

Chapter II

According to the statement of Chase himself, the argument which induced Justice Cranch to admit him to the bar was his declaration : " I have made all my arrangements to go to the Western country and practice law." As early as July, 1826, while he was still in college, a friend in Cincinnati wrote, advising him against a place where there were " about sixty lawyers, about thirty ministers, and doctors without number." In February, 1830, Judge Burnet, of Cincinnati, senator from Ohio, rather faintly counseled him to settle in Cincinnati, with the remark : " On the whole it offers to you stronger inducements than any other place in the West." With large expectations and a little money Chase left Washington in March, 1830, to make his fortune in the golden West.

The choice of Cincinnati as the place for the development of a young and ill-trained lawyer was of course influenced by Chase's Ohio relatives and boyhood experiences, but he sought it chiefly because he believed that it offered the largest opportunity for brains and ambition. It was no longer a rude frontier town, but the largest city in the

West, apparently destined to be the metropolis of the Mississippi Valley, on the axis of Eastern and Western commerce, and a terminus for important and growing trade from North to South. The Cumberland road to Wheeling and Zanesville and the road to Pittsburg across southern Pennsylvania were the great Western highways of the time ; and from Pittsburg and Wheeling navigation reached to Cincinnati, St. Louis, St. Paul, and New Orleans. The Northwest was then an undeveloped section, far behind the Ohio River settlements.

Of all the cities of the West the most individual and the most foreign was Cincinnati. On the contracted plain above the high-water mark lay the business district ; the rest of the city and suburbs straggled up over the confused hills, everywhere flanked by walls of squared limestone. Among the twenty-five thousand people of Cincinnati in 1830 were to be found four different elements, which were slowly and unwillingly combining in a common life : the Southerner, the New Englander and Middle State man, the foreigner, and the negro. The Southern element was on the whole the most numerous, for all the lower counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had a large number of Southern settlers, and in Cincinnati itself there were many people of distinctly Southern habits of mind. Indeed, in many respects Cincinnati was a Southern city on free soil: the Southern buyer gladdened the heart of the merchant ; the Southern traveler and his family took the best rooms in the hotels ;

and in times of crisis Southern sympathy for slavery was visible in the newspapers. New Englanders were numerous and contended for their familiar standards of education and intellectual life ; but they were not here, as in northern Ohio, the dominant element. Foreigners had begun to straggle in ; and Cincinnati became an early place of settlement for Germans, through whom, about 1825, the culture of the grape was introduced. The negro population was only about one fifteenth of the whole, but it was a source of some perplexities, for besides the influx of negroes from other Northern communities, free to shift for themselves, there was an infusion of freed slaves from Kentucky, and even of runaways.

Commercially Cincinnati was a place of growing importance. The artery which kept the city prosperous was the Ohio River, which in modern railway circles is said to be shallow and uncertain, but in 1830 was a natural street, for which pious travelers thanked the Almighty, even though a voyage from Pittsburg to Cincinnati might take a week. Besides having the direct river trade, Cincinnati was already becoming the centre of a rich countryside, and the exchange point for Northern and Southern products. On the north, however, the means of communication were still so poor that even so late as 1839 a traveler leaving Cincinnati on Thursday reported that he arrived at Columbus, a hundred miles away, on Monday. Canals from Portsmouth to Cleveland and from Cincinnati to Dayton were now almost completed; but not till the railroad came, in the early fifties, was Cincinnati really united to the shores of Lake Erie. Toward the south, however, it was otherwise. The navigable branches of the Ohio — the Kanawha, Licking, Kentucky, Cumberland, and Tennessee — gave access to Kentucky and the country farther south; and Cincinnati was already becoming a favorite supply point for provisions, especially for hog products. There was also some manufacturing, — in cotton, lumber, and machinery, — which cheap coal was later to develop.

The social life of Cincinnati has been much misrepresented by Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans. " However accurately that author described the life which she saw, the diaries and letters of Chase, then living in the city, show that there was much which she did not see. To the mind of the cultivated Englishwoman, dirty streets, tobacco chewing, and the coarseness of a frontier town seemed incompatible with refined society ; but such a society there was, and Chase at once found a share in it. In a few months he was the welcome friend of the Burnets and the Longworths, the social leaders in the city.

The first duty of the newcomer was to establish himself in his profession, and within four years and a half he had taken his place as one of the best and busiest lawyers in Cincinnati. During the first two years, however, progress was very slow. He was admitted to the Ohio bar in June, 1830, and in September set up his own office. He afterward said that his first client paid him half a dollar for drawing a deed, and the second client borrowed the half dollar and decamped.

It is a proof of the strength of character of the young man that this period of growth into his profession is also the period of greatest intellectual progress in his whole life : he read, he reflected, he analyzed, he pondered upon religion, he lectured, he wrote articles, he projected a literary magazine, and he began the only formal publication of his whole career. Chase was throughout his life a great reader, though in a rather haphazard fashion. But to read and reflect was not enough for the active young man ; hence in the fall of 1830 he took a large part in founding the Cincinnati Lyceum, a system of popular lectures much like that of the modern "Institutes" in the great cities, to which he proposed to add the illustration of scientific discoveries by simple experiments ; but only that part of the scheme which provided for lectures was carried out.

Of these lectures, Chase himself delivered four ; and he was thus led directly to his first literary venture, the publication in the " North American Review" of two of his lectures, "The Life and Character of Henry Brougham" (July, 1831), and "Effects of Machinery" (January, 1832). The impulse to this latter article appears in an entry in his diary of March 2, 1831 : " Perused an article in the Ed. Rev. on the effects of Machinery and accumulation and about 50 pages of the Wealth of Nations and about a dozen pages of Say." The article is a good wholesome statement of the orthodox doctrine of the real advance resulting from machinery, with a special statement of those American conditions which take away the force of the argument against factory towns. "Machinery," says Chase, " substitutes bodies of iron with souls of steam to do the work of living men."

From contributor to editor was a step which Chase longed to take, and in 1832 he was busily writing to his friends in behalf of a scheme for a "Western Quarterly Review." The plan was heroic, in a region where there were almost no booksellers, but it was not unexampled. Timothy Flint had for a year or two been issuing his " Western Monthly Review," and James Hall at Vandalia was editing an " Illinois Magazine and Western Souvenir." Some effort was made to consolidate these ventures, but the project lacked support, and the only result seems to have been that Hall gave the name of " Western Monthly Magazine " to his periodical in its later form of 1833-36.

The only literary careers in the thirties in which a man could make a living in the West were journalism and the writing of law books. For newspaper work Chase had some early inclination, and to some of the local papers he occasionally sent short unsigned articles or editorials. Law books, however, came more directly in the line of his profession ; hence in September, 1832, he formed the project of publishing a collection of the laws of Ohio, for the use of lawyers and courts. The state judges took an interest in the plan, and lent him their aid ; and he reprinted in his three volumes all the public acts in the four volumes of "adopted laws" for the Northwest Territory, the four volumes of territorial enactments, and the thirty-one volumes of state laws. He added abundant notes and references, and his " Laws " at once became the standard edition. Unfortunately, the legislature would buy only a hundred and fifty copies, and Chase's rewards were probably not over a thousand dollars for his immense labor ; but the work at once gave him a solid reputation throughout the West. Chancellor Kent and Justice Story, in personal letters of much warmth, testified to its value and its learning.

From the beginning it had been Chase's intention to prefix to the " Laws " a brief historical sketch of Ohio, and the resulting forty pages remain one of the best accounts of the early constitutional history of the Northwest Territory and of the commonwealth of Ohio. The historical matter is sound ; there are references to some sources, and a successful effort to choose the really interesting and significant events. The Ordinance of 1787 had already been the subject of a long disquisition in Chase's diary, in July, 1831, and his careful discussion of it in his historical sketch did much to call attention to its historical importance. The history is a plain, straightforward story, with little comment, for the editor avoided political and controversial questions ; hence the book gives little indication of Chase's opinions. One of the few subjects on which the future governor of Ohio takes ground, however, is the administration of St. Clair in the Northwest, which afforded him opportunity for expressing his satisfaction that " the veto power, that anomaly in republican government, is not recognized by the Constitution of the State of Ohio." As a whole, the history shows Chase full of the spirit of historical investigation, and possessed of an unusual power of statement. He had the qualities of a good historian, — truth, patience, accuracy, impartiality, discernment, an interesting method, and a readable style.

Soon after the publication of the Ohio statutes, Chase married. The frank diary of a susceptible young man of twenty-two is certain to record much to vex the same man at forty and to amuse him at sixty. Chase was fond of the ladies, and liked to call on them and to tell his diary what he thought of them. A frequently recurring name is that of Catherine Jane Garniss, a young lady about three years Chase's junior. After a leisurely courtship they were married, March 4, 1834 ; on December 1, 1835, she died, leaving him a little girl, who lived only four years longer. To the very end of his life the statesman recalled with tenderness this wife of his youth, who seemed so well suited to be his helpmeet. The desolation of the young father intensified a strong religious feeling, to which he gave frequent expression in public and in his diary : the Puritan habit of withdrawal and meditation awoke in him; he constantly reviewed his own life, upbraided his few failings, and set himself forward in a new effort. Sincerity and uprightness speak out from the anguish of these months.