Salmon P. Chase Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Salmon Portland Chase was born on January 13, 1808, in Cornish, New Hampshire, the eighth of eleven children of Ithamar Chase and Janet Ralston Chase. After his father died when Salmon was a boy, he lived for a time in the household of his uncle, Philander Chase, an Episcopal bishop who was building institutions on the Ohio frontier. Those years in Ohio exposed him to the developing West and to reform-minded clergy. Chase returned east to complete his schooling and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1826. Drawn to the law, he studied in Washington, D.C., under William Wirt, a former U.S. Attorney General, and was admitted to the bar before settling in Cincinnati in 1830.

Law Practice and Antislavery Leadership
In Cincinnati, Chase built a reputation both as a meticulous legal scholar and as a public-spirited reformer. He compiled and published a multivolume digest of the Statutes of Ohio and of the Northwestern Territory, a reference work that enhanced his standing among lawyers and legislators. More defining was his commitment to antislavery advocacy. He defended African Americans and their allies in courts hostile to their cause, earning the sobriquet "attorney general" for fugitive slaves. His defense of John Van Zandt, sued under the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, went as far as the Supreme Court in 1847. Although he lost the case, his arguments crystallized a moral and constitutional critique of slavery's reach, and he increasingly allied himself with abolitionists such as Joshua R. Giddings and with antislavery politicians who sought to limit slavery's expansion.

From Free Soil to Republican Leadership
Chase helped organize the Liberty Party in the 1840s and then became one of the principal architects of the Free Soil Party in 1848, drafting platform language that linked free labor to democratic opportunity. The Ohio legislature elected him to the United States Senate in 1849, where he emerged as a leading foe of the Compromise of 1850's Fugitive Slave Law and, later, of Stephen A. Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1854 he coauthored the "Appeal of the Independent Democrats", with Charles Sumner, Joshua Giddings, Edward Wade, Gerrit Smith, and Alexander De Witt, mobilizing public resistance to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. As the Republican Party coalesced, he became one of its early standard-bearers, and Ohio voters elected him governor in 1855 and again in 1857. As governor, he pressed for fiscal reform, modernization, and educational improvements while keeping antislavery principles at the center of his politics. He briefly returned to the U.S. Senate in 1861 before entering the Lincoln Cabinet.

Secretary of the Treasury in the Civil War
Abraham Lincoln appointed Chase Secretary of the Treasury at the start of the Civil War. Faced with unprecedented financial demands, Chase stabilized federal credit and innovated boldly. Working with financiers such as Jay Cooke and with congressional allies including Ohioan John Sherman, he shepherded measures that created a national banking system, a uniform national currency ("greenbacks"), and a broad set of internal taxes, including the first federal income tax, to fund the Union war effort. He approved placing "In God We Trust" on coinage, reflecting wartime religious sentiment. His relations with other Cabinet members, notably William H. Seward and Edwin M. Stanton, and with the president were sometimes tense, especially over patronage and policy. After several pro forma offers to resign, he left the Treasury in June 1864. Despite political rivalry, he had briefly sought the presidency in 1864, aided by supporters such as Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy, Lincoln soon nominated him to succeed the late Roger B. Taney as Chief Justice of the United States, and the Senate confirmed him in December 1864.

Chief Justice of the United States
As Chief Justice from 1864 to 1873, Chase presided over a Court that confronted the constitutional aftermath of civil war. In Texas v. White (1869), he wrote for the Court that the Union is "indestructible" and that states could not secede, while recognizing Congress's authority to shape Reconstruction. The Court during his tenure decided major questions of civil liberties and national power, including Ex parte Milligan (1866), which limited the use of military tribunals against civilians where civil courts were open. In the Legal Tender Cases, Chase authored the opinion in Hepburn v. Griswold (1870), concluding that making paper money legal tender for preexisting debts exceeded congressional authority; a year later, after changes in Court personnel, the Court reversed course, and Chase dissented. He presided over the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in 1868, asserting the independence of the judiciary in procedural rulings while the Senate, led by figures such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens in the House, wrestled with the politics of Reconstruction. In 1865, he admitted John S. Rock as the first Black attorney to practice before the Supreme Court, a symbolic milestone consistent with his long antislavery commitments.

Presidential Ambitions and Reconstruction Politics
Chase never fully relinquished presidential ambitions. After Lincoln's assassination, he sought to shape Reconstruction around equal civil and political rights for Black Americans, including Black male suffrage. He entertained support from disparate political quarters in 1868, when Democrats looked for a figure who opposed Radical Republican excesses yet supported broad amnesty; Republicans ultimately nominated Ulysses S. Grant, and Democrats turned to Horatio Seymour. Chase's advocacy of universal suffrage and constitutionalism sometimes left him at odds with both parties, but he remained a national figure whose views were courted by reformers and editors such as Horace Greeley.

Personal Life
Chase married three times, each wife dying young, a sequence of losses that deepened his religious sense and personal resolve. His most prominent child, Kate Chase, became one of the capital's most influential hostesses during the Lincoln years and married the Rhode Island industrialist and politician William Sprague. Her salons drew Cabinet secretaries like Seward and Stanton, senators such as Sumner, and generals including Ulysses S. Grant, enhancing Chase's political network. Another daughter, Janet "Nettie" Chase, later married into the Hoyt family of New York. Despite the public glamour surrounding Kate, the family endured strains that mirrored the era's political turbulence.

Final Years and Legacy
Chase suffered a stroke in 1870 but continued to serve, traveling to hear cases and to speak for equal rights and sound finance. He died on May 7, 1873, in New York City at the home of his daughter Nettie. He was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, the city where his legal and political life had truly begun. Chase's legacy is twofold. As Lincoln's Treasury Secretary, he constructed the financial architecture, greenbacks, national banks, and a modern system of internal revenue, that enabled the Union to prevail and that undergirded American finance thereafter. As Chief Justice, he sought to reconcile national authority with civil liberty and to anchor the postwar constitutional order in the principles of Union and equality. His career intersected with the defining figures of his age, Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Seward, Stanton, Sumner, Douglas, Taney, and, through decisions and institutions, helped shape the nation they contested.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Salmon, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Justice - Freedom - Honesty & Integrity - Equality.