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 CHASE 327 In 1830 he returned to Cincinnati. While straggling through the early embarrassments of professional life, he prepared an edition of the statutes of Ohio, with copious annotations, and a preliminary sketch of the history of the state (3 vols. 8vo). This edition soon super- seded all previous publications of the statutes, and is now received as authority in the courts. Aided by the reputation thus acquired, he soon gained a valuable practice, and in 1834 became solicitor of the bank of the United States in Cincinnati, and not long after of one of the city banks. In 1837 he acted as counsel for a colored woman claimed as a fugitive slave, and in an elaborate argument, afterward published, controverted the authority of congress to im- pose any duties or confer any powers in fugitive slave cases on state magistrates, and maintained that the law of 1793 relative to fugitives from service was void, because unwarranted by the constitution of the United States. The same year, in an argument before the supreme court of Ohio in defence of James Gr. Birney, prose- cuted under a state law for harboring a negro slave, Mr. Chase asserted the doctrine that slavery was local and dependent on state law for existence and continuance, and insisted that the person alleged to have been harbored, having been brought within the territorial limits of Ohio by the individual claiming her as master, was thenceforth in fact and by right free. In 1846 he was associated with William H. Seward as defendant's counsel in the case of Van Zandt before the supreme court of the United States, and argued more elaborately the principles which he had advanced in-former cases, maintaining that under the ordinance of 1787 no fugitive from service could be reclaim- ed 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 con- stitution that slavery was to be left exclusively to the disposal of the several states, without sanction or support from the national govern- ment; and that the clause in the constitution relative to persons held to service was one of compact between the states, and conferred no power of legislation on congress, and was never understood to confer any. Prior to 1841 Mr. Chase had taken little part in politics. He had voted sometimes with the democrats, but more commonly with the whigs, who in the north seemed to him more favorable to anti-slavery views than their opponents. In 1841 he united in a call for a convention of the opponents of slavery and slavery extension, which assembled at Columbus in December. This convention organized the liberty party of Ohio, nominated a candidate for governor, and issued an address to the people written by Mr. Chase, defining its principles and purposes. In 1843 a national liberty convention assembled at Buffalo. Mr. Chase was an active member of the committee on resolutions, to which was referred a resolu- tion 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." He opposed the resolution, and the committee refused to report it. It was, however, after- ward moved in the convention by its author, and adopted. In 1845 Mr. Chase projected a southern and western liberty convention, de- signed 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, and are therefore resolved to use all constitu- tional and honorable means to effect the ex- tinction of slavery within their respective states, and its reduction to its constitutional limits in the United States." The convention was held in Cincinnati in June, 1845, and Mr. Chase, as chairman of the committee, prepared the ad- dress, giving a history of slavery in the United States, showing the position of the whig and democratic parties, and arguing the neces- sity of a political organization unequivocally committed to the denationalization of slavery and the overthrow of the slave power. In 1847 he was a member of the second national liberty convention, and opposed the making of any national nomination at that time, urging that a more general movement against slavery extension and domination was likely to grow out of the agitation of the Wilmot proviso, and the action of congress and political parties in reference to slavery. In 1848, anticipating that the conventions of the whig and demo- cratic parties would probably refuse to take ground against the extension of slavery, he prepared a call for a free territory state conven- tion at Columbus, which was signed by more than 3,000 voters of all political parties. The convention thus called was largely attended, and invited a national convention to meet at Buffalo in August. This convention, over which Mr. Chase presided, nominated Martin Van Buren for president, and Charles Francis Adams for vice president. On Feb. 22, 1849, he was chosen a senator of the United States from Ohio, receiving the entire vote of the democratic members of the legislature, and of those freesoil members who favored demo- cratic views. The democratic party of Ohio, by the resolutions of its state convention, had already declared slavery an evil. Mr. Chase, coinciding with the democrats in their general views of state policy, supported their state nominees, distinctly announcing his intention, in the event of the party's desertion of its anti- slavery position in state or national conven- tions, to end at once his connection with it. When the nomination of Mr. Pierce by the Baltimore convention of 1852, with a platform approving the compromise acts of 1850, and denouncing the further discussion of the slavery question, was sanctioned by the democratic party in Ohio, Mr. Chase withdrew from it, and advocated the formation of an indepen-