Leadership Quote by Salmon P. Chase

Resignation, in Salmon P. Chase's telling, isn’t a tantrum or a tactical feint. It’s a moral event: “grave” in the older sense of weighty, almost funereal. The line tries to reclaim resignation from the realm of personal pique and put it back in the ledger of public duty, where actions are supposed to cost something. Chase doesn’t merely warn against quitting; he warns against quitting in a way that keeps your options open. “With reserve” is the tell. He’s condemning the half-resignation: the letter written to spark applause, the threat issued to extract concessions, the exit staged so the door stays conveniently ajar.

The rhetorical move is blunt and effective: he defines the “right minded man” as someone who resigns only after “forethought,” and by that definition anyone resigning impulsively (or theatrically) is, by implication, not right minded at all. It’s both a standard and a weapon. In the 19th-century political world Chase inhabited, offices were fragile coalitions of ego, principle, patronage, and faction. Resignations could be leveraged like blackmail, especially in cabinet politics and party infighting. Chase himself, ambitious and often at odds with allies, understood how public virtue could be performed as strategy.

So the subtext is less a sermon than a preemptive strike against cynicism: if you resign, mean it; if you don’t mean it, don’t pretend your maneuver is conscience. He’s policing sincerity because he knows how easily “principle” becomes a costume in a power struggle.