SALMON PORTLAND CHASE
If I were asked to name the man to whom the colored people of this
country, who were slaves, or were liable to become slaves, are under
the greatest obligation for their freedom, I would unhesitatingly say
Salmon Portland Chase.
If I were asked to name the man who was the strongest and most useful
factor in the Government during the great final contest that ended in
the emancipation of the black man, I would say Salmon Portland Chase.
In expressing the opinions above given, no reproach for Abraham
Lincoln, nor for any of the distinguished members of his Cabinet, is
intended or implied. Inferiority to Salmon P. Chase was not a
disgrace. Physically he rose above all his official associates, which
was no discredit to them, and in much the same way he towered
intellectually and administratively. His was the most trying, the most
difficult position, in the entire circle of public departments. It was
easy to get men to fight the battles of the Union if there was money
to pay them. It was easy to furnish ships and arms and supplies in
sufficient quantity, notwithstanding the terrible drain of the
greatest of civil wars, as long as the funds held out. Everything
depended on the treasury. Failure there meant irretrievable disaster.
It would not answer to have any serious mistakes in that quarter, and
in fact no fatal mistakes were there made. In all other departments
there were failures and blunders, but the financial department met
every emergency and every requisition. Chase's financial policy it was
that carried the country majestically through the war, and that
afterwards paid the nation's debts.
There is a circumstance that has not been mentioned, as far as the
writer knows, by any of Mr. Chase's biographers, which seems to him to
be significant and worth referring to. During the Civil War, Walter
Bagehot was editor of the _Economist,_ the great English financial
journal. His opinion in financial matters was regarded as the highest
authority. It was accepted as infallible. He discussed the plans of
Mr. Chase with great elaborateness and great severity. He predicted
that they were all destined to failure, and proved this theoretically
to his own satisfaction and the satisfaction of many others. The
result showed that Mr. Chase was right all the time, and the great
English economist was wrong.
The entrance of such a man into the Abolitionist movement marked an
era in its history. It was the thing most needed. He gave it a leader
who, of all men then living, was most competent for leadership. From
that time he was its Moses.
The greatest service rendered to the Abolition cause by Salmon P.
Chase was in pushing it forward on political lines. There was a
contest for the mastery of the Government from the hour he took
command. The movement was to be slow, sometimes halting and apparently
falling back, in some respects insignificant, in all respects
desperate, but there was to be no permanent defeat and no compromise.
The espousal of Abolitionism by Mr. Chase was a remarkable
circumstance. He was not an enthusiast like Garrison and Lundy and
many other Anti-Slavery pioneers, but precisely the opposite. He was
cold-blooded and cool-headed, a deliberate and conservative man. His
speeches were described as giving light but no heat. His sympathies
were seemingly weak, but his sense of justice was immense. Apparently,
he opposed slavery because it was wrong rather than because it was
cruel. He had a big body, a big head, and a big conscience, the
combination making a strong man and a good fighter.
That he did, in fact, sympathize with the slaves was shown by his
professional work in their behalf, more particularly in pleading
without fee or other reward the cases of escaped fugitives in the
courts. So numerous were his engagements in this regard that his
antagonists spoke of him sneeringly as the "Attorney-General for
runaway niggers." Upon some of his Anti-Slavery cases he bestowed an
immense amount of work. His argument in the case of Van Zant--the
original of Van Tromp in Mrs. Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_,--an old man
who was prosecuted and fined until he was financially ruined for
giving a "lift" in his farm wagon to a slave family on its way to
Canada, was said at the time to have been the most able so far made
in the Supreme Court of the United States. That and other similar
utterances by Mr. Chase were published for popular reading, and were
widely distributed by friends of the cause.
It is possible that, in performing this arduous labor, Mr. Chase, who
was not without personal ambition, was able, with his great native
sagacity, to foresee, although it must have been but dimly, the
possibilities of political development and official promotion, but at
the same time, for the same reason, he could the more clearly realize
the wearisome, heart-breaking struggle that was before him.
It was an enormous sacrifice that he made. Journeymen printers and
saddlers, like Garrison and Lundy, who had never had as much as one
hundred dollars at one time in their lives, and who had no social
position and no influential kinsfolks, had little to lose. But it was
very different with Chase. He had a profession that represented great
wealth. He had distinguished and aristocratic family connections. He
had a high place in society. All these he risked and largely lost.
In speaking of his sacrifices at that time in a subsequent letter to a
friend, he wrote:
"Having resolved on my political course, I devoted all the time
and means I could command to the work of spreading the principles
and building up the organization of the party of constitutional
freedom then inaugurated. Sometimes, indeed, all I could do seemed
insignificant, while the labors I had to perform, and the demand
upon my very limited resources by necessary contributions, taxed
severely all my abilities."
The writer hereof was a witness to one incident that showed something
of the loss that Mr. Chase sustained in a business way because of his
principles. While a law student in a country village he was sent down
to Cincinnati to secure certain testimony in the form of affidavits.
During his visit he called at Mr. Chase's law office, introduced
himself, and was very pleasantly received. He noticed that there was a
notary public in the office.
Among other instructions he had been directed to get the affidavit of
a leading business man in Cincinnati, a railroad president. The
document was prepared and signed, but there was no one at hand before
whom it could be sworn to. The writer remarked that he knew where
there was a notary in a near-by office. We proceeded to Mr. Chase's
chambers, and were about to enter when my companion noticed the name
on the door. He fell back as if he had been struck in the face. "The
---- Abolitionist," he exclaimed, "I wouldn't enter his place for a
hundred dollars!" We went elsewhere for our business, and on the way
my companion expressed himself about Mr. Chase. "What a pity it is,"
he said, "that that young man is ruining himself. He is a bright man,"
he went on, "and I employed him professionally until he went daft on
the subject of freeing the niggers whom the Lord made for the purpose
of serving the white people."
Like pretty much all the early Abolitionists, Mr. Chase had a taste of
mob violence. He had one singular experience. When the mob destroyed
the printing establishment of James G. Birney in Cincinnati, Chase
mingled with the crowd. He discovered that personal violence to Mr.
Birney was contemplated and that his life was in danger. He made all
haste to Birney's residence and gave him warning of his peril. Then he
took his stand in the doorway of the building and calmly awaited the
coming of the rabble. Those who knew Chase will remember that in size
he was almost a giant, and his countenance had a stern, determined
look. The multitude, finding itself thus unexpectedly confronted,
paused and entered into a parley that gave the hunted man an
opportunity to reach a place of safety.
Chase had an appointment to speak in the village in which the writer
lived, and the opposers of his cause arranged to give him a warm
reception. Something prevented his attendance, and a very mild and
amiable old clergyman from an adjoining town, who took his place,
received the shower-bath of uncooked eggs that had been intended for
the Cincinnati Abolitionist.
Chase's great work for the Anti-Slavery cause was in projecting and
directing it on independent political lines. Up to that time most
Anti-Slavery people opposed separate party action. Garrison and his
_Liberator_ violently denounced such action. Moral suasion was urged
as the panacea. Chase himself had not been a "third party" man. In
1840, when there was an Abolition ticket in the field, headed by his
personal friend, James G. Birney, he had not supported it. But soon
afterwards, becoming firmly convinced that Anti-Slavery people had
nothing to hope for from either of the old parties, he set about the
work of building a new one. The undertaking was with no mental
reservation on his part. When he put his hand to that plow there was
no looking back, notwithstanding that a rougher or more stony field,
and one less promising of returns for the laborer than that before
him, would be difficult to imagine.
In 1841 he headed a call for a convention at Columbus, the State
capital, to organize the Liberty party in the State of Ohio, and at
the same time nominate a State ticket. Less than a hundred
sympathizers responded to the call, and the ticket put in nomination
received less than one thousand votes.
Among the attendants at the Columbus meeting was a near kinsman of the
author. On his return, in describing the proceedings, he said that
pretty much everything was directed by a Mr. Chase (Salamander Chase
was his name, he said), a young Cincinnati lawyer. That young man, he
declared, would yet make a mark in the world.
From that time every important move was directed by Chase. He prepared
the calls for important meetings. He wrote their addresses and their
platforms. He made the leading speeches. He presided at the great
convention at Buffalo in 1848, which formulated the "Free-Soil"
party--successor to the Liberty party--and wrote the platform which it
adopted.
In speaking of Chase's share in the independent organization of this
time, William M. Evarts says: "He must be awarded the full credit of
having understood, resolved upon, planned, organized, and executed
this political movement."
The movement thus conducted by Mr. Chase was slow and tremendously
laborious, but it was effective. In the presidential elections of 1844
and 1848 it held the balance of power and turned the scale to further
its purposes. In 1852 it shattered and destroyed one of the old
pro-slavery parties, and became the second party in the country
instead of the third. In eight years more it was the first.
The charge has been made against Mr. Chase that, while a member of
Lincoln's Cabinet, he aspired to supersede his chief in the
Presidency. But did he not have a right to seek the higher office,
especially when the policy pursued by its incumbent did not meet his
full approval? He merely shared the sentiment that was then
entertained by nearly all the radical Anti-Slavery people of the
country. It is not unlikely that Chase felt somewhat envious of
Lincoln. After, as he stated in his letter of congratulation to Mr.
Lincoln on his first election, he had given nineteen years of
continuous and exhausting labor to the freedom movement, it would be
but natural that he should feel aggrieved when he saw that the chief
credit of that movement was likely to go to one who had, to his own
exclusion, come up slowly and reluctantly at a later day to its
support. If he were somewhat jealous, it would be hard not to
sympathize with him.