Men of Our Times. Or, Leading Patriots of the Day

One thing, at least, became plain; that whatever might be the case with the army, financially the American people had a leader who united them to a man, and under whose guidance the vast material resources of the country moved in solid phalanx to support its needs.

When a blade does good service, nothing is more natural than to turn and read upon it the stamp that tells where and by whom it was fashioned; and so when we see the quiet and serenity in which our country moved on under its burdens, we ask, Whence comes this man who has carried us so smoothly in such a storm?

America is before all other things an agricultural country, and her aristocracy, whether of talent or wealth, generally trace back their origin to a farm. The case of Secretary Chase is no exception.

It is one of the traditions of Dartmouth College that old President Wheelock, in one of his peregrinations, once stopped in the town of Cornish, N. H.; a place where the Connecticut river flows out from the embrace of the White Mountains. Here he passed a night at a farm-house, the dwelling of Samuel Chase, a patriarchal farmer, surrounded by seven sons, as fine, strong and intelligent as those of Jesse of Old Testament renown. The President used his visit to plead the cause of a college education for these fine youths to such good purpose, that five of the boys, to wit: Salmon, Baruch, Heber, Dudley and Philander became graduates of Dartmouth College. Two remained to share the labors of the farm, one of whom was the father of Secretary Chase.

All the boys thus educated attained more than the average mark in society, and some to the highest distinction. Dudley Chase was one of the most distinguished lawyers and politicians of New England – a member of the United States Senate, and for many years Chief Justice of Vermont. It is said that he was so enthusiastic a classical scholar that he carried a Greek Homer and Demosthenes always in his pocket, for his recreation in intervals of public business. He lived to a patriarchal age, an object of universal veneration.

Salmon Chase, another brother, was a lawyer in Portland, the acknowledged leader of that distinguished bar. He died suddenly, while pleading in court, in 1806, and in memorial of him our Secretary received the name of Salmon Portland, at his birth, which occurred in 1808. The youngest of the graduates, Philander Chase, was the well-known Episcopal Bishop of Ohio and Illinois. He was the guardian under whose auspices the education of Salmon P. Chase was conducted.

In regard to Chase's early education, we have not many traditions. His parents were of the best class of New Hampshire farmers; Bible-reading, thoughtful, shrewd, closely and wisely economical. It is said that in that region literary material was so scarce that the boy's first writing lessons were taken on strips of birch bark.

When his father died, there was found to be little property for the support of the family, and only the small separate estate of his mother was left. She was of Scotch blood – that blood which is at once shrewd, pious, courageous and energetic, and was competent to make a little serve the uses of a great deal.

But an education, and a college education, is the goal towards which such mothers in New England set their faces as a flint – and by infinite savings and unknown economies they compass it.

When Chase was fourteen years old, his uncle, the Bishop, offered to take and educate him, and he went to Ohio along with an elder brother who was attached to Gen. Cass's expedition to the upper waters of the Mississippi.

While at Buffalo the seniors of the party made an excursion to Niagara, but had no room in their vehicle for the boy. Young Chase, upon this, with characteristic energy, picked up another boy who wanted to see the falls, and the two enterprising young gentlemen footed it through the snow for twenty miles, and saw the falls in company with their elders.

He remained two years with the Bishop, who was a peremptory man, and used his nephew as he did himself and everybody else about him, that is, made him work just as hard as he could.

The great missionary Bishop had so much to do, and so little to do it with, that he had to make up for lack of money by incessant and severe labor, and with such help as he could get. His nephew being his own flesh and blood, he felt perhaps at liberty to drive a little more sharply than the rest, as that is the form in which the family instinct shows itself in people of his character.

The Bishop supplemented his own scanty salary by teaching school and working a farm, and so Salmon's preparatory studies were seasoned with an abundance of severe labor.

The youth was near sighted, and troubled with an obstinate lisp. The former disability was incurable, but the latter he overcame by means of a long and persevering course of reading aloud.

On the whole, the Bishop seems to have thought well of his nephew, for one day in refusing him leave to go in swimming, he did so with the complimentary exclamation, "Why, Salmon, the country might lose its future President, were I to let you get drowned."

After being fitted under his uncle, Chase entered Dartmouth College.

One anecdote of Chase's college life is characteristic, as showing that courageous and steady sense of justice which formed a leading feature of his after life. One of his classmates was sentenced by the faculty to be expelled from college on a charge of which Chase knew him to be wholly innocent. Chase, after in vain arguing the case with the president, finally told him that he would go too, as he would not stay in an institution where his friends were treated with such injustice. The two youths packed up their goods and drove off. But the faculty sent word after them almost before they had got out of the village, that the sentence was rescinded and they might come back. They said, however, that they must take time to consider whether they would do so, and they took a week, having a pleasant vacation, after which they returned.

After graduating, Mr. Chase found himself dependent on his own exertions to procure his support in his law studies. He went to Washington intending to open a private school. He waited in vain for scholars till his money was gone, and then, feeling discouraged, asked his uncle the Senator to get him an office under government.

The old gentleman, who seems to have been about as stern in his manner of expressing family affection as his brother the Bishop, promptly refused:

"I'll give you half a dollar to buy you a spade to begin with," he said, "for then you might come to something at last, but once settle a young man down in a government office, he never does any thing more – it's the last you hear of him. I've ruined one or two young men in that way, and I'm not going to ruin you."

Thus with stern kindness was Chase turned off from what might have made a contented common-place man of him, and pricked up to the career which gave us a Secretary of the Treasury and a Chief Justice of the United States. He succeeded at last in obtaining the ownership of a select classical school already established, while he pursued his legal studies under the auspices of Wirt.

In 1830 he was examined for admission to the bar. At the close of the examination he was told that he had better read for another year. He replied that he could not do that, as he was all ready to commence practice in Cincinnati.

"Oh, at Cincinnati!" replied the Judge, as if any law or no law was enough for such a backwoods settlement – "well then, Mr. Clerk, swear in Mr. Chase."

His early days of legal practice, like those of most young lawyers, were days of waiting and poverty. The only professional work he did for a considerable time was to draw an agreement for a man, who paid him half a dollar, and a week afterwards came and borrowed it back. In one of his early cases he had occasion to prove the bad character of a witness who was on the other side, on which the fellow, who was a well known rough, threatened to "have his blood," and undertook to assault him. But as the rowdy came up at the close of the court, he met so quiet and stern a look from Mr. Chase's eyes that he turned and sneaked off without opening his mouth or raising his hand.

Mr. Chase's first argument before a United States Court was at Columbus, O., in 1834. The case was to him a very important one, and when he arose to make his argument he found himself so agitated that he could not utter a word. He had therefore to sit down, and after waiting a few moments, tried again, and made his plea. After he was through, one of the Judges came to him and shook hands with him, saying, "I congratulate you most sincerely." Chase, who was feeling very disagreeably, inquired with surprise what he was congratulated for?

"On your failure," answered the judge, who added, "A person of ordinary temperament and abilities would have gone through his part without any such symptoms of nervousness. But when I see a young man break down once or twice in that way, I conceive the highest hopes of him."

This may have been interpreted as a good natured attempt on the part of the Judge to reassure the young lawyer, but there is a deep and just philosophy in it. The class of men who have what Carlye calls "a composed stupidity, or a cheerful infinitude of ignorance," are not liable ever to break down through a high sense of the magnitude of their task, and the importance of a crisis. Such as their work is, they are always in a prepared frame of mind to do it.

Although the Washington judge who passed Mr. Chase into the legal profession had so small an opinion of Cincinnati, yet no place could have afforded a finer and more agreeable position to a rising young man, than that city in those days. A newly settled place, having yet lingering about it some of the wholesome neighborly spirit of a recent colony – with an eclectic society drawn from the finest and best cultivated classes of each of the older States, there was in the general tone of life a breadth of ideas, a liberality and freedom, which came from the consorting together of persons of different habits of living.

In no city was real intellectual or moral worth in a young candidate likely to meet a quicker and a more appreciative patronage.

Gradually Mr. Chase gained the familiar entrée of all that was worth knowing, and was received with hospitable openness in the best society. His fine person, his vigorous, energetic appearance, and the record of talent and scholarship he brought with him, secured him, in time the patronage of the best families, and a valuable and extensive practice. His industry was incessant, and his capability of sustained labor uncommon, as may be gathered from the fact that besides the labors of his office, he found time to prepare an edition of the Statutes of Ohio, with notes, and a history of the State, which is now a standard authority in the Ohio courts.

In the outset of Chase's career, he, like Charles Sumner, and every rising young American of his time, met the great test question of the age. To Chase it came in the form of an application to plead the cause of a poor black woman, claimed as a fugitive slave. For a rising young lawyer to take in hand the cause of a poor black, now, would be only a road to popularity and fame. But then the case was far otherwise.

If the abolition excitement had stirred up Boston it had convulsed Cincinnati. A city separated from slave territory only by a fordable river, was likely to be no quiet theatre for such discussions. All the horrors, all the mean frauds and shocking cruelties of the interstate slave-trade, were enacting daily on the steamboats which passed before the city on the Ohio River, and the chained gangs of broken-hearted human beings, torn from home and family, to be shipped to Southern plantations, were often to be seen on steamboats lying at the levee.

The chapter in Uncle Tom's Cabin called "Select Incidents of Lawful Trade" was no fancy painting. It was an almost literal daguerreotype of scenes which the author of that book had witnessed in those floating palaces which plied between Cincinnati and New Orleans, and where too, above in the cabin, were happy mothers, wives, husbands, brothers and sisters, rejoicing in secure family affection, and on the deck below, miserable shattered fragments of black families, wives torn from husbands, children without mothers and mothers without children, with poor dumb anxious faces going they knew not whither, to that awful "down river" – whence could come back letter or tidings never more – for slavery took care that slaves should write no letters.

Such scenes as these, almost daily witnessed, gave the discussion of the great question of slavery a startling and tangible reality which it never could have had in Boston. For the credit of human nature we are happy to state that the Ohio was lined all along its shores, where it ran between free and slave territory, with a chain of abolitionist forts, in the shape of societies prosecuting their object with heroic vigor; and what made the controversy most peculiarly intense was the assistance which these abolitionists stood always ready to give to the escaping fugitive. For a belt of as much as fifty miles all along the river, the exertions of the abolitionists made slave property the most insecure of all kinds of possessions.

The slave power, as we have seen, was no meek non-resistant, and between it and the abolitionists there was a hand-to-hand grapple, with a short knife, and deadly home thrusts. The western man is in all things outspoken and ardent; and Garrison's logical deductions as to the true nature of slavery came molten and red hot, as fired from the guns of western abolitionists. To do them justice, they were sublimely and awfully imprudent, heroically regardless of any considerations but those of abstract truth and justice; they made no more effort to palliate slavery or conciliate the slaveholders than the slaveholders made efforts to palliate their doings, or conciliate them. War, war to the knife, was the word on both sides, the only difference being that the knife of the abolitionist was a spiritual one, and the knife of the slaveholders a literal one.

The Lane Theological Seminary was taken possession of as an anti-slavery fortification by a class of about twenty vigorous, radical young men, headed by that brilliant, eccentric genius, Theodore D. Weld; who came and stationed themselves there ostensibly as theological students under Dr. Beecher and Professor Stowe, really that they might make of the Seminary an anti-slavery fort.

Now at this time, "good society," so called, as constituted in Cincinnati, had all that easy, comfortable indifference to the fortunes and sufferings of people not so well off as itself, which is characteristic of good society all the world over. It is so much easier to refine upon one's own ideal of life, to carpet one's floors, and list one's doors and windows and keep out the cold, stormy wind of debate and discussion, than it is to go out into the highways and hedges and keep company with the never-ending sins and miseries and misfortunes and mistakes of poor, heavy-laden humanity, that good society always has sat as a dead weight on any rising attempt at reform.

Then again, Cincinnati was herself to a large extent a slaveholding city. Her property was in slaveholding states. Negroes were negotiable currency; they were collateral security on half the contracts that were at the time being made between the thriving men of Cincinnati and the planters of the adjoining slave states. If the bold doctrine of the abolitionists was true – if slavery was stealing, then were the church members in the fairest Cincinnati churches thieves– for in one way or another, they were to a large extent often the holders of slaves.

The whole secret instinct of Cincinnati, therefore, was to wish that slavery might in some way be defended, because Cincinnati stood so connected with it in the way of trade, that conscientious scruples on this point were infinitely and intolerably disagreeable. The whirlwind zeal of the abolitionists, the utter, reckless abandon and carelessness of forms and fashions with which they threw themselves into the fight, therefore furnished to good society a cloak large and long, for all their own sins of neglect. They did not defend slavery, of course, these good people – in fact, they regarded it as an evil. They were properly and decorously religious – good society always is, and so willing in presbytery and synod to have judiciously worded resolutions from time to time introduced, regretting slavery as an evil. The meetings of ecclesiastical bodies afforded at this time examples of most dexterous theological hair-splitting on this subject. Invariably in every one of them, were the abolitionists forward and fiery, calling slavery by that ugly old Saxon word, "a sin." Then there were the larger class of brethren, longing for peace, and hating iniquity, who had sympathy for the inevitable difficulties which beset well-meaning Christian slaveholders under slave laws. Now if these consented to call slavery a sin, they imposed on themselves the necessity of either enforcing immediate repentance and change of life on the sinner, or excluding him from the communion. So they obstinately intrenched themselves in the declaration that slavery is – an EVIL.

When a synod had spent all its spare time in discussing whether slavery ought to be described in a resolution as an evil or as a moral evil, they thought they had about done their share of duty on the subject; meanwhile, between the two, the consciences of those elders and church members who were holding slaves on bond and mortgage, or sending down orders to sell up the hands of plantations as securities for their debts, had a certain troublous peace.

How lucky it was for these poor tempest-tossed souls that the abolitionists were so imprudent and hot headed, that they wore garments of camel's hair, and were girt about the loins with a leathern girdle, and did eat locusts and wild honey, being altogether an unpresentable, shaggy, unkempt, impracticable set of John the Baptist reformers. Their unchristian spirit shocked the nerves of good pious people far more than the tearing up of slave families, or the wholesale injustice of slavery. "The abolitionists do things in such bad taste," said good society, "that it really makes it impossible for us to touch the subject at all, lest we should become mixed up with them, and responsible for their proceedings." To become mixed up with and responsible for the proceedings of slaveholders, slave-traders, and slave-drivers, who certainly exhibited no more evidences of good taste in their manner of handling subjects, did not somehow strike good society at this time as equally objectionable.

It had got to be a settled and received doctrine that the impudent abolitionists had created such a state of irritation in the delicate nerves of the slaveholding power, that all good Christian people were bound to unite in a general effort to calm irritation by suppressing all discussion of the subject.

When, therefore, James G. Birney, a southern abolitionist, who had earned a right to be heard, by first setting free his own slaves, came to Cincinnati and set up an abolition paper, there was a boiling over of the slaveholding fury. For more than a week Cincinnati lay helpless in a state of semi-sack and siege, trod under the heels of a mob led by Kentucky bullies and slave-traders. They sacked Birney's anti-slavery office, broke up his printing press and threw the types into the river, and then proceeded to burn negro houses, and to beat and maltreat defenceless women and children, after the manner of such evil beasts generally.

At the time the mob were busy destroying the printing press, Mr. Chase threw himself in among them with a view to observe, and if possible to obstruct their proceedings.

He gathered from their threats while the process of sacking the office was going on, that their next attack would be on the life of Mr. Birney. On hearing this, he hastened before them to Mr. Birney's hotel, and stood in the door-way to meet them when they came up.

No test of personal courage or manliness is greater than thus daring to stand and oppose a mob in the full flush of lawless triumph. Mr. Chase had a fine commanding person, and perfect courage and coolness, and he succeeded in keeping back the mob, by arguing with them against lawless acts of violence to persons or property, until Birney had had time to escape.

The upper ten of Cincinnati, when tranquility was once more restored to that community, were of course very much shocked and scandalized by the proceedings of the mob, but continued to assert that all these doings were the fault of the abolitionists. What could be expected if they would continue discussions which made our brethren across the river so uncomfortable? If nobody would defend the rights of negroes there would be no more negro mobs, and good society became increasingly set in the belief that speaking for the slave in any way whatever was actually to join the abolitionists, and to become in fact a radical, a disorganizer, a maker of riots and disturbances.

No young lawyer who acted merely from humane sentiment, or common good natured sympathy, would have dared at that time to plead a slave's cause against a master's claim. Then and always there were a plenty of people to feel instinctive compassion, and in fact slily to give a hunted fugitive a lift, if sure not to lose by it – but to take up and plead professionally a slave's cause against a master was a thing which no young man could do without making up his mind to be counted as one of the abolitionists, and to take upon his shoulders the whole responsibility of being identified with them.

Mr. Chase was a man particularly alive to the value of all the things which he put in peril by such a step. He had a remarkable share of what is called the "Yankee" nature, which values and appreciates material good. He had begun poor, and he knew exactly what a hard thing poverty was. He had begun at the bottom of the social ladder, and he knew exactly how hard it was to climb to a good position. He had just got such a position, and he truly appreciated it. His best patrons and warmest friends now, with earnestness warned him not to listen to the voice of his feelings, and take that course which would identify him with the fanatical abolitionists. They told him that it would be social and political death to him to take a step in that direction.