SALMON P. CHASE,

OF OHIO.

THIS widely-known and distinguished leader of the Repu lican party was born in the State of New Hampshire, at Cornish, January 13, 1808. About 1815, his father removed to Keene, with which place the earlier school-boy days of Chase are associated. But two years, however, had rolled over until our boy was an orphan; and a few years later he was taken to that great State of the West with which his name is now an historical boast. At twelve he was taken to Worthington, Ohio, and his uncle, Philander Chase, then Episcopal Bishop of that diocese,— with whose entertaining "Reminiscences" the general reader is acquainted, undertook and superintended his education. He was prepared for, and entered at, Cincinnati College, of which the bishop had accepted the presidency. He only remained a year in Cincinnati, when he returned to his mother's home in New Hampshire, and in his sixteenth year entered the Junior Class of Dartmouth College, where he was graduated in 1826.

Determined to turn his acquirements to immediate account, he proceeded to Washington, and opened a classical school for boys, and was patronized by many eminent men, among others, by Henry Clay, William Wirt, and Samuel L. Southard, whose sons were intrusted to his care. Having studied law under Mr. Wirt while earning a livelihood as a teacher of the dead languages, he closed his school on attaining his majority, in 1829, and was admitted to the bar of the District of Columbia. He practised little, if any, here, but, thinking the West afforded a better field for his talents and ambition, returned to Cincinnati in the spring of the following year, and took up his permanent residence there as a practitioner at the bar.

The inducements which attract young men of energy and cultivation to the West also render competition in that region, in

almost every phase of life, very great. As a consequence, the embarrassments are not few, and the difficulties to be surmounted task the best energies of the best men. If Mr. Chase had his share of embarrassments, he also had more than the average amount of intelligence, and the industry to make it available. Hence, while looking out for cases, he was also looking up the laws of the State, and, not finding them as he thought. they ought to be found, he set to work and prepared an edition of the Statutes, accompanied them with copious annotations, and prefixed to them an historical sketch of the State,—the whole occupying three large octavo volumes. Success attended his labor: his edition soon superseded all other editions of the Statutes, and is now the received authority in the courts.

The necessary reading and study for his work brought him valuable acquisitions of available knowledge, and its publication brought him reputation. Then, again, the latter won him business, and the former the power to hold it and make him successful. He thus acquired a valuable practice, and early in 1834 we find him solicitor of the Bank of the United States in Cincinnati, to which was soon added a similar position in connection with one of the city banks. Thus was the foundation of his fortune laid.

In 1837, Mr. Chase came prominently forward in the advocacy of those ideas with which his name is now so widely identified. Acting as counsel for a colored woman who was claimed as a fugitive slave, he made an elaborate argument controverting the authority of Congress to impose duties or confer powers in fugitive-slave cases on State magistrates," a position in which he has since been sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States, and maintained that the law of 1793 relative to fugitive slaves was void, because unwarranted by the Constitution of the United States." In the same year he defended James G. Birney, who was prosecuted by the State for harboring a negro slave. The case was tried before the Supreme Court of Ohio, and Mr. Chase argued that slavery was a local institution, and dependent on State law for its existence and continuance; and that the slave, having been brought within the territorial limits of Ohio by one claiming to be her master, was, in fact and by right, free. In 1838, he followed up these arguments by a review, in a news

paper, of a report emanating from the Judiciary Committee of the State Senate, which took grounds against granting slaves the trial by jury.

His

Outside of the political reference of the legal question he discussed, Mr. Chase had taken but slight part in politics until 1841. He had not settled himself into a party man. Sometimes he voted with the Democrats, but more generally with the Whigs; and this because the Northern Whigs appeared more favorable to Anti-Slavery doctrines than their political antagonists. He supported Harrison for the Presidency in 1840, but "the tone of his inaugural address, and, still more, the course of the Tyler Administration, convinced him that no effective resistance to the encroachments of slavery was to be expected from any party with a slaveholding and pro-slavery wing, modifying, if not controlling, its action. He had made up his mind. day for giving a stray vote with the Democracy was gone, and the time for fully organizing a distinct party, pledged to AntiSlavery views, had come." He, with others, in 1841, called a convention of those opposed to slavery and slavery-extension. The convention met in December of that year, organized the "Liberal party of Ohio, nominated a candidate for Governor, and issued an address defining its principles and purposes." Mr. Chase wrote and reported this address, which has an historical importance in being one of the earliest expositions of the political warfare against slavery. In 1843, Mr. Chase was an active participant in the "National Liberty Convention," which assembled at Buffalo. He was on the Committee on Resolutions, to which was referred, under a rule of the Convention, a resolution proposing "to regard and treat the third clause of the Constitution, whenever applied to the case of a fugitive slave, as utterly null and void, and consequently as forming no part of the Constitution of the United States, whenever we are called upon or sworn to support it." This resolution was opposed by Mr. Chase, and was not reported by the committee. Having been moved, however, in Convention, it was adopted by that body. Senator Butler, of South Carolina, afterward charged the authorship and advocacy of the resolution on Mr. Chase, and denounced the doctrine of mental reservation apparently sanctioned by it. Chase replied, "I have only to say I never pro

posed the resolution: I never would propose or vote for such a resolution. I hold no doctrine of mental reservation. Every man, in my judgment, should speak just as he thinks, keeping nothing back, here or elsewhere."

In the same year, "the great Repeal year," as it was called, Mr. Chase was designated to prepare an address on behalf of the friends of Liberty, of Ireland, and of Repeal, in Cincinnati, to the Loyal National Repeal Association of Ireland, in reply to a letter from Daniel O'Connell. In it he reviewed "the relations of the Federal Government to slavery at the period of its organization, set forth its original anti-slavery policy, and the subsequent growth of the political power of slavery, vindicated the action of the liberal party, and repelled the aspersions cast by a Repeal Association in Cincinnati upon anti-slavery men."

The Southern and Western Liberty Convention held in Cincinnati, June, 1845, originated with Mr. Chase. He desired to embrace "all who, believing that whatever is worth preserving in republicanism can be maintained only by uncompromising war against the usurpations of the slave-power, are, therefore, resolved to use all constitutional and honorable means to effect the extinction of slavery in their respective States, and its reduction to its constitutional limits in the United States." There were two thousand delegates present, and over twice that number of spectators. As chairman of the committee, the projector of the movement drew up the address, embracing a history of the Whig and Democratic parties in their relation to the Slavery question, recommending, as a political necessity, the formation of a party pledged to the overthrow of the Southern institution, and showing what to the writer seemed the natural and necessary antagonism between Democracy and Southern interests.

Mr. Chase was now a widely-known champion of the growing anti-slavery party. He was associated with the Hon. W. H. Seward in the defence of John Van Zandt, who was arraigned before the United States Supreme Court for aiding in the escape of slaves. In this case Seward made one of his most eloquent efforts; and Chase followed up the arguments suggested by the above outline of his views on the subject in a still more elaborate manner, contending that, "under the Ordinance

of 1787, no fugitives from service could be reclaimed from Ohio unless there had been an escape from one of the original States; that it was the clear understanding of the framers of the Constitution, and of the people who adopted it, that slavery was to be left exclusively to the disposal of the several States, without sanction or support from the National Government; and that the clause of the Constitution relative to persons held to service was one of compact between the States, and conferred no power of legislation on Congress, having been transferred from the Ordinance of 1787, in which it conferred no power on the Confederation and was never understood to confer any." He was subsequently engaged for the defence in the case of Dieskell vs. Parish, before the United States Circuit Court at Columbus, and argued the same positions.

Mr. Chase attended a second "National Liberty Convention" in 1847, and, in expectation that the agitation of the Wilmot Proviso would result in a more positive movement against slaveryextension, opposed the making of any national nominations at that time. He anticipated the Whig and Democratic Conventions in 1848, by calling a Free-Territory Convention, which resulted in the Buffalo Convention in August, and the nomination of Martin Van Buren for the Presidency.

On the 22d of February of the following year, Mr. Chase was elected to the United States Senate, receiving the entire vote of the Democratic members of the Legislature, as well as a large number of the Free-Soilers. Agreeing with the Democracy of Ohio, which had, by resolution in Convention, declared slavery to be an evil, he supported its State policy and nominees, but declared that he would desert it if it deserted the anti-slavery position. He spoke at length, on the 26th and 27th of March, 1850, against the Compromise resolutions. Opening with a modest allusion to his coming from the private walks of life, without the advantage of previous public position or experience in legislative debates, he claimed consideration for his sincerity and the directness with which he would present his positions. He then proceeded to give a history of the Government in its relations to slavery. Senator Hunter had, on the day previous, remarked that the South had no cause of complaint against the North in regard to slavery until the year 1820,-the