Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 14.pdf/189

 156

within its borders, until, earlier than else where, it grew to paramount political im portance. Ohio was the political hothouse of practical anti-slavery organization, and the first great anti-slavery leader and champion of the West was Salmon Portland Chase. Organized out of the territory subject to the Ordinance of 1787, Ohio had a peculiar interest in and could speak with an authoritative voice on the subject of the constitutional import and extent of that act. As Mr. Chase said in his argument before the Supreme Court of the United States in the Van Zandt case: "Ohio in truth came into the Union not so much in virtue of any act of Congress consenting to her admission, as in virtue of a right secured to her by the Ordinance, and which could not have been denied to her without a flagrant breach of faith. The Ordinance itself provided for the erection of States within the territory. . . . . It was the right of the people within the limits thus defined to form their State government and come into the Union whenever the number of inhabitants should reach sixty thousand, and earlier, if con sistent with the general interests of the Con federacy. As it was then their right to come in under the Ordinance, and as it was by that instrument made their duty to frame their government and constitution in accord ance with the articles of compact, it seems impossible to maintain that, by the act of entering the Union, any of those articles could be abridged, impaired or in any way modified." It is perhaps impossible for one of the present generation to give successfully a cor rect and vivid conception of the varied life of the West in the first half of the last cen tury. The political questions which then agitated Ohio are buried, never to be ex humed. The commercial interests have so changed that the original causes for the upbuilding of its wealth and population are well-nigh forgotten. The methods of bank ing and finance, the money centres, and

even the money itself are so different, that they are unrecognizable. The social con ditions were then amorphous. The society made up of so many and so diverse elements has since become amalgamated and fused into a coherency, bearing no resemblance to its parts. All these subtle influences must have had their power for good or bad over the individual living in their midst. Espe cially powerful must have been their force upon a young and ardent man, who went with hopeful expectations from the East and entered upon the new and strange life with the zest of youth and the determination to succeed. The early life of Mr. Chief Justice Chase was full of incident. But its incidents were of the commonplace order, to which it is hard to give either color or interest. They were ephemeral. His life was that of a politician rather than of a lawyer. And although from 1837 on to almost the end 01' his life he was valiantly struggling for one great principle, the freedom of the slave, the pitched battles of that struggle were few and undramatic. Until towards the end they were apparently evanescent. When success ful at all, the success seemed only temporary. But he fought on, undismayed. At first he was in a pitifully small minority, despised and ostracized by nearly all classes of society. In the end he seemed to be literally lost among the great majority. This moral fight, so strenuously and tenaciously made, reveals the greatness of his character. It was he who pushed the anti-slavery principle on to the plane of practical politics, and organized the anti-slavery cohorts and led them again and again after defeat heaped upon defeat. It was due to his genius and intrepidity more than to those of any other, that success for the cause came at last in the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency. Again, in his administration of the Treasury depart ment, no just conception can be given of the magnitude of the work which he accom plished, without going into the driest details