Page:The Biographical Dictionary of America, vol. 02.djvu/192

 CHASE.

CHASE.

CHASE, Salmon Portland, chief justice, was boi-u ia Cornish, 2s. H., Jan. 13, 1808, sou of Itha- mar and Janette (Ralston) Chase, and sixth in descent from Aquila and Ann Chase, emigrants, who left England in 1640, and settled in Newbury, Mass. His father was a farmer and in 1815 re- moved from Cornish to Keene, N. H., where, with his wife and eleven children, he estabUshed a new home, having in 1813 engaged in the man- ufacture of glass and become bankrupt. Salmon attended the district school until 1817, when his father died, and he was sent to Windsor, Vt. , where he continued his studies. In 1820 his mother sent liim to "W o r t h i n g t o n, Ohio, at the suggestion of her brotlier-in-law. Bishop Philander Chase, who conducted a col- legiate school at that place, and who agreed to give him a home and educational advantages. He made the journey with an elder brother and H. R. Schoolcraft, who were going west to join the Cass exploring expedition. On the removal of the bishop to Cincinnati ia 1822, to accept the presidency of Cincinnati college, Salmon entered that institution, and in 1823, when his uncle went to Europe to procure funds to establish Kenyon college, he returned to his mother's home in Keene, N. H., taught school at Royalton, Vt., and matriculated at Dartmouth college in 1824, graduating with the class of 1826. He then went south, expecting to find employment as tutor in some private family, but in this was disappointed, and returning as far as "Washington he there was refused a situation in one of the departments, his uncle, Dudley Chase, of Vermont, declining to aid him on the ground that such an appointment had already ruined one nephew. He secured a private school, where he had among other pupils a son of Attorney-General "Wirt. This incident led to an offer from Mr. "Wirt to receive the young tutor as a law student, and he was admitted to the bar of the District of Columbia in 1829. He continued his school until 1830, when he returned to the home of his uncle in Cincinnati, and was admitted as an attorney and counsellor at the Ohio bar. His anxious waiting for clients was relieved by industrious application to the prepar- ation of an edition of the statutes of Oliio, which his conscientious codification, copious annotation, and comprehensive historical sketch of the growth

and development of the territory and state, ex- panded to three volumes. Upon its publication the fame of the author spread with its rapid sale, all previous "Statutes of Ohio " being superseded by the new work. Practice now came to the young barrister, and among his clients were the bank of the United States in Cincinnati, and the Lafayette, a prominent city bank, which en- gaged his services as director, secretary of the board, and solicitor. This experience directed the mind of the rising lawyer to subjects of finance, and was the preparatory school of the future U. S. treasurer. The question of slavery and the rights of fugitives from bondage was at this time (1837) uppermost in the public mind, especially in the vicinity of Cincinnati. Mr. Chase was retained as counsel for a colored woman claimed as a fugitive slave, and also in the case of James G. Birney, prosecuted under a state law for harboring a fugitive slave. Both causes were defended by him before the state supreme court, and his arguments against the right of the fed- eral government to demand of a state magistrate any service in the case of a slave voluntarily brought by his master into a free state and there escaping from his control, and in maintaining that the law of 1793 was unwarranted by the constitution of the United States, and there- fore void, Avere published and extensively circu- lated by the anti -slavery party. In the case of Van Zandt. before the supreme court of the United States in 1846, he was associated with William H. Seward, and there argued that under the ordinance of 1787 no fugitive from service could be reclaimed from Ohio, unless escaped from one of the original slave states, and that the question of slavery was an interstate, and not a federal question for adjudication by Congress. In politics Mr. Chase had taken no positive posi- tion, and had supported either Whig or Democrat as they pro?nised to further his one political idea, the blotting out of slavery; but in 1841 lie called the convention that organized the Liberty party in Ohio, wrote the address to the people, and sup- ported the candidate for governor named by the party. In 1843, when the Liberty party met in convention at Baltimore to nominate candidates for president and vice-president, Mr. Chase was a member of the committee on resolutions, and opposed the radical proposition offered, refusing to support the tliird clause of the Constitution if it was applied to the case of a fugitive slave, his opposition preventing its becoming a part of the committee's report. It was, however, introduced before the convention and adopted. The move- ment for a convention of "all who believe that all that is worth preserving in republicanism can be maintained only by uncompromising war against the usurpation of the slave power, and