Salmon Portland Chase (January 13, 1808 – May 7, 1873) was an American politician and jurist who served as the sixth chief justice of the United States from 1864 to his death in 1873. Chase served as the 23rd governor of Ohio from 1856 to 1860, represented Ohio in the United States Senate from 1849 to 1855 and again in 1861, and served as the 25th United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1861 to 1864 during the administration of Abraham Lincoln. Chase is therefore one of the few American politicians who have served in the highest levels of all three branches of the federal government, in addition to serving in the highest state-level office. Prior to his Supreme Court appointment, Chase was widely seen as a potential president.
Born in Cornish, New Hampshire, Chase studied law under Attorney General William Wirt before establishing a legal practice in Cincinnati. He became an anti-slavery activist and frequently defended fugitive slaves in court. Chase left the Whig Party in 1841 to become the leader of Ohio's Liberty Party. In 1848, he helped establish the Free Soil Party and recruited former President Martin Van Buren to serve as the party's presidential nominee. Chase won election to the Senate the following year, and he opposed the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas–Nebraska Act. In the aftermath of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, Chase helped establish the Republican Party, which opposed the extension of slavery into the territories. After leaving the Senate, Chase served as the governor of Ohio from 1856 to 1860.
Chase sought the Republican nomination for president in the 1860 presidential election, but the party chose Abraham Lincoln at its National Convention. After Lincoln won the election, he asked Chase to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. Chase served in that position from 1861 to 1864, working hard to ensure the Union was well-financed during the Civil War. Chase resigned from the Cabinet in June 1864, but retained support among the Radical Republicans. Partly to appease the Radical Republicans, Lincoln nominated Chase to fill the Supreme Court vacancy that arose following Chief Justice Roger Taney's death.
Chase served as Chief Justice from 1864 to his death in 1873. He presided over the Senate trial of President Andrew Johnson during the impeachment proceedings of 1868. Despite his nomination to the court, Chase continued to pursue the presidency. He unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1868 and the Liberal Republican nomination in 1872.
Chase was born in Cornish, New Hampshire, on January 13, 1808,[2] to Janette Ralston and Ithamar Chase, who died in 1817 when Salmon was nine years old. His paternal immigrant ancestor was Aquila Chase from Cornwall, England, a ship-master who settled in Newbury, Massachusetts, about 1640, while his maternal grandparents Alexander Ralston and Janette Balloch were Scottish, originally from Falkirk.[3][4][5] His mother was left with ten children and few resources, and so Salmon lived from 1820 to 1824 in Ohio with his uncle, Bishop Philander Chase, a leading figure in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the West and the founder of Kenyon College. U.S. Senator Dudley Chase of Vermont was another uncle.[6]
He studied in the common schools of Windsor, Vermont, and Worthington, Ohio, and at Cincinnati College before entering the junior class at Dartmouth College.[5] He was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and Phi Beta Kappa,[5] and graduated from Dartmouth with distinction in 1826.[2] While at Dartmouth, he taught at the Royalton Academy in Royalton, Vermont.[5] Chase then moved to the District of Columbia, where he opened a classical school while studying law under U.S. Attorney General William Wirt.[2] He was admitted to the bar in 1829.[5]
Chase married his first wife Katherine Jane Garniss on March 4, 1834. She died the following year after the birth of a girl who died a few years later. He married his second wife Eliza Ann Smith on September 26, 1839, who died from consumption years later. Chase married his third wife, Sarah Bella Dunlop Ludlow who also died from consumption. After her death, he did not remarry.[7]
The Salmon P. Chase Birthplace and childhood home still stands in Cornish, New Hampshire.[citation needed]
Chase moved to a country home near Loveland, Ohio,[8] and practiced law in Cincinnati from 1830.[9] He rose to prominence for his authoritative compilation of the state's statutes,[2] which long remained the standard work on the topic.
From the beginning, despite the risk to his livelihood,[2] he defended people who had escaped slavery and those who were tried for assisting them, notably the Matilda Case in 1837.[2][10] He became particularly devoted to the abolition of slavery after the death of his first wife, Katherine Jane Garmiss, in 1835, shortly after their March 1834 wedding. This event was a spiritual reawakening for him. He worked initially with the American Sunday School Union.[10] At a time when public opinion in Cincinnati was dominated by Southern business connections, Chase, influenced by local events, including the attack on the press of James G. Birney during the Cincinnati riots of 1836, associated himself with the anti-slavery movement. Chase was also a member of the literary Semi-Colon Club; its members included Harriet Beecher Stowe and Calvin Ellis Stowe.[11] Chase became the leader of the political reformers, as opposed to the Garrisonian abolitionist movement.[citation needed]
For his defense of people arrested in Ohio under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, Chase was dubbed the "Attorney General for Fugitive Slaves."[12] His argument in the case of Jones v. Van Zandt on the constitutionality of fugitive slave laws before the U.S. Supreme Court attracted particular attention. Chase contended that slavery was local, not national, and that it could exist only by virtue of positive state law. He argued that the federal government was not empowered by the Constitution to create slavery anywhere and that when an enslaved person leaves the jurisdiction of a state where slavery is legal, he ceases to be a slave; he continues to be a man and leaves behind the law that made him a slave. In this and similar cases, the court ruled against him, and the judgment against John Van Zandt was upheld.[citation needed]
Though elected as a Whig to a one-year term on the Cincinnati City Council in 1840,[13][14] Chase left that party the next year.[14] In the 1840s, he helped to form the Liberty Party.[15] For seven years, Chase was the leader of the Liberty Party in Ohio. He helped balance its idealism with his pragmatic approach and political thought. Chase was skillful in drafting platforms and addresses, and he prepared the national Liberty platform of 1843 and the Liberty address of 1845. Building the Liberty Party was slow going. By 1848, Chase was the leader in the effort to combine the Liberty Party with the Barnburners or Van Buren Democrats of New York to form the Free Soil Party.[citation needed]
Chase drafted the Free-Soil platform,[16] and it was chiefly through his influence that Van Buren was their nominee for president in 1848.[citation needed] In 1849, Chase was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio on the Free Soil ticket.[15] Chase's goal, however, was not to establish a permanent new party organization, but to bring pressure to bear upon Northern Democrats to force them to oppose the extension of slavery.[citation needed] During his associations with the Liberty and Free Soil parties, Chase considered himself an "Independent Democrat" or a "Free Democrat".[15]
While serving in the Senate (1849–1855), Chase was an anti-slavery champion. He argued against the Compromise of 1850[17] and the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.[18] After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska legislation and the subsequent violence in Kansas, Chase helped form the Republican Party with former Whigs and anti-slavery members of the American Party.[19] The "Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States", written by Chase and Giddings, and published in The New York Times on January 24, 1854, may be regarded as the earliest draft of the Republican party creed. In 1855, Chase was elected the first Republican governor of Ohio. During his time in office, from 1856 to 1860, he supported improved property rights for women, changes to public education, and prison reform.[5]
In 1860, Chase sought the Republican nomination for president, with Massachusetts Governor Nathaniel Banks as his running mate.[20] With the exception of William H. Seward, Chase was the most prominent Republican in the country and had done more to end slavery than any other Republican. However, he opposed a "protective tariff," favored by most other Republicans, and his record of collaboration with Democrats annoyed the many Republicans who were former Whigs. At the 1860 Republican National Convention, he got 49 votes on the first ballot,[21] but he had little support outside of Ohio. Abraham Lincoln won the nomination, and Chase supported him.
Chase was elected as a Republican to the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 1860. However, he resigned shortly after taking his seat in order to become Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln.[5] This was despite no prior financial experience; rather obtained through Chase's nomination of Lincoln.[22]He was also a participant in the February 1861 Peace Conference in Washington, D.C., a meeting of leading American politicians held in an effort to resolve the burgeoning secession crisis and to preserve the Union on the eve of the Civil War.[citation needed]
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During the Civil War, Chase served as Secretary of the Treasury in President Lincoln's cabinet from 1861 to 1864. In that period of crisis, there were two great changes in American financial policy: the establishment of a national banking system and the issue of paper currency. The former was Chase's own particular measure. He suggested the idea, worked out the important principles and many of the details, and induced the Congress to approve them. It secured an immediate market for government bonds and provided a permanent, uniform, and stable national currency. Chase ensured that the Union could sell debt to pay for the war effort. He worked with Jay Cooke & Company to successfully manage the sale of $500 million (~$11.9 billion in 2023) in government war bonds (known as 5/20s) in 1862.[23]