Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 14.pdf/192

 Salmon Portland Chase. Presidency, aroused all of Mr. Chase's love of justice, of freedom of speech and of the press. He took part against the mob. In an autobiographical fragment he says: "From this time on ... I became a decided opponent of slavery and the slave power . . I differed from Mr. Garrison and others as to the means by which the slave power could be best overthrown and slavery most safely and fitly abolished under our American Constitution; not in the con viction that these objects were of paramount importance. In 1837 I first publicly de clared my views in respect to legislation under the Constitution." When once con vinced that a cause was just and that it was his duty to advocate it, no power could turn him from it. To this trait of his character is principally due his noble espousal of the cause of anti-slavery. Consider what this meant. He was ambitious. Remember the hatred and suspicion that even almost every good man then heaped upon anyone who advocated humanity to the slave. Neverthe less, with seemingly nothing to gain and everything to lose, before he was thirty he threw himself with all the energy of his nature into the fight. He brought to it all his wonderful genius for organization, all his instinct for politics. For it he threw away his chances for political and professional preferment. For it he brooked the loss of friends and the abuse of enemies. For it he jeopardized any hope that he had for wealth. He antagonized both Whigs and Democrats. For twenty years he fought an apparently hopeless fight, without passion, with the per sistence of pure reason. One cannot but give the most unstinted admiration and praise to his perfect poise, his insistent energy, his magnificent courage. He took the question out of the domain off mere vituperation and iconoclastic pessimism, where Phillips and Garrison had placed it. He made for it a working and tenable politi cal theory. He clothed the doctrine with the Constitution, and argued it until it could not

159

be answered. He was not an abolitionist. He wanted to confine slavery to the territory where it then existed. He stated the doctrine in an address to the Liberty Party in July, 1845, as follows: "Against these infractions of the Constitution, against these departures from the national policy originally adopted, against these violations of the national faith originally pledged, we solemnly protest. Nor do we propose only to protest. . . . We have the example of our fathers on our side. We have the Constitution of their adoption on our side It is our duty and our purpose to rescue the government from the control of the slaveholders; to harmonize its practical administration with the provisions of the Constitution and to secure to all, without exception and without partiality, the rights which the Constitution guarantees. . . . We believe that its removal can be effected peacefully, constitutionally, without real injury to any, with the greatest benefit to all. We propose to effect this by repealing all legislation and discontinuing all action in favor of slavery, at home and abroad; by prohibiting the practice of slaveholding in all places of exclusive national jurisdiction, in the District of Columbia, in American vessels upon the seas, in forts, arsenals, navy yards; by forbidding the employment of slaves upon any public work; by adopting resolutions in Congress, declaring that slaveholding in all States created out of national territories is unconstitutional, and recom mending to the others the immediate adoption of measures for its extinction within their respective limits; and by electing and appointing to public station such men, and only such men as openly avow our principles, and will honestly carry out our measures." This extract is an excellent example of Mr. Chase's diction, clear, forcible, logical. It carries one on with a sweep that never lets the interest flag. Up to 1841 Mr. Chase had little to do with practical politics. In 1832 he had been a delegate to the convention that nominated