Salmon P. Chase

Salmon P. Chase is usually remembered for his service as Treasury secretary during the Civil War. Earlier, he had attracted national attention as an antislavery attorney and politician and was twice elected U.S. senator from Ohio and served two terms as governor. For the final volume of this series, John Niven has chosen 215 significant letters that shed light on the last phase of Chase's life, the eight and one half years that he presided over the United States Supreme Court as chief justice.

During this period, Chase and the Court grappled with an array of issues that redefined the rights of individuals and legal relationships among citizens, the federal government, and the states. Correspondence selected for this volume is particularly rich with insights into the inner workings of the Court and the judicial process. Other themes include Chase's quest for the Democratic nomination to the presidency in the elections of 1868 and 1872, his role as presiding officer during the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, and the scandalous breakup of the marriage of his socialite daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, and her millionaire husband, U.S. Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island. The volume closes with Chase's death on May 7, 1873, at the New York City residence of his youngest daughter, Janet ("Nettie") Chase Hoyt.

Representative correspondents in this volume include such national leaders as Stephen Field, Horace Greeley, Andrew Johnson, and Charles Sumner, as well as relatives and personal friends such as Jay Cooke. As in previous volumes, the editors have supplemented their meticulous transcriptions of the manuscripts with detailed notes, a chronology, an index, and a narrativeintroduction. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and Claremont Graduate University provide support for the edition.

Salmon P. Chase is usually remembered for his service as Treasury secretary during the Civil War. Earlier, he had attracted national attention as an antislavery attorney and politician and was twice elected U.S. senator from Ohio and served two terms as governor. For the final volume of this series, John Niven has chosen 215 significant letters that shed light on the last phase of Chase's life, the eight and one half years that he presided over the United States Supreme Court as chief justice.

During this period, Chase and the Court grappled with an array of issues that redefined the rights of individuals and legal relationships among citizens, the federal government, and the states. Correspondence selected for this volume is particularly rich with insights into the inner workings of the Court and the judicial process. Other themes include Chase's quest for the Democratic nomination to the presidency in the elections of 1868 and 1872, his role as presiding officer during the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, and the scandalous breakup of the marriage of his socialite daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, and her millionaire husband, U.S. Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island. The volume closes with Chase's death on May 7, 1873, at the New York City residence of his youngest daughter, Janet ("Nettie") Chase Hoyt.

Representative correspondents in this volume include such national leaders as Stephen Field, Horace Greeley, Andrew Johnson, and Charles Sumner, as well as relatives and personal friends such as Jay Cooke. As in previous volumes, the editors have supplemented their meticulous transcriptions of the manuscripts with detailed notes, a chronology, an index, and a narrativeintroduction. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and Claremont Graduate University provide support for the edition.

Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought. A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny. In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks. Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.