Chapter 2

This movement in politics was one of prodigious difficulty and immeasurable responsibility. It was so felt to be by the prime actors in it, though with greatly varying largeness of survey and depth of insight. In the system of American politics it created as vast a disturbance as would a mutation of the earth's axis, or the displacement of the solar gravitation, in our natural world. This great transaction filled the twenty years of Mr. Chase's mature manhood, say, from the age of thirty to that of fifty years. He must be awarded the full credit of having understood, resolved upon, planned, organized, and executed, this political movement, and whether himself leading or coöperating or following in the array and march of events, his plan, his part, his service, were all for the cause, its prosperity, and its success. To one who considers this career, not as completed and triumphant, not with the glories of power, and dignities, and fame which attended it, not with the blessings of a liberated race, a consolidated Union, an ennobled nationality which receive the plaudits of his countrymen, but as its hazards and renunciations, its toils and its perils, showed at the outset, in contrast with the ease and splendor of his personal fortunes which adhesion to the political power of slavery seemed to insure to him, and then contemplates the promptness of his choice and the steadfastness of his perseverance, the impulse and the action seem to find a parallel in the life of the great Hebrew statesman, who, "_by faith_, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter," and "_by faith_, forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king."

The first half of this period of twenty years witnessed only the preliminaries, equally brave and sagacious, of agitation, promulgation of purposes and opinions, consultations, conventions, and political organizations, more and more comprehensive and effective. All this time Mr. Chase was simply a citizen, and apparently could expect no political station or authority till it should come from the prosperous fortunes of the party he was striving to create. Suddenly, by a surprising conjunction of circumstances he was lifted, at one bound, to the highest and widest sphere of influence, upon the opinion of the country, which our political establishment presents--I mean the Senate of the United States. The elective body, the Legislature of Ohio, was filled in almost equal numbers with Whigs and Democrats, but a handful of Liberty party men held the control to prevent or determine a majority. They elected Mr. Chase. The concurrence is similar, in its main features, to the election of Mr. Sumner to the Senate, two years afterward, in Massachusetts. Much criticism of such results is always and necessarily excited. The true interpretation of such transactions is simply a transition state from old to new politics, wherein party names and present interests are unchanged, but opinions and projects and prospects are taking a new shape, and the old mint, all at once, astonishes everybody by striking a new image and superscription, soon to be stamped upon the whole coinage. The part of Mr. Chase in this election, as of Mr. Sumner in his own, was elevated and without guile. His term in the Senate brought him to the year 1856, and was followed by two successive elections and four years' service as Governor of Ohio, and a reëlection to the Senate. In these high stations he added public authority to his opinions and purposes, and gained for them wider and wider influence, while he discharged all general senatorial duties, and official functions as Governor, with benefit to the legislation of the nation and to the administration of the State.

As the presidential election approached and the Republican party took the field with an assurance of assuming the administration of the Federal Government, and of meeting the weighty responsibility of the new political basis, the question of candidates absorbed the attention of the party, and attracted the interest of the whole country. When a new dynasty is to be enthroned, the _personality_ of the ruler is an element of the first importance. In the general judgment of the country, and equally to the apprehension of the mass of his own party and of its rival, Mr. Seward stood as the natural candidate, and upon manifold considerations. His unquestioned abilities, his undoubted fidelity, his vast services and wide following in the party, presented an unprecedented combination of political strength to obtain the nomination and carry the election, and of adequate faculties and authority with the people for the prosperous administration of the presidential office. Second only to Mr. Seward, in this general judgment of his countrymen, stood Mr. Chase, with just enough of preference for him, in some quarters, over Mr. Seward, upon limited and special considerations, to encourage that darling expedient of our politics, a resort to a _third_ candidate. This recourse was had, and Mr. Lincoln was nominated and elected.

The disclosure of Mr. Lincoln to the eyes of his countrymen as a possible, probable, actual candidate for the presidency came upon them with the suddenness and surprise of a revelation. His advent to power as the ruler of a great people, in the supreme juncture of their affairs, to be the head of the state among its tried and trusted statesmen, to subordinate and coördinate the pride and ambition of leaders, the passions and interests of the masses, and to guide the destinies of a nation whose institutions were all framed for obedience to law and perpetual domestic peace, through rebellion, revolt, and civil war; and to the subversion of the very order of society of a vast territory and a vast population, finds no parallel in history; and was a puzzle to all the astrologers and soothsayers. It has been said of George III.--whose narrow intellect and obstinate temper so greatly helped on the rebellion of our ancestors to our independence--it has been said of George III., that "it was his misfortune that, intended by nature to be a farmer, accident placed him on a throne." It was the happy fortune of the American people, that to the manifest advantages of freedom from jealousies of any rivals; and from commitment, by any record, to schemes or theories or sects or cabals, pursued by no hatreds, beguiled by no attachments, Mr. Lincoln added a vigorous, penetrating, and capacious intellect, and a noble, generous nature which filled his conduct of the Government, in small things and great, from beginning to end, "with malice to none and charity to all." These qualities were indispensable to the safety of the Government and to the prosperous issue of our civil war. In the great crisis of a nation struggling with rebellion, the presence or absence of these personal traits in a ruler may make the turning-point in the balance of its fate. Had Lincoln, in dealing with the administration of government during the late rebellion, insisted as George III. did, in his treatment of the American Revolution, upon "the right of employing as responsible advisers those only whom he personally liked, and who were ready to consult and execute his personal wishes," had he excluded from his counsels great statesmen like Seward and Chase, as King George did Fox and Burke, who can measure the dishonor, disorder, and disaster into which our affairs might have fallen? Such narrow intelligence and perversity are as little consistent with the true working of administration under our Constitution as they were under the British Constitution, and as little consonant with the sound sense as they are with the generous spirit of our people.

By the arrangement of his Cabinet, and his principal appointments for critical services, Mr. Lincoln showed at once that nature had fitted him for a ruler, and accident only had hid his earlier life in obscurity. I cannot hesitate to think that the presence of Mr. Seward and Mr. Chase in the great offices of State and Treasury, and their faithful concurrence in the public service and the public repute of the President's conduct of the Government, gave to the people all the benefits which might have justly been expected from the election of either to be himself the head of the Government and much else besides. I know of no warrant in the qualities of human nature, to have hoped that either of these great political leaders would have made as good a minister under the administration of the other, as President, as both of them did under the administration of Mr. Lincoln. I see nothing in Mr. Lincoln's great qualities and great authority with this people, which could have commensurately served our need in any place, in the conduct of affairs, except at their head.

The general importance, under a form of government where the confidence of the people is the breath of the life of executive authority, of filling the great offices of state with men who, besides possessing the requisite special faculties for their several departments and large general powers of mind for politics and policies, have also great repute with the party, and great credit with the country, was well understood by the President. He knew that the times needed, in the high places of government, men "who," in Bolingbroke's phrase, "had built about them the opinion of mankind which, fame after death, is superior strength and power in life."

Of the great abilities which Mr. Chase, in his administration of the Treasury, exhibited through the three arduous years of that public service, no question has ever been made. The exactions of the place knew no limits. A people, wholly unaccustomed to the pressure of taxation, and with an absolute horror of a national debt, was to be rapidly subjected to the first without stint, and to be buried under a mountain of the last. Taxes which should support military operations on the largest scale, and yet not break the back of industry which alone could pay them; loans, in every form that financial skill could devise, and to the farthest verge of the public credit; and, finally, the extreme resort of governments under the last stress and necessity, of the subversion of the legal tender, by the substitution of what has been aptly and accurately called the "coined credit" of the Government for its coined money--all these exigencies and all these expedients made up the daily problems of the Secretary's life. We may have some conception of the magnitude of these financial operations, by considering one of the subordinate contrivances required to give to the currency of the country the enormous volume and the ready circulation without which the tides of revenue and expenditure could not have maintained their flow. I refer to the transfer of the paper money of the country from the State to the national banks. This transaction, financially and politically, transcends in magnitude and difficulty, of itself alone, any single measure of administrative government found in our history, yet the conception, the plan, and the execution, under the conduct of Mr. Chase, took less time and raised less disturbance than it is the custom of our politics to accord to a change in our tariff or a modification of a commercial treaty. Another special instance of difficult and complicated administration was that of the renewal of the intercourse of trade, to follow closely the success of our arms, and subdue the interests of the recovered region to the requirements of the Government. But I cannot insist on details, where all was vast and surprising and prosperous. I hazard nothing in saying that the management of the finances of the civil war was the marvel of Europe and the admiration of our own people. For a great part of the wisdom, the courage, and the overwhelming force of will which carried us through the stress of this stormy sea, the country stands under deep obligations to Mr. Chase as its pilot through its fiscal perils and perplexities. Whether the genius of Hamilton, dealing with great difficulties and with small resources, transcended that of Chase, meeting the largest exigencies with great resources, is an unprofitable speculation. They stand together, in the judgment of their countrymen, the great financiers of our history.

A somewhat persistent discrepancy of feeling and opinion between the President and the Secretary, in regard to an important office in the public service, induced Mr. Chase to resign his portfolio, and Mr. Lincoln to acquiesce in his desire. No doubt, it is not wholly fortunate in our Government that the distribution of patronage, a mixed question of party organization and public service, should so often harass and embarrass administration, even in difficult and dangerous times. Mr. Lincoln's ludicrous simile is an incomparable description of the system as he found it. He said, at the outset of his administration, that "he was like a man letting rooms at one end of his house, while the other end was on fire." Some criticism of the Secretary's resignation and of the occasion of it, at the time, sought to impute to them consequences of personal acerbity between these eminent men, and the mischiefs of competing ambitions and discordant counsels for the public interests. But the appointment of Mr. Chase to the chief-justiceship of the United States silenced all this evil speech and evil surmise.

There is no doubt that Mr. Chase greatly desired this office, its dignity and durability both considered, the greatest gratification, to personal desires, and the worthiest in public service, and in public esteem, that our political establishment affords. Fortunate, indeed, is he who, in the estimate of the profession of the law, and in the general judgment of his countrymen, combines the great natural powers, the disciplined faculties, the large learning, the larger wisdom, the firm temper, the amiable serenity, the stainless purity, the sagacious statesmanship, the penetrating insight, which make up the qualities that should preside at this high altar of justice, and dispense to this great people the final decrees of a government "not of men, but of laws." To whatever President it comes, as a function of his supreme authority, to assign this great duty to the worthiest, there is given an opportunity of immeasurable honor for his own name, and of vast benefits to his countrymen, outlasting his own brief authority, and perpetuating its remembrance in the permanent records of justice, "the main interest of all human society," so long as it holds sway among men. John Adams, from the Declaration of Independence down, and with the singular felicity of his line of personal descendants, has many titles to renown, but by no act of his life has he done more to maintain the constituted liberties which he joined in declaring, or to confirm his own fame, than by giving to the United States the great Chief-Justice Marshall, to be to us, forever, through every storm that shall beset our ship of state--

"Like a great sea-mark, standing every flaw, And saving them that eye it."

In this disposition, Mr. Lincoln appointed Mr. Chase to the vacant seat, and the general voice recognized the great fitness of the selection.

I may be permitted to borrow from the well-considered and sober words of an eminent judge, the senior Associate on the bench of the Supreme Court--words that will carry weight with the country which mine could not--a judicial estimate of this selection. Mr. Justice Clifford says: "Appointed, as it were, by common consent, he seated himself easily and naturally in the chair of justice, and gracefully answered every demand upon the station, whether it had respect to the dignity of the office, or to the elevation of the individual character of the incumbent, or to his firmness, purity, or vigor of mind. From the first moment he drew the judicial robes around him he viewed all questions submitted to him as a judge in the calm atmosphere of the bench, and with the deliberate consideration of one who feels that he is determining issues for the remote and unknown future of a great people."

_Magistratus ostendit virum_--the magistracy shows out the man. A great office, by its great requirements and great opportunities, calls out and displays the great powers and rare qualities which, presumably, have raised the man to the place. Let us consider this last public service and last great station, as they exhibit Mr. Chase to a candid estimate.

And, first, I notice the conspicuous fitness for judicial service of the mental and moral constitution of the man. All through the heady contests of the vehement politics of his times, his share in them had embodied decision, moderation, serenity, and inflexible submission to reason as the master and ruler of all controversies. Force, fraud, cunning, and all lubric arts and artifices, even the beguilements of rhetoric, found no favor with him, as modes of warfare or means of victory. So far, then, from needing to lay down any weapons, or disuse any methods in which he was practised, or learn or assume new habits of mind or strange modes of reasoning, Mr. Chase, in the working of his intellect and the frame of his spirit, was always judicial.

It was not less fortunate for the prompt authority of his new station, so dependent upon the opinion of the country, that his credit for great abilities and capacity for large responsibilities was already established. Great repute, as well as essential character, is justly demanded for all elevated public stations, and especially for judicial office, whose prosperous service, in capital junctures, turns mainly on moral power with the community at large.

Both these preparations easily furnished the Chief-Justice with the requisite aptitude for the three relations, of prime importance, upon which his adequacy must finally be tested; I mean, his relation to the court as its presiding head, his relation to the profession as masters of the reason and debate over which the court is the arbiter, and his relation to the people and the State in the exercise of the critical constitutional duties of the court, as a coördinate department of the Government.

In a numerous court, that the Chief-Justice should have a prevalent and gracious authority, as first among equals, to adjust, arrange, and facilitate the coöperative working of its members, will not be doubted. For more than sixty years, at least, this court had felt this authority--_potens et lenis dominatio_--in the presence of the two celebrated Chief-Justices who filled out this long service. Their great experience and great age had supported, and general conformity of political feeling, if not opinion, on the bench, had assisted, this relation of the Chief-Justice to the court.

When Mr. Chase was called to this station, he found the bench filled with men of mark and credit, and his accession made an exactly equal division of the court between the creations of the old and of the new politics. In these circumstances the proper maintenance of the traditional relation of the Chief-Justice to the court was of much importance to its unbroken authority with the public. That it was so maintained was apparent to observation, and Mr. Justice Clifford, speaking for the court, has shown it in a most amiable light:

"Throughout his judicial career he always maintained that dignity of carriage and that calm, noble, and unostentatious presence that uniformly characterized his manners and deportment in the social circle; and, in his intercourse with his brethren, his suggestions were always couched in friendly terms, and were never marred by severity or harshness."

As for the judgment of the bar of the country, while it gave its full assent to the appointment of Mr. Chase, as an elevated and wise selection by the President, upon the general and public grounds which should always control, there was some hesitancy, on the part of the lawyers, as to the completeness of Mr. Chase's professional training, and the special aptitude of his intellect to thread the tangled mazes of affairs which form the body of private litigations. The doubt was neither unkind nor unnatural, and it was readily and gladly resolved under the patient and laborious application, and the accurate and discriminating investigation, with which the Chief-Justice handled the diversified subjects, and the manifold complexities, which were brought into judgment before him. In fact, the original dubitation had overlooked the earlier distinction of Mr. Chase at the bar in some most important forensic efforts, and had erred in comparing, for their estimate, Mr. Chase entering upon judicial employments, with his celebrated predecessors, as they showed themselves at the close, not at the outset, of their long judicial service. I feel no fear of dissent from the profession in saying that those who practised in the Circuit or in the Supreme Court while he presided, as well as the larger and widely-diffused body of lawyers who give competent and responsible study to the reports, recognize the force of his reason, the clearness of his perceptions, the candor of his opinions, and the lucid rhetoric of his judgments, as assuring his rank with the eminent judges of our own and the mother-country.

But, in the most imposing part of the jurisdiction and jurisprudence of the court; in its dominion over all that belongs to the law of nations, whether occupied with the weighty questions of peace and war, and the multitudinous disturbances of public and private law which follow the change from one to the other; or with the complications of foreign intercourse and commerce with all the world, which the genius of our people is constantly expanding; in its control, also, of the lesser public law of our political system, by which we are a nation of republics, where the bounds of State and Federal authority need constant exploration, and require accurate and circumspect adjustment; in its final arbitrament on all conflicts and encroachments by which the great coördinate departments of the Government are to be confined to their appropriate spheres; in that delicate and superb supremacy of judicial reason whereby the Constitution confides to the deliberations of this court the determination, even, of the legality of legislation, and trusts it, nevertheless, to abstain itself from law-making--in all these transcendent functions of the tribunal the preparation and the adequacy of the Chief-Justice were unquestioned.

Accordingly, we find in the few years of his service, before his decline in health, in the crowd of causes bred by the civil war, which pressed the court with novel embarrassments, and loaded it with unprecedented labors, that the Chief-Justice gave conspicuous evidence, in repeated instances, of that union of the faculties of a lawyer and a statesman, which alone can satisfy the exactions of this highest jurisdiction, unequaled and unexampled in any judicature in the world. To name these conspicuous causes merely, without unfolding them, would carry no impression; and time fails for any demonstrative criticism upon them.

There are two passages in the judicial service of Mr. Chase which, attracting great attention and exciting some difference of opinion at the time of the transactions, invite a brief consideration at your hands.