Such intimate male attachments, as Seward’s with Berdan, or, as we shall see, Lincoln’s with Joshua Speed and Chase’s with Edwin Stanton, were “a common feature of the social landscape” in nineteenth-century America, the historian E. Anthony Rotundo points out. The family-focused and community-centered life led by most men in the colonial era was transformed at the dawn of the new century into an individual and career-oriented existence. As the young men of Seward and Lincoln’s generation left the familiarity of their small communities and traveled to seek employment in fast-growing, anonymous cities or in distant territories, they often felt unbearably lonely. In the absence of parents and siblings, they turned to one another for support, sharing thoughts and emotions so completely that their intimate friendships developed the qualities of passionate romances.
After passing the bar examination, Seward explored the western part of the state, seeking the perfect law office from which to launch an illustrious career. He found what he wanted in Auburn when Judge Elijah Miller offered him a junior partnership in his thriving firm. Seward quickly assumed responsibility for most of the legal work passing through the office, earning the senior partner’s trust and respect. The fifty-two-year-old judge was a widower who shared with his daughters—Lazette and Frances—the grandest residence in Auburn. It seemed to follow naturally that, less than two years later, Seward should woo and win Miller’s twenty-year-old daughter, the beautiful, sensitive Frances. The judge insisted, as a condition of consent to the marriage, that the young couple join his household, which included his mother and unmarried sister.
Thus, at twenty-three, Seward found himself the tenant of the elegant country mansion where he and Frances would live for the rest of their lives. With a brilliant marriage and excellent prospects in his chosen profession, he could look ahead with confidence. To the end of his long life, he gazed optimistically to the future, believing that he and his countrymen were steadily advancing along a road toward increased knowledge, achievement, prosperity, and moral development.
SALMON PORTLAND CHASE, in contrast to the ever buoyant Seward, possessed a restless soul incapable of finding satisfaction in his considerable achievements. He was forever brooding on a station in life not yet reached, recording at each turning point in his life his regret at not capitalizing on the opportunities given to him.
He was born in the rolling hills of Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1808, the eighth of eleven children. His ancestors had lived in the surrounding country for three generations, becoming pillars of the community. Chase would remember that “the neighboring folk used to say” of the substantial Chase homestead that “in that yellow house more brains were born than in any other house in New England.” Three of his father’s brothers attended Dartmouth College. One became a distinguished lawyer, another a U.S. senator, and the third an Episcopalian bishop.
Salmon’s father, Ithamar Chase, was a successful farmer, a justice of the peace, and a representative from his district to the New Hampshire council. He was “a good man,” Chase recalled, a kind father and a loving husband to his young wife, Janette Ralston. He governed his large family without a single “angry word or violent e[x]clamation from his lips.” Chase long remembered a day when he was playing a game of ninepins with his friends. His father interrupted, saying he needed his son’s help in the field. The boy hesitated. “Won’t you come and help your father?” That was all that needed to be said. “Only a look…. All my reluctance vanished and I went with a right good will. He ruled by kind words & kind looks.”
Young Salmon, like Seward, demonstrated an unusual intellectual precocity. His father singled him out to receive a better education “than that given to his other children.” The boy thrived in the atmosphere of high expectations. “I was…ambitious to be at the head of my class,” he recalled. During the summer months, his elder sister, Abigail, a schoolteacher in Cornish, kept him hard at work studying Latin grammar. If he failed to grasp his lessons, he would retreat to the garden and stay there by himself until he could successfully read the designated passages. At Sunday school, he strove to memorize more Bible verses than anyone else in his class, “once repeating accurately almost an entire gospel, in a single recitation.” Eager to display his capacity, Chase would boast to adults that he enjoyed studying volumes of ancient history and perusing the plays of Shakespeare “for the entertainment they afforded.”
While he was considered “quite a prodigy” in his written work, Chase was uneasy reciting in public. In contrast to Lincoln, who loved nothing better than to entertain his childhood friends and fellow students with stories, sermons, or passages from books, the self-conscious Chase was terrified to speak before fellow students, having “little notion of what I had to do or of the way to do it.” With his “hands dangling and head down,” he looked as awkward as he felt.
From his very early days, Chase showed signs of the fierce, ingrained rectitude that would both fortify his battle against slavery and incur the enmity of many among his fellows. Baptized Episcopalian in a pious family, where the Lord’s day of rest was strictly kept, the young boy needed only one Sunday scolding for “sliding down hill with some boys on the dry pine leaves” to know that he would never “transgress that way again.” Nor did he argue when his mother forbade association with boys who used profane language: he himself found it shocking that anyone would swear. Another indelible childhood memory made him abhor intemperance. He had stumbled upon the dead body of a drunken man in the street, his “face forward” in a pool of water “not deep enough to reach his ears,” but sufficient, in his extreme state of intoxication, to drown him. The parish priest had delivered sermons on “the evils of intemperance,” but, as Chase observed, “what sermon could rival in eloquence that awful spectacle of the dead drunkard—helplessly perishing where the slightest remnant of sense or strength would have sufficed to save.”
When Chase was seven years old, his father made a bold business move. The War of 1812 had put a halt to glass imports from Europe, creating a pressing demand for new supplies. Sensing opportunity, Ithamar Chase liquidated his assets in Cornish to invest in a glass factory in the village of Keene. His wife had inherited some property there, including a fourteen-room tavern house. Chase moved his family into one section of the tavern and opened the rest to the public. While a curious and loquacious child like the young Lincoln might have enjoyed the convivial entertainments of a tavern, the reticent Salmon found the move from his country estate in Cornish unsettling. And for his father, the relocation proved calamitous. With the end of the war, tariff duties on foreign goods were reduced and glass imports saturated the market. The glass factory failed, sending him into bankruptcy.
The Chase family was unable to recover. Business failure led to humiliation in the community and, eventually, to loss of the family home. Ithamar Chase succumbed to a fatal stroke at the age of fifty-three, when Salmon was nine. “He lingered some days,” Chase recalled. “He could not speak to us, and we stood mute and sobbing. Soon all was over. We had no father…the light was gone out from our home.”
Left with heavy debts and meager resources, Janette Chase was forced to assume the burden of housing, educating, and providing for her numerous children on her own. Only by moving into cheap lodgings, and scrimping “almost to suffering,” was she able to let Salmon, her brightest and most promising child, continue his studies at the local academy, fulfilling her promise to his “ever lamented and deceased father.” When she could no longer make ends meet, she was forced to parcel her children out among relatives. Salmon was sent to study under the tutelage of his father’s brother, the Episcopal bishop Philander Chase, who presided over a boys’ school in Worthington in the newly formed state of Ohio. In addition to his work as an educator, Philander Chase was responsible for a sizable parish, and owned a farm that provided food and dairy products for the student body. Young Chase, in return for milking cows and driving them to pasture, building fires, and hauling wood, would be given room and board, and a cla
ssical and religious education.
In 1819, at the age of twelve, the boy traveled westward, first by wagon through Vermont and New York, then by steamboat across Lake Erie to Cleveland, a tiny lakeside settlement of a few hundred residents. There Salmon was stranded until a group of travelers passed through en route to Worthington. In the company of strangers, the child made his way on foot and horseback through a hundred miles of virgin forest to reach his uncle’s home.
The bishop was an imposing figure, brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking. His faith, Chase observed, “was not passive but active. If any thing was to be done he felt that he must do it; and that, if he put forth all his energy, he might safely & cheerfully leave the event to Divine Providence.” Certainty gave him an unbending zeal. He was “often very harsh & severe,” recalled Chase, and “among us boys he was almost and sometimes, indeed, quite tyrannical.” The most insignificant deviation from the daily regimen of prayer and study was met with a fearful combination of physical flogging and biblical precept.
“My memories of Worthington on the whole are not pleasant,” Chase said of the time he spent with his domineering uncle. “There were some pleasant rambles—some pleasant incidents—some pleasant associates: but the disagreeable largely predominated. I used to count the days and wish I could get home or go somewhere else and get a living by work.” One incident long remained in Chase’s memory. As punishment for some infraction of the daily rules, he was ordered to bring in a large stack of wood before daybreak. He completed the task but complained to a fellow student that his uncle was “a darned old tyrant.” Upon hearing these words, the bishop allowed no one to speak to the boy and forbade him to speak until he confessed and apologized. Days later, Chase finally recanted, and the sentence was revoked. “Even now,” Chase said, telling the story decades later, “I almost wish I had not.”
When the bishop was made president of Cincinnati College, Chase accompanied his uncle to Cincinnati. At thirteen, he was enrolled as a freshman at the college. The course of study was not difficult, leaving boys time to indulge in “a good deal of mischief & fun.” Salmon Chase was not among them. “I had little or nothing to do with these sports,” he recalled. “I had the chores to do at home, & when I had time I gave it to reading.” Even Chase’s sympathetic biographer Robert Warden observed that his “life might have been happier” had he “studied less and had more fun!” These early years witnessed the development of the rigid, self-denying habits that, throughout his life, prevented Chase from fully enjoying the companionship of others.
When Chase turned fifteen, his uncle left for England to secure funding for the new theological seminary that would become Kenyon College. At last, Chase was allowed to return to his mother’s home in Keene, New Hampshire, where he planned to teach while preparing for admittance to Dartmouth College. His first position lasted only weeks, however. Employing the harsh methods of his uncle rather than the gentle precepts of his father, he administered corporal punishment to discipline his students. When irate parents complained, he was dismissed.
When Chase made his application to Dartmouth, he found that his schooling in Ohio, though filled with misery, had prepared him to enter as a third-year student. At Dartmouth, for the first time, he seemed to relax. Though he graduated with distinction and a Phi Beta Kappa key, he began to enjoy the camaraderie of college life, forging two lifelong friendships with Charles Cleveland, an intellectual classmate who would become a classics professor, and Hamilton Smith, who would become a well-to-do businessman.
No sooner had he completed his studies than he berated himself for squandering the opportunity: “Especially do I regret that I spent so much of my time in reading novels and other light works,” he told a younger student. “They may impart a little brilliancy to the imagination but at length, like an intoxicating draught, they enfeeble and deaden the powers of thought and action.” With dramatic flair, the teenage Chase then added: “My life seems to me to have been wasted.” While Seward joyfully devoured the works of Dickens and Scott, Chase found no room for fiction in his Spartan intellectual life. After finishing the new novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Last Days of Pompeii, he conceded that “the author is doubtless a gifted being—but he has prostituted God’s noblest gifts to the vilest purposes.”
The years after his graduation found nineteen-year-old Chase in Washington, D.C., where he eventually established a successful school for boys that attracted the sons of the cabinet members in the administration of John Quincy Adams, as well as the son of Senator Henry Clay. Once again, instead of taking pleasure in his position, he felt his talents went unappreciated. There were distinct classes of society in Washington, Chase told Hamilton Smith. The first, to which he aspired, included the high government officials; the second, to which he was relegated, included teachers and physicians; and the third mechanics and artisans. There was, of course, a still lower class comprised of slaves and laborers. The problem with teaching, he observed, was that any “drunken, miserable dog who could thre’d the mazes of the Alphabet” could set himself up as a teacher, bringing the “profession of teachers into utter contempt.” Chase was tormented by the lowly figure he cut in the glittering whirl of Washington life. “I have always thought,” he confessed, “that Providence intended me as the instrument of effecting something more than falls to the lot of all men to achieve.”
Though this thirst to excel and to distinguish himself had been instilled in Chase early on by his parents, and painfully reinforced by the years with Philander Chase, such sleepless ambition was inflamed by the dynamic American society in the 1820s. Visitors from Europe, the historian Joyce Appleby writes, “saw the novelty of a society directed almost entirely by the ambitious dreams that had been unleashed after the Revolution in the heated imagination of thousands of people, most of them poor and young.”
Casting about for a career befitting the high estimation in which he held his own talents, Chase wrote to an older brother in 1825 for advice about the different professions. He was contemplating the study of law, perhaps inspired by his acquaintance with Attorney General William Wirt, the father of two of his pupils. Wirt was among the most distinguished figures in Washington, a respected lawyer as well as a literary scholar. He had served as U.S. Attorney General under President James Monroe and had been kept in office by John Quincy Adams. His popular biography of the patriot and lawyer Patrick Henry had made a small name for him in American letters.
A warmhearted, generous man, Wirt welcomed his sons’ teenage instructor into his family circle, inviting the lonely Chase to the small dinner parties, private dances, and luxurious levees attended by Washington’s elite. At the Wirt household, filled with music and lively conversation, Chase found a respite from the constant pressure he felt to read and study in order to stay ahead of his students. More than three decades later, in the midst of the Civil War, Chase could still summon up vivid details of the “many happy hours” he spent with the Wirt family. “Among women Mrs. [Elizabeth] Wirt had few equals,” he recalled. Particularly stamped in his memory was an evening in the garden when Elizabeth Wirt stood beside him, “under the clusters of the multiflora which clambered all over the garden portico of the house and pointed out…the stars.”
Though supportive and eager to mentor the ambitious and talented young man, the Wirts delicately acknowledged—or so Chase felt—the social gulf that divided Chase from their family. Any attempt on the young teacher’s part to move beyond friendship with any one of their four beautiful daughters was, he thought, discouraged. Since he was surrounded by the tantalizing fruits of professional success and social eminence in the Wirt family’s parlor, it is no wonder that a career in law beckoned. His brother Alexander warned him that of all the professions, law entailed the most strenuous course of preparation: success required mastery of “thousands of volumes” from “centuries long past,” including works of science, the arts, and both ancient and contemporary history. “In fine, you must become a universal sc
holar.” Despite the fact that this description was not an accurate portrait of the course most law students of the day embarked upon, typically, Chase took it to heart, imposing a severe discipline upon himself to rise before daybreak to begin his monumental task of study. Insecurity and ambition combined, as ever, to fuel his efforts. “Day and night must be witness to the assiduity of my labours,” he vowed in his diary; “knowledge may yet be gained and golden reputation…. Future scenes of triumph may yet be mine.”
Wirt allowed Salmon to read law in his office and offered encouragement. “You will be a distinguished writer,” he assured Chase. “I am sure of it—You have all the sensibility, talent and enthusiasm essential to success in that walk.” The young man wrote breathlessly to Wirt in return, “God [prospering] my exertions, I will imitate your example.” As part of his self-designed course of preparation, Chase diligently took notes in the galleries of the House and Senate, practiced his elocution by becoming a member of Washington’s Blackstone debating club, and read tirelessly while continuing his duties as a full-time teacher. After hearing the great Daniel Webster speak before the Supreme Court, “his voice deep and sonorous; and his sentiments high and often sublime,” he promised himself that if “any degree of industry would enable me to reach his height, how day and night should testify of my toils.”