Chase, Salmon Portland

Chase, Salmon Portland (b. Cornish, N.H., 13 January 1808; d. New York, N.Y., 7 May 1873; interred Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati), chief justice, 1864–1873. After being raised an orphan, Salmon P. Chase graduated from Dartmouth (1823) and then read law in Washington, D.C., where he began practice in 1829. Moving to Cincinnati, Chase was thrice married (1834–1846), his wives predeceasing him, and the father of six children. He compiled The Statutes of Ohio (1835), defended in courts runaway slaves and their abettors, and was Ohio's senator (1849), then governor (1855–1861).

An early Republican critic of the 1850 Fugitive Slave law and an advocate of “freedom national” constitutionalism, Chase emerged as a would‐be presidential candidate in 1860. The nomination and the election went to Abraham Lincoln and Chase then became treasury secretary. He ably administered wartime tax, greenback, and banking laws; commerce with occupied southern areas; rebels' confiscated properties including slaves; and educational, agricultural, and industrial experiments for displaced bondsmen. Chase influenced Lincoln and Congress toward military emancipation in wartime state reconstruction, toward nationwide emancipation by constitutional amendment, and, by early 1865, toward equal legal and political rights for African‐Americans. Succeeding Roger B. Taney as chief justice in 1864, Chase tried but failed to convince either President Andrew Johnson or most of the justices that the Thirteenth Amendment incorporated the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights against national and state officials as well as private persons. He also failed in his argument that the amendment created a new federalism of interstate diversity in laws and rights but of intrastate, race‐and gender‐blind equality (see Race and Racism).

Republican congressmen sharing his perception enacted the 1866 Civil Rights law, providing federal alternatives to racially prejudiced state justice in matters of private rights as well as public law. On circuit in Maryland, Chase in In re Turner (1867) entertained a former slave's plea for discharge from her work contract with her former master and current employer. Affirming the constitutionality of the Civil Rights law, Chase held that the Thirteenth Amendment clothed black citizens with full federal rights to litigate and testify, that private contracts existed only with state sanction, and that Turner's private contract, whose terms were inferior to contracts given to white apprentices, reduced her to involuntary servitude.

Encouraged by President Johnson, the white South resisted such policies. Overturning vetoes, Congress's various Military Reconstruction laws required biracial electorates to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments before southern states rejoined the Union. However, although Lincoln had appointed four other justices along with Chase, the chief justice was unable to form a majority on race equality. In Ex parte Milligan (1866), for example, Chase joined three other dissenters in opposing the Court's holding that Congress could impose military justice. The 5‐to‐4 Test Oath decisions, Ex parte Garland and Cummings v. Missouri (1867), voided federal and state loyalty requirements for officeholders and licensed professionals as punitive ex post facto laws, bills of attainder, and denials of presidential pardons for rebels. Chase and the other dissenters insisted that the oaths were proper qualifications and questioned federal court jurisdiction. These decisions prevented the democratization of southern officialdom and political leadership, impelling Congress toward military reconstruction.

Chase retained influence among the justices though not consistent leadership, a condition evident when Mississippi and Georgia petitioned the Court to enjoin Military Reconstruction. Chase, for a unanimous Court, in Mississippi v. Johnson (1867) and Georgia v. Stanton (1868), declined to politicize injunctions. In Ex parte McCardle (1869), a racist Mississippi editor arrested by military authorities for incendiary articles appealed to the Court based on the 1867 Habeas Corpus Act, key jurisdictional portions of which Congress had repealed (see Judicial Power and Jurisdiction). The Court affirmed Congress's power over its appellate jurisdiction, but Chase noted that as well the 1867 law did not touch the Court's independent habeas corpus power. In Texas v. White (1869), Chase reasserted basic Republican constitutional principles that the Union and states were indissoluble, holding that Congress and not the Court had the sole authority to recognize state governments.

Chase presided ably over the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson in early 1868. Ever ambitious, Chase sought unsuccessfully to become a presidential nominee (see Extrajudicial Activities). On the bench, his influence over his fellow justices oscillated. He dissented from their validation of prewar slave‐purchase contracts, in Osborn v. Nicholson (1873), their rejection of Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment claims by a qualified white woman to practice law in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873) and, above all, from their Slaughterhouse decision (1873). The last consigned the fate of blacks seeking federally protected access to job markets to the very white state authorities who oppressed them by limiting the Thirteenth Amendment to the abolition of formal slavery and reducing the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause to inconsequentiality. Although a frequent dissenter, Chase helped “his” Court to exercise a full measure of governance by avoiding dangerous policy confrontations.

See also Chief Justice, Office of the.

Bibliography

Frederick J. Blue , Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (1987).
David Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (1954).

Harold M. Hyman