Cam-Che: Cameron through Cheney

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


CAMERON, SIMON (March 8, 1799-June 26, 1889), senator, secretary of war, diplomat, was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, of Scotch and German ancestry, the son of Charles and Martha (Pfoutz) Cameron. Reverses and misfortunes in his father's family cast him upon the world early and he was obliged to apprentice himself for a time in a printing business in Harrisburg. In January 1821, at the solicitation of Samuel D. Ingham, he went to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he edited the Bucks County Messenger, soon merged with the Doylestown Democrat as the Bucks County Democrat. On the decease of this paper at the close of the year 1821, he returned to Harrisburg for a short time as partner of Charles Mowry in the management of the Pennsylvania Intelligencer, but during 1822 he went to Washington to study national political movements, obtained work in the printing house of Gales & Seaton who printed the congressional debates, and spent his spare time in the houses of Congress and in making useful friends, among them Monroe and Calhoun. About 1824 he returned to Harrisburg, bought the Republican, and was soon exercising considerable influence in state and national politics. He was then, as later, a staunch advocate of the protective tariff. The remunerative position of state printer was given him and in 1826 he was made adjutant-general of the state. Newspaper editing did not hold him long. As soon as his position was established and his purse sufficient, he left the press and entered pursuits which promised greater financial gain. It was the era of internal improvements, and the ambitious young Cameron was quick to see money-making possibilities. He became a contractor for the construction of canals and began a network of railroads in Pennsylvania which he later united into the Northern Central Railroad. In 1832 he set up the Bank of Middletown with himself as cashier, and soon afterward entered the iron business. Subsequently he also engaged in insurance and became interested in other projects. Notwithstanding the diversity of these undertakings Cameron managed them with skill and success and amassed a fortune. At no time, however, did he lose his interest in state and national politics. It was partly through his efforts that the state legislature in 1830 was induced to head a movement for Jackson's renomination, and two years later he aided materially in having Van Buren nominated for vice-president in place of Calhoun. It was also largely through Cameron's maneuvering that James Buchanan was sent to the Senate in 1833 just at the time when he despaired of political opportunities and was seriously considering a return to the practise of law. Prior to 1838 Cameron had held no public office except the position of adjutant-general of Pennsylvania, but in that year he received an appointment as commissioner to settle certain claims of the Winnebago Indians, a place he acquired with Buchanan's assistance. Considerable scandal arose from his activities because of his adjusting the claims by the payment of notes on his own bank, an arrangement which enriched himself and earned for him the derisive sobriquet, "The Great Winnebago Chief." Following this episode, Cameron's political influence decreased for a time, but actually his career as a great politician was only beginning. In 1845 by a coalition of Whigs, Native Americans, and Protectionist Democrats he won the Senate seat vacated by Buchanan who resigned to enter Polk's cabinet. Buchanan was irritated at Cameron's defeat of the regular party candidate, George Woodward, a free-trader, and the two men parted political company. Alexander K. McClure, an old political foe, has written that from 1845 until Cameron's death nearly a half-century later, "There is not an important complete chapter of political history in the State that can be written with the omission of his defeats or triumphs, and even after his death until the present time [1905] no important chapter of political history can be fully written without recognizing his successors and assigns in politics as leading or controlling factors" (Old Time Nates of Pennsylvania, 1905, I, 98). Still, the victory of 1845 did not crown Cameron as the political czar of his state. He had won by fusion methods and incurred bitter Democratic opposition. In 1849 he was unable to command Democratic support and failed to effect a strong enough coalition in the legislature to win a reelection. His first term in the Senate is of interest principally because in 1846 he made the one important speech of his career. It was in opposition to the Walker revenue tariff. Another attempt in 1855 to return to the Senate with Know-Nothing support also resulted in failure. Cameron then decided to cast his lot with the new Republican party and in 1856 actively supported Fremont for President. The following year Republican backing and three Democratic votes, obtained by bargaining, enabled him to return to the Senate. There he became an implacable foe of President Buchanan. Cameron's political somersaulting was now at an end; he remained a Republican for the rest of his life and gave much of his time and energy to the building up of a smooth running party machine in Pennsylvania. In the management and control of it he was unequalled. His leadership was sometimes challenged; he suffered subsequent defeats; but no one ever dislodged him from control of the organization. In 1860 it helped him to make a presentable showing in the Republican national convention as a candidate for president. He could not be nominated, but his henchmen traded Pennsylvania votes for Lincoln in exchange for a cabinet post for Cameron. After much hesitation Lincoln abided by the bargain his managers had made without his consent. Cameron resigned his seat in the Senate and became secretary of war. The choice proved a most unfortunate one. Although Cameron was an able business executive, political considerations too often governed his judgments and his actions in departmental administration. He dispensed civil and military offices and army contracts in a notorious fashion; corruption became rampant. Although it does not appear that he enriched himself, there were many who did profit shamefully. Complaints against his management and his favoritism poured into Washington almost daily and demands for his removal were persistent. In an effort to retrieve popular support he began to advocate the freeing and arming of slaves, policies which were rapidly gaining public favor, but which were not then acceptable to the President. So embarrassing did the Secretary's presence become that Lincoln in January 1862 appointed him minister to Russia to be rid of him. Three months later the House of Representatives censured his conduct in the handling of contracts. Cameron had no intention of remaining long in Russia, however, and was back in the United States in time to try for the Senate again in 1863. He failed of election, but in 1867, after a struggle of unexampled desperation, was successful. For ten years thereafter the Senator reigned supreme in Pennsylvania, and in 1873 returned to the Senate without a contest. He also became a power in Grant's administration, controlled the patronage of his state, and in 1876 succeeded in having his son, James Donald Cameron [q.v.], appointed secretary of war. When President Hayes in 1877 refused to continue the son in that office, Cameron resigned his own place in the Senate upon receiving assurances from the subservient Pennsylvania legislature that it would elect his son as his successor. With this bold stroke the Senator closed his remarkable political career. At the same time he handed over to his son the control of the state machine. No politician of his generation understood the science of politics better than Simon Cameron; none enjoyed greater power. He studied and understood individuals who could be of service to him; he knew the precise value of men and could marshal them when occasion arose. His methods were often circuitous, the means employed were often questionable, but the end in view was always clear. Cameron was of broad intellectual force, if not of fine learning; he could employ his faculties to the utmost and meet each new problem in an eminently practical way. He could be patient and conservative, or keen and aggressive, as the situation demanded. Tradition and precedent bore lightly upon him and were promptly brushed aside when new conditions and necessities arose. He lived in a time when men firmly believed that "to the victor belongs the spoils, "and to this doctrine he gladly subscribed. By patronage he built up a political despotism in Pennsylvania; with it he rewarded his friends and punished his foes. It was commonly said that he never forgot a friend or an enemy. In his senatorial career there was little that was statesmanlike or brilliant. He had no aptitude for Websterian oratory or flights of verbal fancy. He said little in public that was vital, but did much in private that was practical, far-seeing, and astute. His business in the Senate, as elsewhere, was politics, and he governed his conduct accordingly. In appearance he was tall and slim, with a "marked Scotch face," keen gray eyes, a high broad forehead crowned with a luxuriant crop of hair. His manners and speech were kindly and gentle, and his genial, democratic manner won many people to him. He prided himself on possessing the doggedness and determination of his German forebears and the aggressiveness of the "Scotch rebels." His fighting qualities were great. Time dealt lightly with him and at the end of his half-century of political activity and struggle, he was hale and hearty as ever. For twelve years after leaving the Senate he enjoyed freedom from the cares and perplexities of political life on his farm at Donegal Springs, and saw his son three times elected to the place he had surrendered to him. In his ninety-first year, rich in honors and fortune, he passed away. His wife Margaret Brua died several years before, leaving five children.

[The Coryell and Buchanan papers in the Pennsylvania Historical Society contain a number of Cameron letters relating to his earlier years. Some others written in later life are to be found in the Library of Congress, in the manuscript collections of his political contemporaries. The files of the War Department and the Official Records contain most of his war correspondence, and the "Report of the Committee on Contracts" (House Report No. 2, 37 Congress, 2 Session) reveals much regarding his deficiencies as secretary of war. The most useful accounts of his life are in Alexander K. McClure, Old Time Notes of Pennsylvania (1905) and Abraham Lincoln and Men of War Time (1892).These are critical, but not unfriendly. Standard histories and the biographies of public men of Cameron's time also are helpful. Additional information is to be found in A.H. Meneely, The War Department, 1861 (1928); Ellis and Evans, History of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (1883); New York Times, March 13, 14, 1877, June 3, 1878, June 27, 1889; Pittsburgh Dispatch, June 27, 1889 ; Harrisburg Daily Patriot, June 27, 1889; Philadelphia Press, March 13, 14, 15, 1877, January 20, June 27, 1889.]

A. H. M.


CAMPBELL, Tunis Gulic, 1812-1891, African American abolitionist, Georgia political leader, moral reformer, temperance activist and lecturer.  Lectured with Frederick Douglass. Worked to help resettle recently-freed slaves near Port Royal, South Carolina.  Later was Bureau agent for Freedman’s Bureau on Georgia Islands.  Resisted acts to reverse gains made by African Americans by President Johnson administration during Reconstruction. (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 2, p. 500; American National Biography, 2002, Vol. 4, p. 299.)


CAPRON, Effingham L., 1791-1851, New England, Smithfield, Rhode Island, Uxbridge, Massachusetts, Society of Friends, Quaker, philanthropist, abolitionist.  Vice president, 1833-1837, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.  Vice president, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1836-1840, 1840-1860.  (Drake, 1950, pp. 137-140; Abolitionist, Vol. I, No. XII, December, 1833).


CARTWRIGHT, Peter, 1785-1872, born in Virginia, went to Kentucky in 1790, then to Illinois in 1824, state senator in Ohio (Dumond, 1961, p. 93; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 544-545; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 546). He published several pamphlets, of which his “Controversy with the Devil” (1853) was perhaps the most famous. “The Autobiography of the Reverend Peter Cartwright” (New York, 1856) was edited by William P. Strickland. See also Dr. Abel Stevens' “Observations on Dr. Cartwright,” and his many books treating of the history of Methodism, and “The Backwoods Preacher” (London, 1869).

CARTWRIGHT, PETER (September 1, 1785-September 25, 1872), Methodist clergyman, was born in Amherst County, Virginia. His father, Justinian Cartwright, a Revolutionary soldier, "was quite a poor man and not so much a bad as a good-for-nothing kind of man" (Mrs. Susannah Johnson, Recollections of the Reverend John Johnson, Nashville, 1869, p. 32). He married a widow Wilcox, a devout Methodist but a termagant. Among her numerous children beside Peter, one son, Edmund, became a local Methodist preacher, another, John, was hanged for murder, while a daughter, Polly, led a life of debauchery. About the year 1790 Justinian moved with his family into the wilds of Kentucky and ultimately located, in 1793, in Logan County on the extreme southern edge of the state in a section known as Rogue's Harbor from the number of escaped convicts and desperadoes who congregated there. Although the more respectable settlers eventually organized into a band called the Regulators and after several pitched battles drove out the Rogues, life in this region continued turbulent and unrestrained. Here Peter grew up, a tall and lusty youth, devoted to horse-racing, card-playing, and dancing. He was almost totally without education save for the religious instruction received from his mother which made a deep impression upon his ardently emotional nature. In his sixteenth year he fell into a conviction of sin soon followed by conversion at a camp meeting and by admission into the Methodist Church. In the service of that robust communion he was thenceforth able to express the energy which had formerly gone into more purely pagan activities. Almost immediately after his own conversion he began to convert the lads of the neighborhood with such success that in the next year (1802) he was given an exhorter's license. A little later his family moved into Lewiston County where for a time Peter attended Brown's Academy, but doctrinal disputes with the teacher and the other pupils soon interrupted his schooling and he returned to the more congenial work of exhortation. In October 1803 when a little over eighteen he became a traveling preacher. His early itineraries successively included the Red River Circuit in Kentucky, the Waynesville Circuit which covered a part of Tennessee, the Salt River and Shelbyville Circuit which extended into Indiana, and the Scioto Circuit in Ohio. Through all this wide territory, "the Kentucky Boy," as Peter was called, became a well-known and popular figure. His self-reliance, his readiness with tongue and fist, his quick sense of humor, all made him dear to the hearts of the frontier. As presiding elder he had the noted William M'Kendree [q.v.], who instructed him in English grammar and laid out for him a course of study and reading which the young disciple faithfully pursued with much profit. In 1806 Peter was ordained a deacon by Bishop Francis Asbury [q.v.], and two years later, at the age of twenty-three, he was ordained an elder. On August 18, 1808, he was married to Frances Gaines, a girl of nineteen, because, as he wrote, "After mature deliberation and prayer. I thought it was my duty to marry." He continued his work as a circuit-rider mainly in Kentucky and Tennessee until 1824 when, actuated largely by hatred of slavery, he had himself transferred to the Sangamon Circuit in Illinois, with which state he was thenceforth identified.

For almost another fifty years "the Kentucky Boy," now known as "Uncle Peter," remained a lea der in the religious activities of the West. His personality was almost perfectly adapted to the demands of frontier life. Early inured to physical hardship and to poverty, delighting in herculean labors, ruggedly honest and shrewdly humorous, indifferent to refinement of thought or manners, he made his Methodism a joyous battlefield against the devil and rival sects. Baptist, Presbyterian, and Shaker he overwhelmed with torrents of abuse, ridicule, and scorn. Sin (consisting in unbelief, drinking, gambling, or the wearing of ruffles) and salvation (consisting of conversion to the Church) gave him a dual theme which he manipulated with telling force. This simple ethical code, this narrow and intense religion, above all this thunderous fighting spirit literally swept his hearers off their feet, and at his camp-meetings hundreds were felled to the ground beneath his eloquence and lay prostrate until brought to the mourners' seats, whence he led them singing and shouting into the courts of heaven. If, as not infrequently happened, intruders attempted to break up his meetings, he was quick to meet force with force and seems to have been uniformly victorious in these physical encounters. There was a point of emotional excess, however, at which Cartwright's common sense revolted. For the nervous disorders which too often accompanied his meetings,-"the jerks," "the runnings and barkings," the trances and prolonged illnesses-he assumed no responsibility, regarding them as due to the wiles of the devil, who thus sought to discredit his work. So he continued on his way, a mighty figure among the Methodists of Illinois. He was for forty-five years a presiding elder, attended forty-six meetings of the Illinois Conference, and was twelve times elected to the General Conference. He was twice a member of the Illinois legislature. The one defeat of his career came in 1846 when he ran for the United States Congress against Abraham Lincoln, attempting in vain to make the issue turn upon Lincoln's alleged "infidelism." This political campaign Cartwright forgot to mention in his noted Autobiography, published in 1857, a work naively self-glorifying, and unsatisfactory as a record of his life, but written with great verve, revealing the author's extraordinary ability as a raconteur. His later work, Fifty Years as a Presiding Elder (1871), edited by the Reverend W. S. Hooper, is considerably less interesting but contains Cartwright's celebrated letter to the devil (a polemic against Calvinism). With advancing years, although he contributed liberally to Methodist colleges and publishing houses, Cartwright found some difficulty in adapting himself to the more intellectual interests of the newer Methodism. He deplored the passing of the good old days and earnestly prayed that "camp-meetings, class-meetings, prayer-meetings, and love-feasts" might "eternally" continue. Hale and hearty he himself remained: his magnificent body, supporting a massive head, with beady black eyes and disheveled hair, hardly knew a day's ill health until extreme old age. From the time of his coming to Illinois he made his home at Pleasant Hills, where in the intervals of religious duty he farmed, and, also, reared a numerous progeny. He lived to welcome nine children, fifty grandchildren, thirty-seven greatgrandchildren, and seven great-great-grandchildren.

[In addition to the works mentioned above see Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the M. E. Church for the Year 1873, pp. 115-17; Abel Stevens, A Compendious History of American Methodism (1868), pp. 482-86; M. H. Chamberlin, "Reverend Peter Cartwright, D.D.," in Trans. of the Illinois State Historical Society, 1902, pp. 47-56.]

E. S. B.


CARY, Mary Ann Shadd, 1823-1893, African American, abolitionist leader. (Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 446-447; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 2, p. 596)


CHACE, Elizabeth Buffum, 1806-1899, Society of Friends, Quaker, women’s suffrage leader, penal reform leader, abolitionist leader.  Co-founder of the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Fall River, Massachusetts, 1836.  Member of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, founded by her father, Arnold Buffum, in 1832.  Contributed articles for abolitionist newspaper, Liberator.  Her home was a station on the Underground Railroad.  She resigned from the Society of Friends in 1843 as a result of its continuing pro-slavery position.  At the end of the Civil War, she was elected Vice President of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  She published her memoirs in 1891, Anti-Slavery Reminiscences. Her grandfather, parents, husband, two sisters, and two brothers-in-law were all abolitionists.  (Drake, 1950, p. 158; Mabee, 1970, pp. 225, 280, 290, 424n54; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 44, 218; Van Broekhoven, 2002, pp. 22, 37, 49-52, 58, 67, 69-71, 73, 159, 171, 191-192, 208-209, 219-221, 232n5; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 2, Pt. 1, p. 584; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 158-159; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 4, p. 609)

CHACE, ELIZABETH BUFFUM (December 9, 1806-December 12, 1899), anti-slavery and woman-suffrage advocate, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the second daughter of Arnold Buffum [q.v.] and Rebecca (Gould) Buffum. She passed her childhood in Smithfield, Rhode Island, and in Connecticut, where she attended the common schools, later studying at the Friends' School, Providence. In June 1828, at Fall River, Massachusetts, she married Samuel Buffington Chace, a cotton manufacturer of that city, like herself an orthodox Friend. Under her father's influence she early interested herself in anti-slavery activities, and in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, whither the Chaces removed in 1840, they conducted an Underground Railroad station. Mrs. Chace gave valued counsel to officers of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and was their agent for  arranging meetings in Rhode Island, entertaining in her home Garrison, Phillips, Frederick Douglass, and other lecturers. In 1843 she resigned from the Society of Friends, alleging their indifference to the abolition cause. Thereafter she was unaffiliated with any religious sect; she retained belief in the "Inner Light," but her views became increasingly liberal. For some years she was a spiritualist, reading assiduously the Banner of Light and the writings of Andrew Jackson Davis, but in later life spiritualism ceased to influence her. She helped to sponsor the Woman's Rights convention held in 1850 in Worcester. With Mrs. Paulina W. Davis she organized, in 1868, the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, of which she was president from 1870 till her death. For many years she was also an officer of the American Woman Suffrage Association. She worked ardently for suffrage, writing, speaking, and securing petitions for legislative action. Temperance and humanitarian activities also engaged her. In 1870 her efforts secured the passage of a state law providing for a board of women visitors to inspect Rhode Island penal and correctional institutions where women or children were confined; on this board she served for several years. At the International Congress on the Prevention and Repression of Crime, Including Penal Reformatory Treatment, in London (1872), she was a delegate and active participant. She brought about the establishment of the Rhode Island Home and School for Dependent Children (1884), and several years later reform of abuses in its management. Her wide range of interests brought her many friends, including Julia Ward Howe, Moncure D. Conway, John Weiss (Shakespearean scholar), Thomas Davidson, and Andrew Carnegie. She contributed to the New England Magazine and extensively to the Providence Journal. Her summer home at Wianno, on Cape Cod, became a literary center for reformers. After 1893 feebleness confined her to her home at Central Falls, where she died. The mother of ten children, she was the affectionate center of her home, which, amid all her activities, she never neglected. Three children only survived her; of these Lillie (Mrs. John C. Wyman) became her mother's biographer, and Arnold B. Chace chancellor of Brown University.

[Sources are Mrs. Chace's vivid Anti-Slavery Reminiscences (1891) and Elizabeth Buffum Chace (2 vols., 1914), by L. B. C. Wyman and A. C. Wyman. A shorter sketch appears in L. B. C. Wyman's American Chivalry (1913), pp. 35-50.]

R. S. B.


CHANDLER, Elizabeth Margaret, 1807-1834, poet, Society of Friends, Quaker, abolitionist.  Member of the Free Produce Society.  Co-founded the first anti-slavery society in Michigan, the Logan Female Anti-Slavery Society, in Lenawee County, Michigan Territory, October 8, 1832, with Laura Haviland.  Writer for Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation after 1829.  In 1836, Chandler’s anti-slavery writings were published. (Dumond, 1961, pp. 279-281, 350-351; Van Broekhoven, 2002, pp. 90-91, 97, 111, 113, 120; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 573; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 613; Mason, Martha J. Heringa, ed. Remember the Distance That Divides Us. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2004). A collection of her poems and essays was edited, with a memoir, by Benjamin Lundy (Philadelphia, 1836). 

CHANDLER, ELIZABETH MARGARET (December 24, 1807-November 2, 1834), author, born at Centre, Delaware, was the youngest of the three children of Thomas Chandler, descended from English Quaker settlers along the Delaware River, and his wife, Margaret Evans of Burlington, New Jersey. Her mother died while Elizabeth was a baby, and Thomas Chandler removed to Philadelphia, where he placed his daughter in the care of her grandmother Evans. Elizabeth attended schools managed by the Society of Friends and was strictly trained in religion by her grandmother. When she was nine her father died, and this loss, combined with her religious education, made her unchildishly reflective. At thirteen she left school, but she had acquired the habits of reading and writing, which were her favorite occupations throughout her short life. Friends published some of her essays and poems, anonymously, for she was timid and feared publicity.  At sixteen she was writing much for the press and her articles were copied by various newspapers. She had never cared for the amusements of her day and seldom went out except to meetings of the Friends. She had become much interested in philanthropy, especially in the anti-slavery cause, and most of her writing was now concerning the wrongs of slavery. Her best known poem, "The Slave Ship," published in the Casket, received a prize and was copied by Benjamin Lundy, editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, who asked its author to become a regular contributor. Many of her poems on slavery appeared in the Genius, among them "The Wife's Lament," "The Recaptured Slave," and "The Slave's Appeal." In 1829 she took charge of the "female department" of the Genius, where she soon published an "Appeal to the Ladies of the United States" concerning slavery, which is said to have caused some women to emancipate their slaves. In 1830 she went with her brother and aunt to make a new home in the Territory of Michigan. There on a farm, which they christened "Hazelbank," in Lenawee County, she continued by mail her editorial work for the Genius. Her work was interrupted by an illness, called "remittent fever," which after some months ended in her death. A portrait of her shows a full oval face, with large dark eyes under heavy arching brows, dark hair piled high on her head, a bow mouth, and an expression of happy alertness not suggestive of her serious nature. Two volumes of her writings were published after her death: Essays, Philanthropic and Moral (1836) and Poetical Works of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler; with a Memoir of Her Life and Character (1836), by Benjamin Lundy. Her work is inspired by a burning moral purpose, but viewed as literature, her best poetry is not her slavery verse but that expressing her love of beauty and tenderness for associations, as in "The Brandywine," "Schuylkill," "The Sunset Hour," and "Summer Morning."

[Benjamin Lundy, ante; Rufus W. Griswold, The Female Poets of America (1859); Philadelphia American Sentinel, November 28, 1834.

J S.G.B.


CHANDLER, Zachariah, 1813-1879, statesman.  Mayor of Detroit, 1851-1852.  U.S. Senator 1857-1975, 1879.  Secretary of the Interior, 1875-1877. Active in Underground Railroad in Detroit area.  Helped organize the Republican Party in 1854.  Introduced Confiscation Bill in Senate, July 1861.  Was a leading Radical Republican Senator.  Chandler was a vigorous opponent of slavery.  He opposed the Dred Scott U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the Fugitive Slave Law.  In 1858, opposed the admission of Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 574-575; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 618; Congressional Globe)

CHANDLER, ZACHARIAH (December 10, 1813- November 1, 1879), senator, Republican boss, was born at Bedford, New Hampshire. His father, Samuel Chandler, was a descendant of William Chandler, who emigrated from England and settled at Roxbury, Massachusetts, about 1637 (George Chandler, The Chandler Family, 1872, p. 818). His mother, Margaret Orr, was the oldest daughter of Col. John Orr. He received a common school education, and in 1833 removed to Detroit, where he opened a general store, and eventually through trade, banking, and land speculation became one of the richest men in Michigan. On December 10, 1844, he was married to Letitia Grace Douglass of New York. He made campaign speeches for Taylor in 1848, served for a year (1851-52) as mayor of Detroit, and in 1852 offered himself as a Whig candidate for governor and was defeated. He was one of the signers of the call for the meeting at Jackson, Michigan, July 6, 1854, which launched the Republican party, and "the leading spirit" of the Buffalo convention called to aid free state migration to Kansas (George F. Hoar, Autobiography, 1903, II, 75). In 1856 he was a delegate to the Republican national convention at Pittsburgh, and was made a member of the national committee of the party. In January 1857, he was elected to the United States Senate in succession to Lewis Cass [q.v.], and held his seat until March 3, 1875. In the Senate he allied himself with the radical anti-slavery element of the Republicans, although hostile to Charles Sumner, and was later recognized as one of the most outspoken enemies of secession. From March 1861 to 1875 he was chairman of the Committee on Commerce, to whose jurisdiction the appropriations for rivers and harbors, later known as the "pork barrel," were assigned. At the outbreak of the Civil War he exerted himself to raise and equip the first regiment of Michigan volunteers. He was a member of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War; initiated acts for the collection and administration of abandoned property in the South (March 3, 1863) and for the further regulation of intercourse with the insurrectionary states (July 2, 1864); bitterly denounced the incompetence of McClellan in a speech at Jackson, Michigan (July 6, 1862) which he regarded as one of his most important public services; supported the proposal of a national bank; voted for greenbacks as an emergency measure while strongly resisting inflation of the currency; and approved of the Reconstruction acts although criticizing them as in some respects too lax. His aggressive Republicanism was matched by his clamorous jingoism in regard to Great Britain; on January 15, 1866, he offered a resolution, which was tabled, for non-intercourse with Great Britain for its refusal to entertain the Alabama claims, and in 1867, when the question of recognizing Abyssinia as a belligerent in its war with Great Britain was under consideration, he submitted (November 29) a resolution "recognizing to Abyssinia the same rights which the British had recognized to the Confederacy" (Congressional Globe, 40 Congress, 1 Sess., p. 810). He was one of the promoters and most influential members of the Republican Congressional Committee, serving as its chairman in the campaigns of 1868 and 1876. From the beginning of his senatorial career he used his Federal patronage to strengthen his political power, and by methods openly partisan and despotic if not actually corrupt obtained control of the Republican machine in Michigan, and was for years the undisputed boss of his party in the state. The Democratic landslide of 1874, however, broke his power, and he was defeated for reelection to the Senate. In October 1875, he became secretary of the interior, retaining the office until the close of Grant's second administration. His reorganization of the department was attended by wholesale dismissals for alleged dishonesty or incompetence. He was again elected to the Senate in February 1879, to fill a vacancy caused by the resignation of Isaac P. Christiancy [q.v.].

[Aside from the Biography Congress Dir. (1913), the Journals of the Senate, the Congressional Globe, and Congressional Record, the chief source is the anonymous Zachariah Chandler: an Outline Sketch of His Life and Public Services (1880), which is supplemented in a number of details by Wilmer C. Harris, Public Life of Zachariah Chandler, 1811-75 (1917), a doctoral dissertation of the University of Chicago.]

W.M.


CHANNING, Reverend William Ellery, 1780-1842, Unitarian clergyman, orator, writer, strong opponent of slavery.  Active in the peace, temperance, and educational reform movements.  Published anti-slavery works, The Slavery Question, in 1839, Emancipation in 1840, and The Duty of the Free States, in 1842. (Brown, 1956; Channing, “Slavery,” 1836; Dumond, 1961, pp. 273, 352-353; Filler, 1960, pp. 33, 34, 59, 80, 88, 93, 101, 128, 141, 184; Goodell, 1852, pp. 419, 560; Mabee, 1970, pp. 15, 16, 43, 51, 79, 105, 384n14; Pease, 1965, pp. xxxix-xl, lvii, lx, 114-118, 240-245; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 43, 46, 162, 169; Sorin, 1971, p. 72; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 576-577; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 2, Pt. 2, pp. 4-7; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 160-163; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 4, p. 680)

CHANNING, WILLIAM ELLERY (April 7, 1780-October 2, 1842), Unitarian clergyman, was born in Newport, Rhode Island. His ancestors on both sides were of the best New England stock. The earliest American Channing was John, who came from Dorsetshire, England, in 1711. His wife was Mary. Antram, a fellow passenger on the voyage hither. Their son John became a prosperous merchant of Newport, Rhode Island, but lost his fortune in later life. John's son William, born in Newport in 1751, was graduated from Princeton College in 1769 and entered at once upon the study of the law. In 1773 he married Lucy, daughter of William Ellery [q.v.], who was graduated from Harvard College in 1747. The son of this marriage inherited thus a double academic tradition; on one side the stern Presbyterianism of Princeton, on the other the already threatening liberalism of Harvard. The father would have sent the boy to his own alma mater, but the stronger influence of the family connection with Cambridge decided the matter. The boy's maternal grandmother, Ann Remington, was of Cambridge origin, and Francis. Dana, chief justice of Massachusetts, whose wife was a sister of Lucy Ellery, was living there. The boy was received into this uncle's family and spent the four years of his college life there, enjoying the benefits of a refined home but deprived of the rough-and-tumble discipline of dormitory life. Contemporary accounts describe him as a serious, over-thoughtful youth, inclined to self-inspection but acutely sensitive to the conditions of life about him. After graduation from college in 1798 he accepted a position as tutor in the family of David Meade Randolph in Richmond, Virginia, and spent a year and a half there. Up to this time he had been in good health, fond of exercise, and a cheerful if rather serious companion. During this Southern residence among people of alien sympathies he acquired habits of overwork and ascetic discipline which undermined his health. Returning to Newport he applied himself with characteristic fervor to the study of theology. In 1802 he was called to Cambridge as "Regent" of Harvard College, a kind of proctorial office which left him abundant leisure for his chosen studies. In 1814 at the age of thirty-four he married his cousin Ruth Gibbs. On June 1, 1803, he was ordained and installed as minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston, and continued in this pastorate until his death in 1842. Channing's semi-invalidism accounts in a large measure for the social aloofness which was one of his great limitations. He was compelled to husband his physical energy very carefully, and he was shielded by his wife and by his admiring friends from many of the ruder contacts with the world. Only a strong will prevented him from becoming a recluse, and he constantly struggled, not always with conspicuous success, against a valetudinarian habit.

On the pedestal of the statue of Channing in the Public Garden of Boston is the inscription, "He breathed into theology a humane spirit." This expresses his real contribution to theology. He had no novelties of doctrine to propose. He was no innovator. He accepted historic Christianity as a way of life and was eager only to persuade others to walk in it. He was by nature a Broad Churchman of the type common in the Church of England. It is one of the ironies of history that he should have had an important part in some of the bitterest religious and political controversies of his time. A man whose tem ·per was altogether catholic was forced by circumstances to appear as the standard bearer of a new sect.

The "Unitarian Controversy" in which the young minister of the Federal Street Church was destined to take a prominent part was the result of forces which had long been working among the Congregational churches of New England. There had come to be Calvinists, moderate Calvinists, Armenians, and even -some ministers darkly suspected of Arianism. About 1815 the differences became acute and the orthodox party, alarmed at the progress of "heresy," insisted upon a thorough house-cleaning. "If Socinians and Arians are among us," they said, '·'let them show their colors!”

The challenge was promptly accepted, and the word "Unitarian" became henceforth the rallying point for the gathering opposition. New England was in a welter of theological pamphleteering at just the time when Channing was maturing his own thought up on religion. His importance lies in the fact that he refused to identify himself with any of the numerous shades of opinion in the community about him. He committed what, in the eyes of his critics, was the unpardonable sin of doing his own thinking. Starting with a profound conviction of the sufficiency of the Christian Scriptures as the guide of faith, he sought there a basis for the creed of Calvinism in which he had been reared. A "jealous''-- God; a mankind conceived in iniquity; the vicarious sacrifice of an innocent victim as atonement for "sin" in which man's will had no part; election by grace:-for all these Channing searched the Scriptures in vain. He did not enter the controversy by the barren method of textual criticism, but by the preaching of a gospel founded upon precisely opposite ideas: the goodness of God, the essential virtue and perfectibility of man, and the freedom of the will with its consequent responsibility for action. The effect of his preaching and writing was to bring to a focus all the unrest and dissatisfaction that had long been gathering within the sects, more especially among the Congregationalists.

The name "Unitarian" was borrowed from England but it was some time before the independent thinkers of America could bring themselves to adopt it. Channing himself hesitated, fearing that if a new party with a distinctive name were to be formed, it would soon produce a "Unitarian orthodoxy" with all the limitations and petty tyrannies of the old. He deplored the necessity of organizing a new denomination. "I desire," he said, "to escape the narrow walls of a particular church, and to live under the open sky, looking far and wide and seeing with my own eyes and hearing with my own ears." Soon, however, he recognized that the movement had gone beyond his control and then he not only threw himself heartily into it, but became its acknowledged leader. In 1819 he preached a sermon defining the position of the Unitarian party and defending their right to Christian fellowship. The disruption that followed grieved him, but he accepted it as inevitable. In the following year, 1820, he organized the Berry Street Conference of liberal ministers, at a meeting of which in May 1825 there was organized the American Unitarian Association. The first number of the Christian Register, the weekly unofficial organ of the Unitarian denomination; appeared in 1821. Associations and publications alike became vehicles for Channing's thought. "Channing Unitarianism" came ·to be and has remained the recognized term for that form of religious liberalism which, while unwavering in its assertion of the right of the human reason as a part of the essential dignity of human nature, still clung fondly to the supernatural element of the Christian tradition.

Channing's objection to the Trinitarian orthodoxy of the time was not so much to its doctrine about the nature of the Godhead, as to its view of the nature of man. This he made clear in his epoch-making sermon, "The Moral Argument against Calvinism." The idea that human nature was essentially depraved and incapable of natural growth into goodness was abhorrent to him.  His conception of Christ linked him with Arians like John Milton. He did not reject the New Testament miracles, but they became less and less important to him as evidences of the truth of Christianity.

Those who heard Channing preach testify to the arresting quality of his voice and the charm of his manner. His style was unadorned by illustration. To the modern reader he seems unnecessarily didactic, but this was a characteristic which did not impress his contemporaries. He steadily grew away from the stilted manner of his earlier discourses. There are few of his sermons which do not have their moments of real eloquence.

But though he attained a place of great power as a preacher, it was not from the pulpit of the Federal Street Church that he exerted his widest influence upon his generation. In 1822 the state of his health required a prolonged vacation in Europe. After his return, Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett, himself a man of distinction in the Unitarian body, became his colleague and took upon himself an increasing part of the ministerial work. From that time Channing addressed the public directly through the press. His essays on Milton, Fenelon, and Napoleon had a wide circulation. In his address on Self-Culture he made a plea for adult education, denying the academic distinction between cultural and vocational studies and insisting on the possibility of attaining true culture by means of one's vocation intelligently pursued. It is interesting, as illustrating the sweep of Channing's mind, to find him in this address delivered in 1838 advocating the policy of setting apart the funds derived from the sale of public lands to support public education.

The influence of Channing on American literature was very direct. The term "Channing Unitarians," while not precise when applied to a theological party, was very apt when applied to the group of New England writers who flourished in the middle of the nineteenth century. Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes were all closely associated with the Unitarian movement, and acknowledged their indebtedness to Channing. If "he breathed into theology a humane spirit" it may with equal truth be said that he breathed into literature a religious spirit.

Channing's Remarks on American Literature, published in 1830, is still worth reading. He defines literature as "the expression of a nation's mind in writing." Then he criticizes the tendency among American writers to imitate English models rather than to find inspiration in what is characteristic of their own land. American literature must become national instead of colonial. The time has come for a literary Declaration of Independence. "We think that the history of the human race is to be rewritten. Men imbued with the prejudices which thrive under aristocracies and state religions cannot understand it. . . . It seems to us that in literature immense work is yet to be done. The most interesting questions of mankind are yet in debate. Great principles are yet to be settled in criticism, in morals, and in politics; and above all, the true character of religion is to be rescued from the disguises and corruptions of ages. We want a reformation .... The part which this country is to bear in that intellectual reform we presume not to predict. We feel, however, that if true to itself, it will have the glory and happiness of giving new impulses to the human mind. This is our cherished hope. We should have no heart to encourage native literature did We not hope that it would be instinct with a new spirit. We cannot admit the thought that this country is to be only a repetition of the old world" (Works, 1903 edition, p. 134).

To those who are familiar only with Channing's sermons there is something amusing in his serious denial of the charge that he cherished political ambitions and was desirous of becoming a member of Congress. But he never looked upon politics with indifference. All questions were to him moral questions. Politics was the native air he breathed in childhood. His father, William Channing, was a politician so successful that he was at the same time attorney-general of Rhode Island and United States district attorney. His grandfather, William Ellery, whose companionship he enjoyed to middle life, was one of the most ardent of the Sons of Liberty and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. His classmate and intimate friend, Judge Story, tells of Channing's intense interest in political questions while in college. During the exciting year 1798, Channing secured a meeting of his fellow students in Harvard "for the purpose of expressing their opinions on the existing crisis in public affairs." The youthful politician was given the principal part at Commencement and assigned the subject "The Present Age" with the stipulation that all reference to present politics should be avoided. Channing resented the restriction and won the plaudits of the audience by stopping in the midst of his address and declaiming, "But that I am forbid I could a tale unfold that would harrow up your souls." His early associations were with the Federalists. His family was connected with the Cabots, the Lees, Jacksons, and Lowells whose names counted for much in the society of those days. George Cabot, the leader of the New England Federalists and president of the Hartford convention, was a friend for whom he cherished the most profound respect. Nevertheless, the trend of his own thought allied him with Jefferson rather than with Hamilton, and he soon outgrew fears of the "Jacobins." His account of the failure of the Federalist party and the reasons for it is full of discriminating sympathy. "A purer party than the Federalists, we believe, never existed under any government." But their fear of the French Revolution destroyed their confidence in their own institutions. "We apprehend that it is possible to make experience too much our guide .... There are seasons in human affairs of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when in truth to dare is the highest wisdom" (Ibid., p. 641).

Unlike the members of the society in which he lived, Channing was conscious of the tremendous revolutionary forces which were at work. He distinguished between the outer and the inner revolution, and his aim was to make the outer revolution peaceful and beneficial, by the timely release of the moral forces which he believed to be stored up in the individual soul. This is emphasized in his pamphlets and addresses on the slavery question. Slavery, he insisted, is an unspeakable evil. But so also is war and of all wars the most dreadful to contemplate is a civil war. He could not dismiss as did many abolitionists the possibility of a war between the states. His residence in Virginia had given him a deep respect for the courage of the Southerners and their willingness to fight in defense of state rights. In his discussions of slavery he addressed himself to the conscience of the South rather than to the New England conscience. He was attacked from both sides, but his addresses did much to prepare people to understand and follow Abraham Lincoln. (See his Slavery, 1835; The Abolitionist, 1836; Open Letter to Henry Clay, 1837; Duty of the Free States, 1842.)

In the modern movement against war, Channing may be counted as a pioneer. He began with an outspoken sermon against the War of 1812. In this he voiced the general feeling of Massachusetts. The great aim of his essay on Napoleon was to destroy the romantic glamour that invests the successful warrior. The Massachusetts Peace Society was organized in his study. His lecture on War delivered in 1838 is almost Tolstoyan in its anti-militarism. Unlike Tolstoy, however, he could not follow literally the injunction "Resist not evil." He admitted the right of a nation to use force in self-defense, but insisted that it must be as carefully defined by law as the similar right of an individual. It is possible for a nation to commit murder.

In his discussion of temperance, the condition of laborers, and public education, Channing was clearly in advance of his time. His viewpoint was surprisingly anticipatory of the thought of present-day social workers. Intemperance he treated as a vice for which the community was largely responsible. The law might properly be invoked to prohibit the sale of intoxicants as of other harmful drugs, but improvements in hygiene, food, and recreation were more needed. "I have insisted on the importance of increasing the innocent gratifications in a community. Let us become more cheerful and we shall become a more temperate people" (Ibid., p. 112). In prophetic words, he warns the advocates of temperance against the attempt to coerce. "We w ant public opinion to bear on temperance, but to act rationally, generously and not passionately, tyrannically and with a spirit of persecution. Men cannot be driven into temperance" (Ibid., p. 116).

[Wm. Henry Channing, Life of Wm. Ellery Channing (1848; Centenary ed., 1880); John White Chadwick, Wm. Ellery Channing, Master of Religion (1903); Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Reminiscences of Reverend Wm. Ellery Channing 1880); Chas. Wm. Eliot, Four American Leaders (1906); Ezra Stiles Gannett, An Address at the Funeral of Wm. Ellery Channing (1842).]

S.M.C.


CHAPMAN, Maria Weston, 1806-1885, educator, writer, newspaper editor, prominent abolitionist leader, reformer.  Advocate of immediate, uncompensated emancipation.  Editor of the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberty Bell.  Also helped to edit William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator.  Co-founded and edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard.  Leader and founder of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), which she founded and organized with twelve other women, including three of her sisters.  The Society worked to educate Boston’s African American community and to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.  In 1840, Chapman was elected to the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  She was Councillor of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society from 1841-1865.  Her husband was prominent abolitionist Henry Grafton Chapman. (Dumond, 1961, p. 273; Filler, 1960, pp. 55, 76, 129, 143, 184; Mabee, 1970, pp. 62, 68, 72, 80, 105, 249, 259, 274; Pease, 1965, pp. xliv-l, li, lii, lxx, 205-212; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 199, 367, 402; Van Broekhoven, 2002, pp. 97, 119, 123, 135, 137, 173, 185, 190-191, 206-208; Weston, “How Can I Help Abolish Slavery?, or Councels to the Newly Converted,” New York, 1855; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 581; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 2, Pt. 2, pp. 19-20; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 163-164; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 4, p. 710; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 315)

CHAPMAN, MARIA WESTON (July 25, 1806-July 12, 1885), reformer, daughter of Warren and Anne (Bates) Weston, was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, of Pilgrim descent. She was married in 1830 to Henry Grafton Chapman, a Boston merchant. Her husband's parents were enthusiastic abolitionists, and in 1834 Maria Weston Chapman went into the movement. She became the soul of the Boston female Anti-Slavery Society, editing (1836-40) its reports published annually under the title Right and Wrong in Boston. Her services to Garrison were said to have been inestimable, her cooperation with him perfect. She was present at the meeting in Boston in. 1835 at which Garrison was mobbed, and it was to her house that the meeting adjourned. Of the Boston gathering she said that when the women left the hall a roar of rage and contempt went up which increased when it was evident that they meant to walk in a regular procession, "each with a colored friend." The next year she spoke for the first time in her life in a public meeting, the day before Pennsylvania Hall was destroyed. She became one of the editors of the Non-Resistant, and, with Edmund Quincy, she edited the Liberator at various times during Garrison's illness or absence. In 1840 she was made a member of the executive committee of the Anti-Slavery Society, with Lucretia Mott and Lydia Maria Child, and in the same year, the Massachusetts Society chose her as one of its delegates to the World's Convention. In 1842 her husband died. In the two months after his death, she was very busy with the Anti-Slavery Fair, in supporting the Latimer fugitive slave case agitation and with writing almost weekly for the Liberator. She edited the Liberty Bell (1839-46).

She published Songs of the Free, and Hymns of Christian Freedom (1836) and How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery (1855), and in 1877 edited, with a memoir, the autobiography of Harriet Martineau, whom she had known for many years.

[Wm. Lloyd Garrison, the Story of His Life, Told by His Children (1885-89); files of the Liberty Bell, Liberator, Right and Wrong in Boston.]

M.A.K.


CHAPMAN, Mary G., leader, Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS). (Yellin, 1994)


CHAPMAN, William M., abolitionist, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.


CHASE, Salmon Portland, 1808-1873, statesman, Governor of Ohio, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, abolitionist, member, Liberty Party, Free Soil Party, Anti-Slavery Republican Party.  “A slave is a person held, as property, by legalized force, against natural right.” – Chase.

“The constitution found slavery, and left it, a state institution—the creature and dependant of state law—wholly local in its existence and character.  It did not make it a national institution… Why, then, fellow-citizens, are we now appealing to you?...Why is it that the whole nation is moved, as with a mighty wind, by the discussion of the questions involved in the great issue now made up between liberty and slavery?  It is, fellow citizens—and we beg you to mark this—it is because slavery has overleaped its prescribed limits and usurped the control of the national government.  We ask you to acquaint yourselves fully with the details and particulars belonging to the topics which we have briefly touched, and we do not doubt that you will concur with us in believing that the honor, the welfare, the safety of our country imperiously require the absolute and unqualified divorce of the government from slavery.”

“Having resolved on my political course, I devoted all the time and means I could command to the work of spreading the principles and building up the organization of the party of constitutional freedom then inaugurated.  Sometimes, indeed, all I could do seemed insignificant, while the labors I had to perform, the demands upon my very limited resources by necessary contributions, taxed severely all my ability… It seems to me now, on looking back, that I could not help working if I would, and that I was just as really called in the course of Providence to my labors for human freedom as ever any other laborer in the great field of the world was called to his appointed work.”

(Blue, 2005, pp. 19, 30, 34, 61, 70-73, 76-78, 84, 123, 124, 177, 178, 209, 220, 225, 226, 228, 247, 248, 259; Dumond, 1961; Filler, 1960, pp. 142, 176, 187, 197-198, 229, 246; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 4-5, 8-9, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 33-36, 61-64, 67, 68, 70-72, 76, 87, 89, 94, 118, 129, 136, 156, 165, 166, 168-169, 177, 187, 191, 193, 195-196, 224, 228, 248; Pease, 1965, pp. 384-394; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 46, 56, 58, 136, 173, 298, 353-354, 421, 655-656; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 585-588; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 2, Pt. 2, p. 34; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 4, p. 739; Hart, Albert Bushnell, Salmon Portland Chase, 1899).

CHASE, SALMON PORTLAND (January 13, 1808-May 7, 1873), statesman, secretary of the treasury under Lincoln, and chief justice during Reconstruction, was born at Cornish, New Hampshire. His line can be traced through nine generations to Thomas Chase of Chesham, England, and through six generations to the American emigrant, Aquila Chase, who settled at Newbury, Massachusetts, about 1640. From Newbury the Chases moved to Sutton, Massachusetts, and later to Cornish, a frontier community on the Connecticut River. The Cornish farmer, Ithamar Chase, father of Salmon, held various state and local offices and was in politics a Federalist; the mother, Janette Ralston, was a woman of vigorous Scotch ancestry. Salmon was the eighth of eleven children. In his childhood the family moved to Keene, New Hampshire, where Ithamar became a tavern keeper. The boy received his early training in the Keene district school and in a private school kept by a Mr. Dunham at Windsor, Vermont.

The death of his father occurred when the boy was nine years old, and shortly after this he was placed under the stern guidance of his uncle, Philander Chase [q.v.], bishop of Ohio, a vigorous pioneer leader in the Protestant Episcopal Church. For two years, the boy lived with the bishop at Worthington, near Columbus, Ohio, entering the church school which the bishop conducted. His days at Worthington were devoted to classical studies, and he was at this time confirmed in the Episcopal Church; but his uncle's hope of making him an Episcopal clergyman was not realized. When Bishop Chase became president of Cincinnati College in the fall of 1821 Salmon entered the college; and a very serious student he seems to have been, to judge by his own statement that he had little to do with college pranks but spent much time "in reading, either under the bishop's direction, or at my own will." "I used to meditate a great deal," he added, "on religious topics; for my sentiments of religious obligation and . . . responsibility were profound" (Schuckers, p. 16). Leaving Cincinnati after less than a year, he spent some months in preparatory study, and then entered as a junior in Dartmouth College, from which he graduated without marked distinction in 1826. He then solicited the influence of another uncle, Dudley Chase, United States senator from Vermont, for a government clerkship; but, this being refused, he conducted a school for boys in Washington, having at one time under his charge sons of all but one of the members of John Quincy Adams's cabinet. In Washington and Baltimore he frequently visited in the cultured home of William Wirt [q.v.]; and his otherwise somber diary glows with youthful romance and sprightliness as it records the evenings spent in the company of the charming Wirt daughters.

Having determined upon his career, he read law under the nominal supervision of Wirt; and with scant legal preparation he was admitted to the bar on December 14, 1829. The following year he settled in Cincinnati, where in addition to legal duties he was soon occupied with anti-slavery activities and with various literary ventures. In 1830 he assisted in organizing the Cincinnati Lyceum which presented a series of lectures, and became himself a lecturer and magazine contributor. In his lecture-essay on the "Life and Character of Henry Brougham" (North American Review, July 1831) his reforming instinct was manifest in his pointed comments on legal abuses of the time. While waiting for clients the lawyer-author sought unsuccessfully to establish a literary magazine for the West, and then turned his energies into the compilation of the Statutes of Ohio (3 volumes, Cinn., 1833-35), a standard work which required heavy labor in the preparation and proved most serviceable to lawyers.

The events of Chase's private life are intimately related in his diary and family memoranda. Three marriages are recorded: the first to Katherine Jane Garniss (March 4, 1834), who died December 1, 1835; the second to Eliza Ann Smith (September 26, 1839), who died September 29, 1845; and the third to Sarah Bella Dunlop Ludlow (November 6, 1846), who died January 13, 1852. Six daughters were born to him, of whom four died when very young. The births and deaths of his children, and the loss of his wives, are recorded in his diary with a revealing tenderness and a grief which takes refuge in religion. Two children reached maturity: the brilliant Katherine, daughter of his second wife, who became the wife of Governor William Sprague of Rhode Island, and Janette, daughter of his third wife, who became Mrs. William S. Hoyt of New York City.

Despite scornful opposition, Chase prominently defended escaping slaves, and was called the "attorney-general for runaway negroes." He labored unsuccessfully to obtain the release of Matilda, a slave woman befriended by J. G. Birney; and when Birney himself was indicted for harboring a fugitive, Chase carried the case to the supreme court of Ohio, where he made a vigorous argument, contending that Matilda, having been voluntarily brought into a free state by her master, became free (Birney vs.Ohio, 8 Ohio, 230). Unwilling to commit itself to the Chase doctrine with which it was evidently impressed, the court directed the dismissal of the indictment against Birney on merely technical grounds. On another occasion Chase defended Vanzandt (the original of John Van Trompe in Uncle Tom's Cabin), prosecuted for aiding the escape of slaves from Kentucky. This case was appealed to the United States Supreme Court, and in its argument Chase was associated with William H. Seward, both giving their services without compensation. Chase contended that the federal government under the Constitution had "nothing whatever to do, directly, with slavery"; that "no claim to persons as property can be maintained under any ... law of the United States"; and that the fugitive-slave act of 1793 was unconstitutional. The case was lost for his client; but it did much to bring Chase into prominence.

In politics Chase subordinated party interests to the central issue of slavery. Though formerly a Whig, he joined the Liberty party after the nomination of Birney in 1840; and in various of the conventions of this party, state and national, he was an outstanding leader. The resolutions of the Buffalo convention of August 1843 came chiefly from his pen; and the Southern and Western Liberty Convention at Cincinnati in 1845 (designed as a rallying point for anti-slavery sentiment in the Middle West) was mainly his work. He was active in the Free Soil movement of 1848, presiding at the Buffalo convention, and drafting in part the platform which declared for "no more slave states and no more slave territory." The power of the new party in the nation at large was shown by the defeat of Cass, whose choice had angered the anti-slavery Democrats; and in the Ohio legislature the Free Soilers used their balance of power in alliance with the Democrats to elect Chase to the United States Senate (February 22, 1849). By this time he had come to realize the weakness of a party grounded on a purely antislavery basis, and was turning his attention to the possibility of capturing the Democratic party for the anti-slavery cause.

Chase entered upon his senatorial career at the time of the mid-century crisis over the slavery question. Unwilling to temporize on this issue, and resenting the Southern leanings of the Democratic party, he opposed the compromise measures of 1850; and in 1854 he issued his "Appeal of the Independent Democrats," denouncing Douglas 's Nebraska bill as a "criminal betrayal of precious rights," warning the people that the "dearest interests of freedom and the Union" were in "imminent peril," and imploring all Christians to protest against "this enormous crime." In this "Appeal" we have the key-note of Chase's senatorial policy-a policy of writing slavery restrictions into national law wherever possible, and of paving the way for a new Democratic party that would be free from pro-slavery "domination." He introduced an amendment to Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska bill affirming the right of the people of a territory to prohibit slavery if they wished (as seemed to be implied in Douglas's "popular sovereignty" doctrine); but the amendment was emphatically rejected.

In the altered political horizon produced by the dissolution of the Whig organization and the rise of the Republican party, Chase naturally cast his lot with the Republicans. Meeting in Columbus in July 1855 the new party (perhaps best designated as an "anti-Nebraska" party) nominated Chase as governor; and in a triangular contest in which he had to combat the old Whigs and the old-line Democrats, while suffering embarrassment from his Know-Nothing friends, he was victorious. In 1857 he was reelected as Republican governor; and by this time he had become committed to the new party. As governor his administration was embarrassed by interstate conflicts over the fugitive-slave question, by a threat of Governor Wise of Virginia to invade Ohio in order to suppress alleged attempts to rescue John Brown (to which Chase sent a vigorous reply), and by corruption in the office of state treasurer. One of his achievements as governor was a reorganization of the militia system which added greatly to the state's military preparedness in 1861.

In 1856 Chase was an avowed aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination; but he did not even command the support of the full Ohio delegation, and his position at Philadelphia was much weaker than that of Fremont. Again in 1860 his wide prestige and his consistent record of anti-slavery leadership caused him to be prominently mentioned for the presidency; but his expected strength did not materialize in the convention at Chicago, since the Ohio delegation was again divided, and the firmness of his outspoken opinions caused him to be rejected from the standpoint of "availability." With only 49 votes out of 465 on the first ballot, and with dwindling support as the voting proceeded, his friends gave up the struggle in his behalf; and when the break for Lincoln became apparent, they threw their votes to the Illinois candidate, thus putting Chase in favor with the incoming administration.

When Virginia, in an effort to avert impending war, called the Peace Convention at Washington in February 1861 Chase attended as one of the Ohio commissioners; but he refused to compromise as to slavery extension, and his speeches in the convention, though disclaiming any intention to invade state rights, probably tended to confirm the Southerners' worst fears.

Chase was again chosen United States senator in 1860, but resigned to become Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, which office he held from March 1861 until July 1864. As director of the country's finances during the Civil War it was his task to borrow money from reluctant bankers and investors; to labor with congressional committees in the formulation of financial legislation; to devise remedial measures for a deranged currency; to make forecasts and prepare estimates in days when financial responsibility was diffused and scientific budgets were unknown; to trim the sails of fiscal policy to political winds; to market the huge loans which constituted the chief reliance of an improvident government; and to supervise the enforcement of unusual laws, such as that which provided for the seizure of captured and abandoned property in the South. The low state of public credit was reflected in the suspension of specie payments at the close of the year 1861; the high interest rate ( over seven per cent) on government loans; the marketing of the bonds at a discount; the difficulty of obtaining loans even on these unfavorable terms and the height and instability of the premium on gold. Chase was fortunate in having the valuable assistance of Jay Cooke who, as "financier of the Civil War," performed the same kind of service in marketing bonds that Robert Morris and Benjamin Franklin did for the Revolutionary War. When the bill to provide for immense issues of paper money with the legal tender feature was under consideration in Congress, Chase at first disapproved, endeavoring to obtain support among bankers for his national banking system; but when this support failed he grew non-committal and later gave a reluctant approval. The country was thus saddled with the "greenback" problem without such active opposition as his judgment would have dictated. The national banking system, first established by law on February 25, 1863, was originated by Chase, who formally submitted his proposal in December 1862 in order to increase the sale of government bonds, improve the currency by providing reliable bank notes backed by government security, and suppress the notorious evils of state bank notes. This was perhaps his most important piece of constructive statesmanship.

On the major questions of the war Chase was called upon, as a member of the President's official family, to assist in the formulation of policies. He favored, in a qualified manner, the provisioning of Fort Sumter; urged the confiscation of "rebel" property; approved the admission of West Virginia (the legality and wisdom of which was doubted by certain members of the cabinet); gave reluctant consent to the surrender of Mason and Slidell; urged McClellan's dismissal; approved Lincoln's suspension of the habeas corpus privilege, and, in general gave support to those measures which were directed toward a vigorous prosecution of the war. The closing paragraph in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, invoking the "gracious favor of Almighty God," was penned by him; but he considered the President's policy of liberation weak, and did not approve the exceptions of whole states and large districts from the proclamation as issued. Chase never had that easy comradeship with Lincoln which Seward had; and the President never got on well with his minister of finance. To Chase Lincoln seemed to lack force; and he frequently complained of the chief's lax administration. He spoke with disparagement of the "so-called cabinet," considered its meetings "useless," and privately expressed distrust of the President's whole manner of conducting the public business. Often he was at odds with his colleagues, and many difficulties arose because of the presence of both Seward and Chase in the President's household-Seward the easy-going opportunist, and Chase the unbending apostle of righteousness and reform. In December 1862 the most serious cabinet crisis of Lincoln's administration arose when, in a Republican caucus of the upper House, certain radical senators, partisans of Chase, expressed lack of confidence in the President and demanded a "reconstruction" of the cabinet, by which was intended primarily the resignation of Seward. One of the senators thus wrote of the designs of the Chase men: "Their game was to drive all the cabinet out then force upon him [the President] the recall of Mr. Chase as Premier, and form a cabinet of ultra men around him" (Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 1925, I, 604). Lincoln handled the situation by arranging a meeting in which the intriguing senators were asked to give open expression to their complaints in the presence of the cabinet. In this meeting Chase was placed in a very embarrassing position. With Lincoln and his colleagues in the room he felt impelled to speak favorably of cabinet harmony in the presence of senators to whom he is said to have remarked that "Seward exercised a back stair and malign influence upon the President, and thwarted all the measures of the Cabinet" (Ibid., p. 603). As a result of these bickerings both Seward and Chase resigned; Lincoln promptly refused to accept either resignation, and matters proceeded as before, except that, as the months passed, Chase's official position became more and more difficult. He honestly differed with Lincoln on essential matters; chafed at the President's inaction and "looseness"; became increasingly impatient at the slow progress of the war, and probably came to believe in his own superior ability to guide the ship of state. Though not quite disloyal to the President, he nevertheless became the center of an anti-Lincoln movement while retaining his position in the cabinet.

Early in 1864 many zealous Unionists, including Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, William Cullen Bryant, and Theodore Tilton, had reached the conclusion that Lincoln's administration was a failure; and a congressional committee of which Senator Pomeroy of Kansas was chairman sounded the call for Chase in a paper known as the "Pomeroy Circular," which was at first distributed confidentially but soon found its way into the press. The paper declared that it was practically impossible to reelect Lincoln; that his "manifest tendency toward temporary expedients" would become stronger during a second term, and that Chase united more of the needful qualities than any other available candidate. Chase, it appears, did not know of the circular until he saw it in a Washington paper; but his criticisms of the administration, as well as his willingness to rely upon the good judgment of those who thought that "the public good" would be promoted by the use of his name, were well known. An element of bitterness was injected into the Chase boom when General Francis P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri, delivered an abusive speech against Chase in Congress in April 1864; and the friendliness of the President toward Blair was misconstrued, adding a further strain to the relations between Chase and Lincoln.

When the publication of the Pomeroy circular required an explanation, Chase wrote Lincoln of his entirely passive attitude toward the movement in his behalf, assured the President of his respect and affection, and offered to resign his secretaryship if the President should desire it. Lincoln's reply indicated that he had not been offended and that he desired no change in the treasury department. The Chase movement soon collapsed, partly from mismanagement, and partly for the lack of any solid foundation. The President's party managers played a trump card by setting an early date (June 7) for the Republican or "Union" nominating convention at Baltimore; and when a caucus professing to speak for the Union members of the Ohio legislature indorsed the President, Chase withdrew his candidacy.

He did not long remain in the cabinet. After various differences over appointments, he submitted for the office of assistant treasurer at New York the name of M. B. Field whom Lincoln found unacceptable because of influential opposition in the state. When Lincoln suggested that the appointment would subject him to "still greater strain," Chase replied that he had thought only of fitness in his suggested appointments, referred to the "embarrassment and difficulty" of his position, and, as on various other occasions, presented his resignation. Chase's diary indicates that he could have been induced to remain in the cabinet (Warden, post, p. 618); but, somewhat to his chagrin, Lincoln accepted the resignation, and he unexpectedly found himself out of office. "Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and fidelity," wrote the President, "I have nothing to unsay; and yet you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relations which it seems cannot be overcome or longer sustained consistently with the public service."

In the depressing summer of 1864 certain factors seemed to be working for a revival of the Chase candidacy. Distrust of the President, combined with anger at his veto of the Wade-Davis reconstruction bill and depression due to the unfavorable military situation, caused certain anti-Lincoln men to launch a movement for another nominating convention "to concentrate the Union strength on some one candidate who commands the confidence of the country" (New York Sun, June 30, 1889, p. 3). The plan contemplated that Lincoln, renominated in June, should be induced to withdraw. On August 18, 1864, Horace Greeley wrote: "Mr. Lincoln is already beaten. He cannot be elected. And we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow" (Ibid.). Charles Sumner approved the movement; and various men who had been active in the earlier effort toward Chase's candidacy, notably Henry Winter Davis, gave it support. Whitelaw Reid, who was very close to Chase, induced the Cincinnati Gazette to come out for Lincoln's withdrawal. Chase's own attitude was at first receptive and non-committal. In September, however, the entire political situation changed with the fall of Atlanta and Republican success in Vermont and Maine. The proposed convention was not held; the whole "radical" movement was abandoned; its sponsors came out for the Baltimore candidates, and Chase himself participated in the campaign for Lincoln, making various speeches in the West.

When Chief Justice Taney died, October 12, 1864, Lincoln's choice fell upon Chase in spite of misgivings as to the former secretary's presidential ambitions-or, as some thought, the President may have felt that he was putting a perpetual candidate in an office where presumably his ambition would be silenced. The years of Chase's chief justiceship fell during the turbulent period of Reconstruction. Occupied with problems of unusual complexity in his judicial capacity, he by no means held aloof from political controversies; and the most determined efforts to put him in the presidency came while he wore the toga of judicial office. Though these years witnessed the fruition of cherished hopes in the eradication of slavery and the restoration of the Union, the satisfaction he might have felt in the accomplishment of these objects was clouded by post-war excesses and corruption which put him out of tune with the party of his later choice, while in his own person he suffered disappointment, affront, and injured dignity. He was probably the least happy of our chief justices. At the time of Lincoln's assassination his life was considered in danger and he was protected by military guard. On April 15, 1865, he administered the presidential oath to Johnson; and it seemed for a time that he might become a sort of mentor to the new president. On various occasions he approached Johnson with advice on Reconstruction policies, at times even drafting public statements to be delivered or issued by the President. Warmly advocating negro suffrage, and favoring the radical policy of Reconstruction, he started in May 1865 on an extended Southern tour which occupied two months and was devoted to confidential investigations concerning conditions in the states lately in "rebellion." At Charleston, South Carolina, and elsewhere he addressed colored audiences, advocating the enfranchisement of their race.

After the war Chase was confronted with the question of reopening federal courts in the South; but he delayed because of the conviction that subordination to the military authorities would be inconsistent with judicial independence; and when at length he did open the United States circuit court at Raleigh, North Carolina, on June 6, 1867, he carefully explained in his address to the bar that this was done only after the habeas corpus privilege had been restored and assurances given that the "military authority [ did] not extend in any respect to the courts of the United States." When planning to reopen the circuit court at Richmond, Virginia, he declined military protection for himself and the court, with the comment: "If I go to Richmond at all, I intend to have no relations with the military, except those which spring from the good-will which subsists between myself and some of the officers" (Warden, post, p. 659).

A painful duty confronting Chase in his capacity as circuit justice was that of presiding at the proposed trial of Jefferson Davis, who, after two years in military custody, was released to the civil authorities in May 1867 and placed under indictment for treason against the United States. The earlier stages of the case cannot be traced here; but on March 26, 1868, in the United States circuit court at Richmond, a grand jury brought in an elaborate indictment against Davis, charging treason under the federal law of 1790, which prescribed the penalty of death. Chase's reluctance to preside at the Davis prosecution may well have explained his repeated postponements in coming to Richmond to hold court. When he did appear he was annoyed by association on the bench with John C. Underwood [q.v.], federal district judge in Virginia, a man whose pronounced anti-Southern prejudices destroyed his judicial impartiality. In December 1868 a motion to quash the indictment was argued before Justices Chase and Underwood, Davis's counsel contending that any prosecution of the Confederate leader for treason would be inconsistent with the fourteenth amendment of the Federal Constitution, in which disability from office-holding, not death, was prescribed for those in Davis's position. Favoring the quashing of the indictment, Chase disagreed with Underwood; the disagreement was certified to the United States Supreme Court; and the Davis case was pending there when, on December 25, 1868, President Johnson issued an unconditional and universal pardon to all who had participated in the "rebellion." The consequent termination of the case, both at Richmond and at Washington, gave genuine relief to Chase (R. F. Nichols, "United States vs. Jefferson Davis,'' American Historical Review, XXXI, 266 ff.).

When the peak of radical fury was reached in the attempt to remove President Johnson, it fell to Chase as chief justice to preside over the Senate sitting as a court of impeachment. The flimsiness of the charges betrayed the whole movement as a partisan attack upon the President because of his opposition to the Stevens-Sumner-Wade policy of Reconstruction; and the great danger was that the judicial character of the whole proceeding would be a mere pretense. Denying that the Senate was a court, the anti-Johnson group sought to subordinate the chief justice as a figurehead, to exclude ordinary rules of evidence, to suppress essential testimony, to deny adequate opportunities for defense, to intimidate individual senators, and to rush the whole proceeding through with railroad speed. Chase, however, refused to accept the role of puppet and effectively asserted his prerogatives as presiding judge. Characteristically, he began by lecturing the Senate for receiving articles of impeachment and framing rules of procedure before being organized as a court. For this he was criticized; and even Warden states that his "hero" erred in this respect; but the question was essentially a judicial one to which the Chief Justice had given earnest study, and his unwillingness to surrender his own functions is more to be admired than censured. He considered himself a part of the court, with the presiding judge's function of seeing that its proceedings from the outset were properly conducted. The Senate radicals were minded to deny him the casting vote; but he successfully defended this right, taking the opportunity, on the occasion of the first tie on a question of adjournment, to announce his vote and declare the tribunal adjourned. He was attacked as a partisan of the President, accused of seeking converts for acquittal, and assailed for playing politics in allowing his name to be used as a candidate for the presidency during the impeachment proceedings. As to the "stories" of rides in which he advised senators on their duty, he himself said that there was a "grain of fact sunk in gallons of falsehood" (Warden, post, p. 696). He did profoundly disapprove of the whole impeachment movement and did not entirely suppress his views; but there is no reason to reject his own statement that he did not seek to influence or convert any one (not even Sprague, his son-in-law), and that until the final vote he had no idea what the result would be.

Chase's incurable ambition for the presidency found its most striking manifestation in 1868, when, after obtaining no notice in the Republican convention, he became the center of a determined boom among the Democrats. Though certain papers, such as the New York Tribune, put forth his name, he made no effort for the Republican nomination. One should perhaps discount his statements in private letters that he would not take the nomination; for he had no chance whatever in that party, whose radical leaders had repudiated him, and whose emotional swing to Grant was irresistible. From the standpoint of party regularity it seemed to many a shocking thing that so prominent a Republican should not only fail to support his party's candidate, but should seek the leadership of the opposing party. For Chase, however, party regularity had never been an imperative motive; he had often described himself as an independent Democrat, and his attitude toward Grant was that of thorough disapproval and lack of confidence. Newspapers and influential leaders began to work for him; and he decided to allow his name to be used. In correspondence and interview he again showed a receptive attitude, and when asked for a public statement he defined his policy, emphasizing universal amnesty and universal suffrage, though realizing that such an attitude would injure his prospects (Schuckers, post, pp. 584-86). In the Democratic convention at New York an active group of Chase managers labored early and late ("Kate" Sprague turning politician and exerting her personal and social influence) ; and a "Chase platform" was circulated among the delegates. When it came to the voting, however, his platform was rejected; Ohio declared for Seymour of New York; and in an atmosphere of pandemonium Seymour was unanimously chosen for the presidential candidacy, with Chase's factious enemy, Blair, as running mate. In his disappointment Chase bore himself in silence and dignity and gave no countenance to efforts of his friends to obtain Seymour's withdrawal or launch a third-party movement.

Meanwhile the court over which Chase presided was faced by a menacing Congress and subjected to unusual strain in deciding a series of perplexing cases. In the Milligan case (4 Wallace, 2), it was held that military commissions for the trial of citizens are illegal, except where invasion or war actually deposes the civil courts. On the main point of this decision Chase concurred; but he dissented from that portion which held that Congress could not have provided for such trials if it had wished. At various times it seemed that the court would have to decide on the constitutionality of the Reconstruction Acts; but such a result, which would have precipitated an unseemly contest with Congress, was avoided. In Mississippi vs. Johnson (4 Wallace, 475) and Georgia vs. Stanton (6 Wallace, 50), the court refused to enjoin the President or a member of the cabinet from enforcing the Reconstruction Acts. This was in keeping with the court's practise of avoiding political questions. In the McCardle case (6 Wallace, 318), which again involved the legality of Reconstruction legislation, a decision was avoided by an act of Congress which deprived the court of jurisdiction; and the court permitted its functions thus to be limited. Further questions concerning reconstruction were considered in Texas vs. White (7 Wallace, 700), Cummings vs. Missouri (4 Wallace, 277) and Ex parte Garland (4 Wallace, 333). In these controversies the court held the Union to be indissoluble, declared secession a nullity, and denied the validity of test oaths intended to exclude ex-Confederates from officeholding. The application of the Fourteenth Amendment to certain state legislation was considered in the Slaughterhouse Cases ( 16 Wallace, 36), in which the court refused to set itself up as a censor of state laws or invade the domain of civil rights theretofore belonging to the states. Preferring a broader application of the amendment, Chase dissented from this opinion, whose main doctrine has since been abandoned by the court.

In 1870 Chase delivered the opinion declaring unconstitutional that part of the Legal Tender Act of 1862 which made the "greenbacks" legal tender as to contracts existing at the time the act was passed (Hepburn vs. Griswold, 8 Wallace, 603). As secretary of the treasury he had issued these government notes; and he was now roundly abused for holding them illegal. When the Hepburn decision was reversed in 1871 (Legal Tender Cases, 12 Wallace, 457), Chase dissented.

It appears that Chase would have accepted a presidential nomination by the Liberal Republicans in 1872; but, aside from other factors, the state of his health would have prevented such a nomination. His vote this year was given to Greeley (Schuckers, post, p. 593). On May 7, 1873, he died of a paralytic stroke in New York.

Chase was tall, massive, handsome in feature, and distinguished in figure and bearing. His portraits show a large head, with deep-set, blue-gray eyes, prominent brow, spirited nostrils, and firm lips. He was near-sighted and may have lacked magnetism and approachableness; but there was something in his mien that bespoke a determined will. His religious convictions were genuine and earnest. Reading his diaries we find how he chided himself on his sinfulness; how at times he declined communion from self-distrust; how he was equally disturbed if at other times his unworthiness failed to oppress him; how he repeated psalms while bathing or dressing; how he pursued his Scripture reading and prayer as a pure matter of conscience. He considered it sinful to waste time. Though fond of chess, he foreswore cards and avoided fashionable society. He once described a charming young lady as one with whom he would have fallen in love had she not been "fond of the gay world" and "disinclined to religion," which he valued "more than any earthly possession" (Warden, post, 190). Though he was socially at ease, a sense of humor was denied him; and when telling a story he would usually spoil it. Schuckers speaks of his "modesty"; but others considered him conceited and accessible to flattery. Though hardly the scholar in politics, he was of a literary turn; and in early life he sometimes expressed himself in verse. There are purple patches in his usually grave diaries to which the historian turns with real delight.

Having the "defects of his virtues," he was self-righteous, opinionated, and difficult to work with. Ambition colored all the more prominent phases of his career. That it diminished his usefulness, impaired his dignity, and blinded his judgment as to currents of public opinion, may be conceded; but it did not prompt unworthy bargains nor excessive electioneering. His moral courage was manifest in his opposition in the Cincinnati council to saloon licenses, his defiance of threatened violence, his advocacy of unpopular causes, and his refusal to truckle for the presidency. As war-time minister of finance he resisted alluring opportunities for private gain. Though puritanical, he was not a fanatic. His anti-slavery activities were held within bounds; and he never affiliated with the Garrison or Phillips type of abolitionist. The antagonism between him and Wade was of long standing; and he disliked the excesses of the radical school of Reconstruction while partly approving its program. His mental operations were steady rather than rapid; his public statements precise and devoid of verbiage. As a speaker he commanded attention rather by conviction and intellectual force than by the orator's art. His opinions as chief justice were characterized by a practical emphasis upon main principles rather than by brilliance or fondness for legal lore.

[Portions of Chase's elaborate diaries and letters have been published in Robert B. Warden, Account of the Private Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase (1874), in J. W. Schuckers, Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase (1874), and in the Annual Report, American Historical Association, 1902, volume II. The last mentioned volume includes some interesting letters from Chase to Sumner and a large number of letters from George S. Denison, who, as treasury official at New Orleans during the Civil War, wrote in full concerning conditions in Louisiana. The bulk of the original manuscript of the diary, together with letters and miscellaneous material, is to be found in the library of the Pennsylvania Historical Society at Philadelphia ; and another large collection of Chase manuscripts (over one hundred volumes) is deposited in the division of manuscripts of the Library of Congress The biographical work by Warden is garrulous, extravagantly eulogistic, and of negligible importance, except as a source book; that of Schuckers, though of somewhat more value, is far from satisfactory. The short volume by A. B. Hart in the American Statesmen series (1899), though not free from error, is the best biography. The amusing campaign biography by J. T. Trowbridge, The Ferry Boy and the Financier (1864), is based in part upon a series of autobiographical letters written by Chase himself; but Chase's recollections were often dim, and Trowbridge drew freely upon his own fancy. A series of letters bearing upon the movement in 1864 to displace Lincoln in favor of Chase appeared under the title "Unwritten History" in the New York Sun, June 30, 1889. The following titles may also be noted: Donn Piatt, Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union (1887); Arthur M. Schlesinger, "Salmon Portland Chase, Undergraduate and Pedagogue," in Ohio Archaeology. and Historical Quarterly, volume XXVIII, no. 2 (1910); Norton S. Townshend, "Salmon P. Chase" (Ibid., volume I, 1887) ; Elbridge G. Spaulding, A Resource of War: History of the Legal Tender Paper Money Issued During the Great Rebellion (1869); Chas. Warren, The Supreme Court in U. S. History (1922); Hugh McCulloch, Men and Measures of Half a Century (1888).]

J.G.R.

Mr. Chase published a compilation of the statutes of Ohio, with annotations and an historical sketch (3 vols., Cincinnati, 1832). See “Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase,” by J. W. Schuckers (New York, 1874). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I. pp. 585-588.


CHENEY, Ednah Dow Littlehale, 1824-1904, abolitionist, women’s rights activist (American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 164-165; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 4, p. 777)


CHENEY, Abigail, New Hampshire, abolitionist.  Wife of abolitionist Moses Cheney.  Conductor on the Underground Railroad.  (Cheney, 1907)


CHENEY, Moses, 1793-1875, New Hampshire, abolitionist, printer, state legislator from New Hampshire.  Cheney printed the abolitionist newspaper, The Morning Star, a Free Will Baptist newspaper.  He was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and an associate of African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass.  Husband of Abigail Cheney.  (Cheney, 1907)


CHENEY, Oren Burbank, 1816-1903, Maine, Free Will Baptist clergyman, state legislator in Maine, educator, newspaper editor, abolitionist.  Editor of The Morning Star.  Founder and President of Bates College.  Conductor on the Underground Railroad for seven years.  Son of abolitionists Moses and Abigail Cheney. (Cheney, 1907)

CHENEY, OREN BURBANK (December 10, 1816-December 22, 1903), Baptist clergyman, college president, was the son of Moses Cheney, a member of the New Hampshire legislature, and of Abigail (Morrison) Cheney, a woman of great energy and strength of character. His early education consisted of a few terms at private schools, a few at public schools, and a year when he was thirteen at New Hampton Institute. When he was sixteen he was sent to Parsonsfield Seminary, the first school founded and maintained by Free Baptists, where, as a student, he helped organize a temperance society, believed to be the first school society of that kind in the world. He was present in the same year at the organization of the Free Baptist Foreign Missionary Society. From this school he went again to the New Hampton Literary Institute. A year at Brown in 1835 was followed by a period at Dartmouth where he took his B.A. degree in 1839, and his M.A. in 1842. He taught the Indians who camped near the college, preached at a Free Will Baptist church at Grantham, ten miles away, and taught a school during the winters at Peterboro to pay his college expenses. In the fall after his graduation he was principal at the Farmington (Maine) Academy with Caroline Adelia Rundlett as his assistant. They were married a few months later. The following year he taught at Greenland, New Hampshire, walking to Northampton on Sundays to preach. Soon after he was licensed to preach. At this time he began to contribute articles to the Morning Star which appeared more or less regularly for sixty years. Called subsequently to be principal of Parsonsfield Seminary, he remained there for two years. Then, as he felt that he needed more theological preparation, he went to Whitestown, New York, to study. At the end of a year he accepted a country pastorate at West Lebanon, Maine, at a salary of $175 a year. His wife had died, and in 1847 he married Nancy S. Perkins, daughter of a Baptist clergyman. At Lebanon, with his customary energy, he founded an academy. After six years here in the church and at the academy, he was called to the Augusta (Maine) Baptist pastorate. In 1851, he was elected to the Maine legislature by a combination of the Free Soil, Independent, and Whig parties. He secured $2,000 from the legislature for the Lebanon Academy and voted for the first prohibition measure introduced in the Maine legislature by Neal Dow. In 1852 he was elected a delegate to the Maine Free Soil Convention at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which nominated John P. Hale for the presidency. When Parsonsfield Seminary was burned in 1854, he was deeply stirred and at this time began to consider an ideal school in which students could depend on their own efforts to pay their way. The result was the Maine State Seminary in Lewiston, Maine, which opened September 1, 1857, with Cheney as principal. In 1863, the trustees were induced to vote to establish a course of collegiate study, the legislature was petioned for an enlarged charter, received the ensuing year, and the name was changed to Bates College in honor of its most generous patron. Women as well as men had attended the seminary, but when the college was opened the feeling was so strong against women that all but one withdrew, the one, however, stayed and obtained her degree, and Bates as a result has remained a coeducational institution as its charter first provided. Cheney remained president of the college until 1894 and was president emeritus until his death in 1903. He was married a third time in 1892 to Emeline S. (Aldrich) Burlingame who had been much interested in Christian and reformatory work.

[General Cat. Bates College and Cobb Divinity School, 1863-1915 (1915); E. Burlingame-Cheney, Story of the Life and Work of Oren B. Cheney, Founder and First President of Bates College (1907).]


CHENEY, Person Colby, 1828-1901, abolitionist, businessman, Union Army officer.  Son of Moses and Abigail Cheney.  Later, Governor and Senator from New Hampshire.  (Cheney, 1907)

CHENEY, PERSON COLBY (February 25, 1828- June 19, 1901), manufacturer, governor of New Hampshire, was born at Holderness (now Ashland), New Hampshire. He was the son of Moses and Abigail (Morrison) Cheney, his father being one of the pioneer paper manufacturers of the state, a business with which he himself was identified throughout the greater part of his life. The family then moved to Peterboro in 1835, and after completing his education at Hancock Literary and Scientific Institution and the academy at Parsonsfield, Maine, Cheney entered business in the same town, becoming in 1853 a partner in the firm of Cheney, Hadley & Gowing, paper manufacturers. In 1863, he served as quartermaster in the 13th New Hampshire Infantry, but was discharged because of ill health after a few months' service. A year later he was elected railroad commissioner for a three-year term. In 1866 he moved to Manchester. He now reorganized and extended his business, engaging in paper-making at Goffstown and the manufacture of wood pulp at Peterboro. Mills at both these places were under the same corporate organization and operations were later extended to several other towns as well. The business prospered, and Cheney became known as one of the leading industrialists of the state. He was also interested in banking in Manchester and was for some time president of the People's Savings Bank.

In 1872 he was elected mayor of Manchester and in the same year a trustee of Bates College of which his brother, Oren Burbank Cheney [q.v.], was president. He served one year as mayor, refusing renomination because of the pressure of private business. He was interested, however, in Republican activities and was an influential leader in party matters. In 1875 he was nominated for the governorship and after a campaign so closely contested that fin al choice rested with the legislature, was elected. In 1876 he was again elected, this time by the popular vote. He was a successful executive. His terms fell in a period of unemployment and business depression, and his efforts were largely devoted toward economy, improved administration, and the reduction of the public debt. In 1876 when the state was about to hold a constitutional convention he urged the adoption of a simplified amending process, a reduction in the size of the lower house, a larger Senate, the abolition of the religious test for office, and biennial elections. On the liquor question, then an active issue in the state, he declared that the most effective effort was that which "untiringly seeks to write on men's hearts the law of individual self control." After retirement from office he devoted himself to business affairs but in 1886 served out the unexpired term of Austin F. Pike in the United States Senate (November 24, 1886-June 14, 1887). From December 1892 to June 1893 he served as envoy extraordinary to Switzerland. He was from 1892 until his death a member of the Republican National Committee. In both business and politics he represented the better type of the period, and in both won its conventional rewards for successful effort. He was twice married: on May 22, 1850, to Annie, daughter of Samuel M. Moore of Bronson, Michigan, and after her death in 1858, on June 29, 1859, to Mrs. Sarah W. Keith.

[G. F. Willey, Semi-Centennial Book of Manchester (Manchester, New Hampshire, 1896), pp. 257-58; Albert Smith, History of the Town of Peterborough, New Hampshire (1876); Manchester (Manches ter, New Hampshire, 1875); J. N. McClintock, sketch in Granite Missouri, III, 65, and obituary, Ibid., XXXI, p. 60.]

W.A.R.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.