Read complete books and articles on: Salmon P. Chase

Chase, Salmon Portland - 1808–73, American public official and jurist, 6th Chief Justice of the United States (1864–73), b. Cornish, N.H. Admitted to the bar in 1829, he defended runaway blacks so often that he became known as "attorney general for fugitive slaves." Chase became prominent in the Liberty party and later in the Free-Soil party and was elected by a coalition of Free-Soilers and antislavery Democrats to the U.S. Senate, where (1849–55) he eloquently opposed such proslavery measures as the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Chase was elected governor of Ohio in 1855 at the head of a Republican ticket that was dominated by Know-Nothings; by 1857, when he was reelected, he was a leading member of the new Republican party. He was a splendid figure of a man, a "sculptor's ideal of a President," and few Americans have ever gone after that high office with more determination—or less success. He sought the Republican nomination in 1860, but since he lacked the full support of even his own state's delegation and since many considered him an extreme abolitionist, his chance passed quickly.

Again elected to the Senate, Chase served only two days in Mar., 1861, before resigning to become Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury. In that difficult position he took part in framing for Congress the new fiscal legislation necessitated by the Civil War, collected new taxes, placed unprecedentedly large loans with reluctant investors, and directed vast expenditures. To assist in government financing and also to improve the status of the currency, he proposed the national bank system (established in Feb., 1863), which is generally considered his greatest achievement. Ambition and a high regard for his own worth made Chase a difficult man to work with; after refusing four previous attempts, Lincoln finally accepted Chase's resignation on June 29, 1864.

Chase failed in his effort to secure the presidential nomination, but he remained an important national figure, and on Dec. 6, 1864, after the death of Roger B. Taney, Lincoln appointed Chase Chief Justice of the United States. He took a moderate stand in most of the important Reconstruction cases. His dissenting opinion in the Slaughterhouse Cases subsequently became the accepted position of the courts as to the restrictive force of the Fourteenth Amendment. On the other hand, his decision (1870) in Hepburn v. Griswold (see Legal Tender cases) was soon reversed. For his fairness in presiding over the Senate in the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, he was furiously denounced by his old radical friends. Chase persisted in seeking the presidency, but neither the Democrats in 1868 nor the Liberal Republicans in 1872 were interested in him.

See biography by A. B. Hart (1899, repr. 1969); D. Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (1954, repr. 1970); J. W. Schuckers, Life and Public Services of Salmon P. Chase (1874, repr. 1970).

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11 of the Best Books and Articles on: Salmon P. Chase

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1.

Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics » Read Now
by Frederick J. Blue. 428 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...Salmon P. Chase A Life in Politics Frederick J...Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blue Frederick J. Salmon P Chase: a life in politics. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1...
2.

The Salmon P. Chase Papers, Vol. 2 » Read Now
by Salmon Chase. 498 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

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...
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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.
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3.

The Salmon P. Chase Papers, Vol. 3 » Read Now
by Salmon Chase, Leigh Johnsen, James P. McClure, John Niven. 452 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

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...
Read More

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.
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4.

The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase: United States Senator and Governor of Ohio, Secretary of the Treasury and Chief-Justice of the United States (1874) » Read Now
by J. W. Schuckers. 675 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...CONTENTS. Birth of Salmon P. Chase--Cornish--His Ancestry--His Marriages...CHAPTER I. BIRTH OF SALMON P. CHASE -- CORNISH -- HIS ANCESTRY...Proximus ascendat; oratio per...
5.

Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase » Read Now
by Salmon P. Chase. 344 pgs.

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...THE CIVIL WAR DIARIES OF Salmon P. Chase 8 The Death of Lincoln...9. Reinhard H. Luthin, "Salmon P. Chase's Political Career Before the...Albert G. Riddle, "The Election of...
6.

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Chap. 3 "Salmon P. Chase: The Constitution and the Slave Power") » Read Now
by Eric Foner. 353 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

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...
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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.
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7.

Lincoln, Master of Men: A Study in Character » Read Now
by Alonzo Rothschild. 531 pgs.

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...Evarts, Carl Schurz, George S. Boutwell, John Albion Andrew, Gideon Welles, Caleb B. Smith, William D. Kelley, Francis P. Blair, Sr., David K. Cartter, and Norman B. Judd;...
8.

Lincoln's War Cabinet » Read Now
by Burton J. Hendrick. 484 pgs.

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...like William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase, for thirty years the nations...appeared to be, Seward left to Salmon Chase the main burden of opposing the...might be compared...
9.

Essays in Honor of William E. Dodd (Chap. 10 "Salmon P. Chase and the Nomination of 1868") » Read Now
by Avery Craven. 362 pgs.

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...Annual Report , 1900, I, 237-463 , p. 280. 5 Archibald Henderson...South Carolina in the Revolution, 1776-1780 , p. 34. This aids materially in explaining...History of...
10.

The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions ("Salmon P. Chase" begins on p. 551) » Read Now
by Leon Friedman, Fred L. Israel. 805 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
11.

Circumventing the Dred Scott Decision: Edward Bates, Salmon P. Chase, and the Citizenship of African Americans, in Civil War History » Read Now
by Leigh Johnsen, James P. Mcclure, Kathleen Norman, Michael Vanderlan. 31 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library