Salmon P. Chase

Biography

Salmon Portland Chase was born in Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1808. After his father's death he spent part of his youth in Ohio with his uncle, the Episcopal bishop Philander Chase, then graduated from Dartmouth College in 1826, read law under Attorney General William Wirt and was admitted to the bar in 1829. He settled in Cincinnati, where he compiled Ohio's statutes and became known for defending fugitive slaves and those who helped them, arguing that slavery existed only by local law.

Elected to the city council as a Whig in 1840, he left the party the next year to lead the Liberty Party in Ohio, then helped found the Free Soil Party in 1848 and drafted its platform. The Ohio legislature sent him to the U.S. Senate in 1849, where he opposed the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act; he was among the founders of the Republican Party and served as its first governor of Ohio from 1856 to 1860.

After losing the 1860 Republican nomination to Abraham Lincoln, he became Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury. He financed the Union war effort through large bond sales, the first federal paper currency and a national banking system, while keeping his own presidential hopes alive until Lincoln accepted his resignation in June 1864.

Lincoln then named him Chief Justice, and he took the oath in December 1864. Chase presided over the Senate impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson in 1868, wrote Texas v. White and Hepburn v. Griswold, and sought the Democratic nomination in 1868 and the Liberal Republican nomination in 1872 without success. He died in New York City in 1873.