Team of Rivals

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  The time had come, Chase decided, to try for public office. Though he had not been active in party politics, he sought a nomination from the Whig Party to the state senate. To his disappointment, he was rebuffed as an abolitionist. Three years later, he tried again, seeking the Whig nomination for the Cincinnati City Council. Although he succeeded in gaining office, he was defeated for reelection after a single term, largely due to his position on temperance, which had led him to unpopular votes denying liquor licenses to city establishments.

  Surveying the political landscape, Chase was unable to see a future for himself as either a Democrat or a Whig. Both parties, he wrote, submitted to the South upon the “vital question of slavery.” Consequently, in 1841, he joined the fledgling Liberty Party, which was struggling to establish a solid base of support. The previous year, James Birney, since moved to New York to head the American Anti-Slavery Society, had gained the party’s nomination for president. Unknown beyond abolitionist circles, Birney garnered only 7,000 votes.

  Through the 1840s, Chase sought to guide the Liberty Party to a more moderate image so that it could gain wider appeal. Working closely with Gamaliel Bailey, Birney’s astute successor at the Philanthropist, Chase persuaded the Ohio Liberty Party to adopt a resolution that explicitly renounced any intention “to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists.” Concurring with Lincoln, Bates, and a number of progressive Whigs, they pledged to focus only on those areas where slavery was present “without constitutional warrant”—in the District of Columbia, on the high seas, in the new territories. At the same time, Chase encouraged his fellow party members to consider reaching outside their ranks to find a presidential candidate who could command a larger vote than the radical Birney, who, as Chase said, “has seen so little of public service.”

  In an 1842 letter to Joshua Giddings, the abolitionist congressman from Ohio’s Western Reserve, Chase suggested that if John Quincy Adams or William Henry Seward “would accept the nomination, great additional strength might be gained for the party.” He had no idea whether either man would accept, but ranked Governor Seward, “for his age,” as “one of the first statesmen in the country,” while former president Adams was “perhaps, the very first.”

  Though he had never met Seward, Chase opened an intriguing correspondence with the governor, in which they freely debated the role of third parties. Seward expressed his belief that “there can be only two permanent parties.” In his view, the Democratic Party, with its strong base in the South, would always be the party of slavery, while the Whig Party would champion the antislavery banner, “more or less,” depending “on the advancement of the public mind and the intentness with which it can be fixed on the question of Slavery.” Seward conceded that while he was disheartened by the Whig Party’s current “lukewarmness on the Subject of Slavery,” he had no choice but to stay with the party he loved, and to hope for a more advanced position in the future. “To abandon a party and friends to whom I owe so much, whose confidence I do in some degree possess,” he wrote, “would be criminal, and not more criminal than unwise.”

  Chase saw the situation differently. Though originally “educated in the Whig school,” with Whiggish views of the tariff, banking, and government, he had never considered party loyalty among his defining characteristics. Nor had he experienced the camaraderie of fellow party loyalists that Seward enjoyed when he and his colleagues boarded together in Albany during the lengthy legislative sessions. For Chase, the decision to leave the Whigs for the Liberty Party was not the momentous separation that it would have been for Seward.

  Chase clearly understood that so long as the Liberty Party remained a “one idea” party, it would never attract majority support. Risking the displeasure of his abolitionist friends, who wanted no diminution of their principles, he envisioned a gradual movement of the Liberty Party toward one of the major parties. His efforts revealed a practical side to his principled stance, but old acquaintances in Ohio were troubled by his decision to set his sights on the more powerful Democratic Party, where he had a greater chance of statewide success than with the Whigs.

  In his bid to cultivate Democratic leaders, Chase shifted his positions on the tariff and the banking system to align himself with the Democrats, though he insisted that the economic policies of either party were insignificant compared to the issue of slavery. For the moment, since neither major party would take a resolute stand on slavery, he remained with the Liberty Party, attending conventions, drawing up resolutions, and searching for candidates.

  In the years that followed, in part because the free city of Cincinnati was a natural destination for runaways crossing the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, a number of fugitive slave cases ended up in the Cincinnati courts. Chase volunteered his services in many such cases. The eloquent power of his arguments soon earned him the honorary title “Attorney General for the Negro.” In the famous case that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s good-hearted John Van Trompe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chase represented John Van Zandt, an old farmer who had moved from Kentucky to Ohio so that he might live in a free state.

  On an April night in 1842, Van Zandt was returning from the Cincinnati market to his home twenty miles north. On the road, he encountered a group of slaves who had crossed the river from Kentucky. “Moved by sympathy,” Chase would argue, the farmer “undertook to convey them in his wagon to Lebanon or Springfield.” En route, two slave catchers accosted the wagon. They captured the slaves and returned them to their Kentucky owner, receiving a $450 bounty for their efforts.

  The owner then brought suit against Van Zandt for “harboring and concealing” the slaves, in violation of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. Chase “very willingly” agreed to represent the elderly farmer, who faced substantial penalties if found guilty. Chase’s defense of Van Zandt transcended the particulars of the Matilda case, directly challenging the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law. That law, he maintained, deprived fugitives of life and liberty without due process of law. “Under the constitution,” he declared, “all the inhabitants of the United States are, without exception, persons,—persons, it may be, not free, persons, held to service…but still, persons,” and therefore possessed of every right guaranteed under the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

  “What is a slave?” he asked. “A slave is a person held, as property, by legalized force, against natural right…. The very moment a slave passes beyond the jurisdiction of the state, in which he is held as such, he ceases to be a slave; not because any law or regulation of the state which he enters confers freedom upon him, but because he continues to be a man and leaves behind him the law of force, which made him a slave.” Chase depicted slavery as “a creature of state law” and not a national institution. He argued that any slave state created after 1787, the year the Northwest Ordinance became law, existed in violation of the Constitution and the wishes of the founding fathers.

  As most observers expected, the Cincinnati court refused to accept Chase’s argument. Van Zandt was found guilty. As Chase left the courtroom, according to Harriet Beecher Stowe, then a Cincinnati resident, one of the judges reflected on the unpopularity of professed abolitionists: “There goes a young man who has ruined himself to-day.”

  Far from ruining his prospects, the Van Zandt case added considerable luster to Chase’s national reputation. Appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, Chase enlisted Seward’s help as co-counsel. The case moved slowly through the docket, affording the two men time to craft their written arguments. Chase presented the constitutional arguments, while Seward dealt with the technical ones. Though the Southern-dominated court wasted little time in affirming the lower court’s ruling, the constitutional arguments Chase outlined became pillars of antislavery party doctrine.

  Chase acknowledged that “poor old Van Zandt” was never able to recover from the loss and the damages inflicted upon him. Still, he believed that “even though my poor old client be sacrificed, the great ca
use of humanity will be a gainer.” He had his 108-page argument reprinted in pamphlet form for wide distribution, and was delighted with the positive response it provoked. Antislavery activist Charles Sumner wrote from Massachusetts that “the question under the Ordinance of 1787 was novel” and might well “rally a political movement.” President John Quincy Adams’s son, Charles Francis, extolled Chase, as did New Hampshire’s Senator John Hale. Nothing gave him more satisfaction, than the praise he received from Seward, who expressed fervent hope that the “chaste and beautiful eloquence” of Chase’s brief would be forever “preserved for the benefit of the cause of Freedom and for [Chase’s] own fame.” The fact that the case brought a personal and intellectual contact with Seward, Chase told abolitionist Lewis Tappan, proved “one of the gratifications, and one of the greatest too,” of all his efforts.

  Politicians were not alone in recognizing Chase’s commitment. In gratitude for public service “in behalf of the oppressed” and his “eloquent advocacy of the rights of man,” the black pastor of the Baker Street Church collected donations from his parishioners. In an emotional ceremony on May 6, 1845, attended by a large black congregation, Chase was honored with a beautifully engraved sterling silver pitcher. Presenting the gift on behalf of “the Colored People of Cincinnati,” the Reverend A. J. Gordon told the enthusiastic gathering that “whenever the friendless objects of slaveholding cupidity” struggled to find freedom, they found in Chase “a firm, zealous and devoted friend.” He assured Chase that his deeds on behalf of fugitive slaves and the black race would be “engraven on the tablets of our hearts…as long as memory retains her seat.” Reverend Gordon avowed that when Chase was finally “called from [his] earthly labors,” he would be ushered into paradise by God Himself, with the words “Well done thou good and faithful servant, enter into the joys of thy Lord. For inas-much as you did it unto the least of these my brethren, you did it unto me!”

  Chase was profoundly moved by the ceremony. Accepting the engraved pitcher, which he treasured the rest of his life, he pledged to continue his fight for freedom until “the colored man and white man are equal before the law.” In his own state of Ohio, he lamented, various legal provisions known as the Black Laws excluded free blacks from public schools, the witness box, and the voting booth. These exclusions, he asserted (two years before Seward would make a similar argument), were clear infringements of the Constitution. “True Democracy makes no enquiry about the color of the skin, or the place of nativity,” he ardently claimed. “Wherever it sees a man, it recognizes a being endowed by his Creator with original inalienable rights.”

  Laws denying black children public school education, while simultaneously requiring that their parents pay school taxes, were reprehensible, he argued. More unjust, blacks were banned from the witness box in all cases where either party was white. This exclusion exposed the black population “to every species of violence and outrage” from whites who felt secure from punishment so long as they committed their crimes only in the presence of black witnesses. “Every law on the statute book so wrong and mean that it cannot be executed, or felt, if executed, to be oppressive and unjust,” averred Chase, “tends to the overthrow of all law, by separating in the minds of the people, the idea of law from the idea of right….

  “For myself,” Chase concluded, “I am ready to renew my pledge—and I will venture to speak also in behalf of my co-workers,—that we go straight on, without faltering or wavering, until every vestige of oppression shall be erased from the statute book:—until the sun in all his journey from the utmost eastern horizon, through the mid-heaven, till he sinks beyond the western mountains into his ocean bed, shall not behold, in all our broad and glorious land, the foot print of a single slave.” A tremendous round of applause was followed by an emotional rendition of the hymn “America.” With a benediction, the exercises were brought to a close.

  CHASE, UNLIKE SEWARD and Lincoln, did not make friends easily. A contemporary reporter observed that he knew “little of human nature,” and that while “profoundly versed in man, he was profoundly ignorant of men.” His abstractedness often lent an air of preoccupation, aggravated by his extreme nearsightedness. Both prevented him from gauging the reactions of others. Furthermore, his natural reserve, piety, temperance, and lack of humor made for uneasy relationships. Even his stately proportions and fastidious dress worked against social intimacy.

  Despite his difficulty in making friends and instilling personal loyalties, Chase did form one significant relationship during the decade of the forties. His bond with Edwin M. Stanton would have important consequences during the Civil War, when the two men would serve together in Lincoln’s cabinet. Six years younger than Chase, Stanton was a brilliant young lawyer from Steubenville, Ohio. He had been active in Democratic politics from his earliest days. A short, stout man, with thick brows and intense black eyes hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses, Stanton had grown up in a Quaker family dedicated to abolition. He later told the story that “when he was a boy his father had—like the father of Hannibal against Rome—made him swear eternal hostility to slavery.”

  When Chase and Stanton first met in Columbus in the early 1840s, each was dealing with appalling personal loss, for death had pursued Stanton much as it had pursued Chase. In the five-year span from 1841 to 1846, Stanton had lost his only daughter, Lucy; his young wife, Mary; and his only brother, Darwin. Confronting a similar reign of grief at almost the same time, Chase found in Stanton a solace and friendship more intense than if they had met at a different juncture in their lives.

  In the summer of 1846, Stanton spent several days with Chase at his Cincinnati home. The wide-ranging conversations they enjoyed left a lasting impression on Stanton. “Since our pleasant intercourse together last summer,” Stanton wrote Chase, “no living person has been oftener in my mind;—waking or sleeping,—for, more than once, I have dreamed of being with you. The strength of my regard and affection for you, I can, thus, tell more freely than were we face to face.”

  More than sorrow bound Chase and Stanton together. At the time of their acquaintance in the mid-1840s, both men were trying to find a footing in quick-shifting political currents. Chase had already taken his stand with the Liberty Party. Stanton, though intrigued by the newly formed party, remained a loyal Democrat. Over the course of many hours, in conversation and then by letter, they debated the merits of the new Liberty Party. Responding to Chase’s worry about the narrowness of the party’s platform, Stanton cited examples of single ideas that had achieved great triumphs: most notably, “Taxation & Representation,” the slogan that guided the American Revolution. “I go for one idea in party,” he wrote, “and in friendship my one idea is strong & sincere love for you.” With Chase, Stanton felt free to criticize the Democratic Party, which had gravely disappointed him in a recent election when its candidate for governor came out in favor of the discriminatory Black Laws.

  Chase tried to involve Stanton in the Van Zandt appeal, but Stanton declined, fearing he had neither the “physical nor intellectual strength sufficient to engage in the cause. Events of the past summer have broken my spirits, crushed my hopes, and without energy or purpose in life, I feel indifferent to the present, careless of the future.” Chase apparently did not reply to this letter. “Many weeks have gone by,” Stanton wrote in January 1847, “but your voice reaches me no more. Why is it? The question arises, as I move slowly & disappointed from the post office each day.”

  The correspondence picked up again in the spring, when Chase sent Stanton his argument in the Van Zandt case. “Rejoicing, as I do, to call you friend,” Stanton wrote after reading through the lengthy document, “it gives me pleasure to acknowledge its intellectual merit.” Rather than discuss it in writing, he hoped that he and Chase could soon meet and “spend two or three days” together. “I want to hear from you,” Stanton concluded, “and so may as well confess it at once & throw myself upon your mercy.”

  They finally met in Cincinnati in July, but t
he visit was too abbreviated to satisfy Stanton. The desire for his friend’s company had been lodged in his heart for so long, Stanton explained to Chase upon returning home to Steubenville, that the visit, while enjoyable, had left him ungratified. In the months that followed, however, they saw each other on a number of occasions and opened their hearts in correspondence. After receiving a particularly affectionate letter from Chase, Stanton fervently replied that it “filled my heart with joy; to be loved by you, and be told that you value my love is a gratification beyond my power to express.” He went on to downplay reports Chase had heard that he had developed a “magnetic attraction” for a new woman. “I wish it were so,” he admitted. “To love, and to be loved, is a necessary condition of my happiness…I have met with no one that exercises upon me the least attraction beyond the general qualities of the sex.”

  In the meantime, his friendship with Chase, and his memories of their time together, sustained him. “Allow me my dear friend again this evening to enter your study—you know I like it better than the parlor even without fire—but the fire is blazing there—let me take you by the hand throw my arm around you, say I love you, & bid you farewell.”

  As their friendship grew, Chase urged Stanton to involve himself more deeply in the struggle against slavery. He promised Stanton, who remained a Democrat, that he would join his campaign should he run for governor. But Stanton, who was now supporting his brother’s family as well as his own, did not feel he could make the financial sacrifice. “How much I regret that your voice is not to be heard,” a disappointed Chase wrote. “We have but a short life to live here my dear friend. But let us make it long by noble deeds. You have great gifts of God, energy, enthusiasm, talent, utterance. And now a great cause demands you.”