The Man in Lincoln's Shadow
Despite the February cold, over 12,000 people crowded around the train shed at Dunkirk, New York, for President-elect Abraham Lincoln's brief station stop on his pre-inaugural tour across the North. "I regret I cannot stop to speak to you," Lincoln apologized from a hastily built platform — he had a train schedule to keep. However, for the sake of the long-suffering Dunkirkers who had waited in the cold, he condensed his usual speech and ended with one urgent exhortation: "Standing as I do," Lincoln said, "under the folds of the American flag, I ask you to stand by me so long as I stand by it."
In the early months of 1861, this straightforward statement captured what Lincoln believed would be necessary to avoid civil war: Stand by me and all will be well. But all was not well, and he would have more difficulty than he appreciated in recruiting people to stand by him. The secessionist states of the new Southern Confederacy showed no desire to stand by him, and even in his own Republican Party, plenty of voices condemned him for asking too much, as well as for asking too little. When his longtime friend and ally from Illinois politics, Orville Hickman Browning, upbraided him for refusing to support an emancipation decree in Missouri, Lincoln could only reply in dismay, "I confess it astonishes me."
No one among Lincoln's Republicans afforded him more such astonishment than the man whom he tapped as his secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Portland Chase. Most accounts of the Lincoln-Chase relationship (and of Lincoln's disagreements with other friends and allies, like Browning) have concluded that Lincoln was right — automatically right, because he was Lincoln — and Chase and the others were wrong, because they weren't. But that conclusion rests on the a priori assumption that, because Lincoln was right about slavery and the extension of slavery into the West, and ultimately right in winning the Civil War for the Union, he was right about everything, and Chase must have been wrong in the same proportion. That assumption may not bear much weight when we inquire into the quixotic figure of Salmon Chase.
MARRED BY AMBITION?
Salmon Chase disagreed with Abraham Lincoln too many times to make biographers of both men comfortable with him. Frederick Blue's 1987 biography of Chase concluded that "his was a career which contemporaries remembered...as one motivated by ambition" for the presidency, and largely because of that ravenous ambition, "Chase made many enemies among public leaders and unfortunately had few lasting friendships." For John Niven, writing about Chase in 1995, Chase ruined his promotion of "high-minded moral and social goals" with his "insidious ambition" and a "mixture of condescension and exasperation" at Lincoln's "finer qualities."
The same condemnation of Chase's "ambition" pervades Doris Kearns Goodwin's popular account of the Lincoln administration. Chase was, in Goodwin's account of Lincoln's "team of rivals," guilty of "fierce ambition," "unattained ambition," "sleepless ambition," and "restless ambition for the presidency" which "was never realized." David Donald, in his great 1995 biography of Lincoln, dismissed Chase as "stiff, reserved, and ponderous," and given, even in offhand conversation, "to uttering profundities." For Michael Burlingame, in his landmark two-volume Lincoln biography, Chase was "vain, hyper-ambitious" and "haughty." John Hay, Lincoln's secretary, accused Chase of being "at work night and day, laying pipe" for his own nomination in place of Lincoln in 1864. Years later, the wartime marriage of Chase's daughter, Kate, to Rhode Island's colorless but wealthy governor, William Sprague, was viewed by cynics as "a burnt offering" that Chase made to secure Sprague's financial backing for a presidential bid. The severest barrage of criticism may have come from fellow Republican Alexander McClure of Pennsylvania, who described Chase as
the most irritating fly in the Lincoln ointment from the inauguration of the new administration in 1861 until the 29th of June, 1864....He was an annual resigner in the Cabinet, having petulantly tendered his resignation in 1862, again in 1863, and again in 1864, when he was probably surprised by Mr. Lincoln's acceptance of it. It was soon after Lincoln's unanimous renomination, and when Chase's dream of succeeding Lincoln as President had perished, at least for the time. He was one of the strongest intellectual forces of the entire administration, but in politics he was a theorist and a dreamer and was unbalanced by overmastering ambition.
There is a question here historians do not often ask: Were these attributes of Chase genuine character deficits, or simply features that drive any public person in a democracy? Alexis de Tocqueville found Americans possessed by "this universal movement of ambition." In America, "[e]quality permits ambition to all," and even at the local level, ambition — "that desire for esteem, the need of real interests, the taste for power and for attention" — lies "at the center of the ordinary relations of life."
Nor was Abraham Lincoln free from ambition. In an illuminating comment, his old law partner William Herndon warned admirers of the Great Emancipator not to discount "his intense ambition." Lincoln's ambition "was never satisfied; in him it was consuming fire." Very nearly the same thing was said about every major political contemporary of Lincoln and Chase — Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade, Thaddeus Stevens, William Seward. If Chase was ambitious, it was an illness he caught from a great many otherwise historically well-regarded people around him.
Any practical understanding of Chase's career, legacy, and relationship to Lincoln must keep two large-scale factors in view. One is Chase's position as an intellectual force in the new Republican movement before the Civil War. The other is Lincoln's surprising willingness to lean on Chase's advice and counsel for at least the first two years of his administration.
ABOLITIONIST LAWYER
Salmon Chase was born in New Hampshire, just 13 months before Lincoln, and named for one of his uncles (who, like Lincoln, had been named for an Old Testament patriarch). After that, any near resemblance of the two ceased. Salmon Chase was properly schooled, baptized into the Episcopal Church, and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1826. He began reading law in the Washington office of Attorney General William Wirt, and it was there that he encountered the moral crisis that shaped his life.
In July 1826, a free black deckhand from the U.S. Navy frigate Macedonian named Gilbert Horton was seized in Washington as a runaway slave. To secure his freedom, the not-yet-20-something Chase signed a petition "praying for the abolition of slavery and the slave-trade in the District of Columbia." From that point, Chase steadily ascended through the ranks of the new abolition movement.
Chase established a law practice in Cincinnati in 1830, and published his first article in the North American Review, praising abolitionists as "the friends of freedom — universal freedom; who confine their regards...to no peculiar texture or color of the skin." In 1837, he served as counsel to Matilda Lawrence, another accused fugitive. In his defense plea, he formulated the argument that would guide him over the next 25 years: that slavery "can have no existence beyond the territorial limits of the state which sanctions it." In other words, freedom was the federal and constitutional rule, and slavery merely the local prerogative of the states that legalized it. Once Lawrence set foot in Ohio, she ceased to be a slave and could not be considered a fugitive.
His argument did not free Lawrence, but it became a staple of abolitionist reasoning that legalized slavery depended solely on the local ordinances of the Southern states — freedom was the rule everywhere else. Eventually, Chase made it a slogan: "Freedom is national; slavery only is local and sectional." Cross into a free state, and freedom became your status; move your farm and family into the Western territories, and you found that freedom was the rule there, too.
Over the next five years, Chase acquired so many fugitive cases that he became known as the "attorney-general for runaway [slaves]." In 1842 he was hired to represent John Van Zandt, an Ohio abolitionist who had assisted nine escapees from slavery in Kentucky. This time, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and Chase's plea in Van Zandt's defense made him nationally famous. "A slave," Chase declared, "is a person held, as property, by legalized force, against natural right." He even dared to cast doubt on the standing of Southern states' slavery statutes. Force, not law, is what makes "men property, for man is not, by nature, the subject of ownership....The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any inferior law which asserts that man is property."
Nevertheless, Chase's appeal for Van Zandt failed, driving him to join the new anti-slavery Liberty Party, and then the Free Soil Party. In 1849, Chase was elected as a Free Soiler to the United States Senate from Ohio. When the Republican Party was organized in 1854, Chase was elected the first Republican governor of the state. In 1858, he was the only prominent Republican to campaign personally for the Illinois Republican Party's longshot nominee for the Senate, Abraham Lincoln. Though Lincoln's bid failed, it formed in his mind a debt too great to repay. "Allow me...to thank you," Lincoln wrote to Chase the following April, "as being one of the very few distinguished men, whose sympathy we in Illinois did receive last year, of all those whose sympathy we thought we had reason to expect." Chase was, as Lincoln said to George Boutwell in 1861, "about one hundred and fifty to any other man's hundred."
This was not to say that Lincoln and Chase were interchangeable, even at that early point. In June 1859, Lincoln was worried about the potential political fallout of the Ohio state Republican convention's call to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. He warned Chase that "the cause of Republicanism is hopeless in Illinois, if it be in any way made responsible for that plank." And though Lincoln professed "a kind side" for Chase, it did not pay Chase any immediate dividends. Chase, one of the frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination in May 1860, slipped into a distant third place at the nominating convention behind William Seward and the ultimate surprise nominee — Lincoln himself.
Yet once elected to the presidency, Lincoln called Chase to a conference in January 1861 to say that he planned to nominate him as secretary of the Treasury. This surprised Chase, who had just been reelected to the Senate in 1860, and who expected that if he would be offered anything, it would be secretary of State. Even more surprising, the new governor of Ohio named Chase a delegate to the peace conference that met in Washington in February 1861 in a last-ditch effort to avert civil war. Chase was curiously conciliatory with the slaveholders: "Civil war!" he said, "let us not rush headlong into that unfathomable gulf." Rather than demand the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, Chase suggested compensating the owners of fugitives from the U.S. Treasury.
But by the time Lincoln was inaugurated president on March 4, all hope of appeasement had disappeared. Seven Southern states had formed a new slave republic, the Confederate States of America, and on March 6, Lincoln sent Chase's name to the Senate as his nominee for secretary of the Treasury. The two were in harness at last.
A WARTIME FISCAL STRATEGY
Or at least they appeared to be. Chase's first reaction to the creation of the Confederacy was to allow the South to "try the experiment of a separate existence" and see how long it lasted. Nevertheless, he soon swung behind Lincoln.
At the first meeting of the cabinet, Chase and Postmaster Montgomery Blair were the only members who insisted that Confederate demands for the surrender of Fort Sumter be resisted. Once the Confederates attacked Sumter a month later, Chase saw war as the only possible response. "The attack on Sumter," he wrote in retrospect, "left nothing practicable except the assertion of the rightful supremacy of the national Government over all parts of the Union." Such a war would bring the death of slavery. "Disunion," he warned his sister-in-law in New Orleans, "is abolition, and abolition through civil and servile war."
For the first two years of the war, Chase remained a close ally of Lincoln and a supporter of the president's policies. When dissent within the cabinet and rumors of corruption left Lincoln no choice in January 1862 but to dismiss Secretary of War Simon Cameron, it was Chase whom Lincoln deputized as the bearer of the bad news — despite Chase's sympathy with Cameron's call for enlisting fugitive slaves as Union soldiers. That May, when Lincoln's impatience with the slow pace of Major General George McClellan's campaign on the James River peninsula prompted the president to take personal command of a small expedition to land at Norfolk, it was Chase who accompanied him. And when Lincoln decided to marginalize McClellan by creating a new Union army in Virginia, he chose the anti-slavery Illinoisan John Pope, a Chase protégé. Chase urged Pope to pursue as radical an anti-slavery strategy as he dared at that moment. "If I were in the field," Chase assured Pope, "I would let every man understand that no man loyal to the Union can be a slave. We must come to this."
Chase's stance on the inevitability of slavery's abolition made him the most demanding voice on the subject in the cabinet. As early as November 1861, Chase was insisting that Lincoln had the constitutional authority to act directly against slavery "under the war power" — despite the fact that no one then had any clear notion of what, under the Constitution, a presidential "war power" might be. When Union forces occupied the South Carolina coastal zone around the Port Royal Sound, Chase encouraged the turnover of abandoned plantations to the slaves who had been left behind in order to prepare them for "self-support by their own industry hereafter." Ultimately, when Lincoln drafted an Emancipation Proclamation later in 1862, the only alteration he accepted to the proclamation's deliberately formal legal language was Chase's last-minute recommendation "that on an occasion of such interest," the insertion of "a solemn recognition of responsibility before men and before God" would be appropriate. This led Lincoln to close the proclamation by describing it as "an act of justice," and commending it to "the considerate judgement of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God."
Crucial for defeating the Confederacy was Lincoln's decision to give Chase a free hand in shaping the administration's fiscal policy. Lincoln described himself as "an Old Line Whig" in the mold of Henry Clay, and he pursued a Whiggish economic agenda that encompassed the triad of Clay's "American System": a national banking network to promote commerce, protective tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing, and government-funded infrastructure to support a market-based national economy. In this way, Lincoln can be seen as the heir to Alexander Hamilton's vision.
Chase, meanwhile, was reared in the economic school of Hamilton's great adversary, Thomas Jefferson. He was skeptical of government involvement in economic affairs, wary of banks, and indifferent to using tax support to connect producers and markets. He had opposed "a mere paper money system of currency," favored free trade over tariffs, and railed "against the frauds and undue expansions of banks."
The war's demands soon compelled Chase to support a more vigorous economic role for the federal government. The nation had only just emerged from a major economic downturn when the secession crisis erupted in December 1860. Interest rates on short-term Treasury notes soared to 12%, while the usual 6% bonds could only be sold at rates up to 11%. Within six months of taking office, Chase saw the war would cost at least $350 million before the fiscal year ended in mid-1862. As early as January 1862, Lincoln reported that Chase "has no money and tells me he can raise no more....The bottom is out of the tub." By 1864, Chase estimated that "the expenses of the Government" were reaching $66 million a month.
As a result, Chase shelved his personal hesitations. He imposed the highest tariff rates in American history; levied the first rudimentary income tax; oversaw the creation of a national banking system through the National Banking Act of 1863, which drew Northern banking houses into a cohesive network; and issued the first legal-tender paper currency, the so-called "greenbacks." The latter move galled Chase especially. "It is true I came with reluctance to the conclusion" that the greenbacks were "a necessity," he admitted, "but I came to it decidedly and I support it earnestly."
Chase's most dramatic turn in economic policy involved devising a borrowing strategy for the Lincoln administration. Just five months into his tenure, he held a summit with New York City's bankers, where he learned that they would extend to the administration no more than $150 million in loans. The bankers politely but firmly stated their "inability to take more bonds than their disposable capital allowed, without a prospect of an early sale and distribution."
Chase, however, discovered a solution through financier Jay Cooke. A fellow Ohioan, Cooke proposed issuing new bonds and notes for direct sale to the public. Chase soon named Cooke his "Special agent" for selling Treasury securities, including the creatively discounted "5-20" bonds that were sold in denominations as low as $50 and redeemable in five or 20 years. Together, Chase and Cooke persuaded not just bankers, but the American public to invest in victory for the Union and for Lincoln.
THE SPLIT WITH LINCOLN
And yet, by the end of 1862, the common purpose that united Lincoln and Chase was loosening. This was partly due to Chase's mounting impatience with Lincoln's zigzag approach to emancipation, and partly due to his own political ambitions.
In April of that year, Major General David Hunter, the military commandant at Port Royal, unilaterally issued an emancipation edict throughout the Union-occupied South Carolina coastal zone. Irritated at Hunter, Lincoln revoked the order. Chase protested: No action by Lincoln had "so sorely tried" him as "the nullifying of Hunter's proclamation." The president, however, was adamant: "No commanding general shall do such a thing upon my responsibility, without consulting me," he told Chase. And that was that.
Chase's discontent only grew when, during a meeting at the White House in August, Lincoln urged black leaders to agree to a program that would colonize freed slaves abroad. Chase was aghast: "How much better would be a manly protest against prejudice...against color! and a wise effort to give freedmen homes in America."
Then in May 1863, Lincoln approved the arrest of former Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham for an incendiary anti-war speech. He also endorsed a subsequent trial by military tribunal instead of civil court. Chase harbored no love for Vallandigham, but "[i]f Vallandigham violated any law he should have been arrested, tried, and convicted" in a civil court. "I have never myself been much afraid of words," he said. Better "to reply by augmented efforts in the service of the country rather than by arrest and imprisonment."
Making matters worse, Chase found Lincoln's management style grating. "We...who are called members of the Cabinet," Chase complained to Ohio senator John Sherman, "are in reality only separate heads of departments, meeting now and then for talk on whatever happens to come uppermost, not for grave consultation on matters concerning the salvation of the country." The administration amounted, in practice, to "a Heptarchy or seven Administrations — State, Treasury, War, Navy, Interior, Post Office, Law," with each secretary except that of War "left, almost absolutely to their several Heads, each of whom is expected to 'run his machine' as well as he can."
Above all, Chase resented the growing influence on Lincoln of the man occupying the job he himself coveted, Secretary of State William Seward. The elegant, raffish Seward appealed more to Lincoln's sensibilities than did the Treasury secretary's unsmiling idealism, especially as Seward endorsed Lincoln's caution in dealing with slavery. Chase imprudently began whispering to Republican congressmen that Seward was the "unseen hand" behind Lincoln's hesitations, "using the president as a puppet."
In December 1862, a Senate committee demanded a meeting with Lincoln, hoping to confront him with Chase's backstage accusations. Lincoln turned the tables on Chase by inviting the entire cabinet to the meeting and encouraging them to assure the senators that nothing ever occurred there to suppress "a reasonable discussion" of all issues. Leaving the meeting deeply embarrassed, Chase offered his resignation. Seward, it happened, had done the same, allowing Lincoln to refuse them both.
From that point, the Lincoln-Chase relationship ebbed. Lincoln stopped calling on Chase for independent tasks. Chase unwisely allowed Kansas senator Samuel Pomeroy to circulate a pamphlet in February 1864 calling on the Republican national committee to dump Lincoln from the upcoming presidential ticket and replace him with Chase. The Pomeroy Circular only further embarrassed Chase; after it appeared, he hastily wrote to Lincoln denying prior knowledge of its contents. "I fully concur with you," Lincoln coolly responded, "that neither of us can be justly held responsible for what our respective friends may do without our instigation or countenance." The incident caused Lincoln to set Chase down as a self-promoting meddler. Chase's head, Lincoln cuttingly remarked, "was so full of Presidential maggots he would never be able to get them out."
Finally, in June 1864, they quarreled over a patronage appointment. When Chase issued another resignation letter, Lincoln accepted it. "[Y]ou and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation," Lincoln replied, "which it seems cannot be overcome."
CHASE'S LEGACY
By that point, Chase had almost reconciled himself to dismissal. "I may have been too earnest and eager," he admitted, "while I thought him not earnest enough and too slow." Their personal connection had frayed. "I feel that I do not know him," Chase sighed.
Yet the chilliness between Chase and Lincoln did not abate their shared conviction about slavery. Some six months after accepting Chase's resignation, Lincoln nominated him to replace the infamous Roger Taney as chief justice of the Supreme Court, confident that a Chase Court would not overturn the Emancipation Proclamation or any of the other measures the president advanced to destroy slavery.
On the issues that mattered most to both, Chase indeed continued to stand with Lincoln. In the greatest decision Chase wrote for the Court, in Texas v. White, he condemned secession as an unconstitutional illusion. The states that composed the American republic had "entered into an indissoluble relation...[that] was final....There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States." Lincoln, had he still been alive, could hardly have said it better. In one of his last dissents, Chase opposed the Court's finding in the Slaughter-House Cases, an unhappy decision that unlocked a flood of judgments restricting the application of the 14th Amendment and opening the path that led to Plessy v. Ferguson.
At the same time, Chief Justice Chase remained perfectly willing to oppose Lincoln's views on some matters. Chase's discomfort with the military trial of Clement Vallandigham resurfaced after the close of the war in Ex parte Milligan. He wrote a concurring opinion to a decision invalidating the military tribunal that had condemned another Midwestern Democrat, Lambdin Milligan. Chase never fully reconciled himself to Lincoln's Whiggish economic ideas, and in Hepburn v. Griswold in 1870, Chase criticized the continued use of paper currency once the emergency of the war was over. Nor did Chase entirely abandon the fantasy of a presidential run until a stroke felled him in August 1870.
It was Salmon Chase's misfortune to stand, like so many others in the Civil War years, in the considerable shadow of Abraham Lincoln. An even greater misfortune overtook Chase when he allowed differences of strategy to weaken the vision of a free nation that animated both him and Lincoln. Still, after Chase's death from a second stroke in May 1873, even fellow justices like Samuel Miller, who had disagreed bitterly with him over Hepburn and found him "warped" by his aspirations for presidential grandeur, conceded that Chase "was a great man, and a better man than public life generally leaves one, after forty years."
It is impossible to overstate how much Lincoln's success depended on Chase's vital role as the administration's money-maker, and how much Chase's unceasing calls for a new racial order in American life provided a radical baseline from which Lincoln could operate. At the end of his life, Chase acknowledged that without Lincoln, the republic could not have survived the Civil War. "He was truth and simplicity personified," Chase told a Cincinnati reporter, "and unselfish to a fault; he was absolutely devoid of a sense of fear." At the same time, without Salmon Chase standing by him, we might remember Abraham Lincoln in a far less exalted light.