Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln’s Vital Rival, by Walter Stahr

How vital of a historical personage is Salmon P. Chase? Most Americans will be most familiar with his name because Chase National Bank, one of the largest banks in the United States, was named after him by some friends. This honor was well-deserved, as Salmon P. Chase was Secretary of the Treasury during most of the American Civil War and largely responsible for creating the national bank system and uniform federal currency that was fundamental for the economic growth of the United States in the last half of the 19th century and beyond. Chase received his spot in the cabinet as one of Lincoln’s main rivals for the presidency and a leader among the radical wing of the Republican party that sought for abolition as well as civil rights for blacks. During his one term in the Senate from 1848 to 1854, Chase was best known for his writings against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed but whose passage ended up creating the Republican Party we know and love today in its hostility to the spread of slavery. From 1864 to his death in 1873, Chase was also Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, succeeding Roger B. Taney, that noted proslavery apologist. If Chase was never president, an office he was greatly ambitious for, he is nonetheless a notable and important figure within the middle third of the 19th century within the United States, and that is enough for a book to be written about him.

This book is more than 650 pages of material about Chase’s life, and it has just about all of the information one could ask about the life of its figure, which is more information than many people would care to know. This book really gets into the nitty gritty details of Chase’s life, which includes a lot of political maneuvering. Although Chase had little of the common touch as a politician, he was so ambitious for political office, seeking to be president despite failing to be nominated repeatedly, that his maneuvering for the support of fellow politicians and newspaper editors for endorsements comes off as cringeworthy and disingenuous even though Chase was never supported by the people as a whole. This book is organized chronologically, with large chapters, from his birth in 1808 to his death in 1873 in 26 chapters. The author includes a detailed discussion of Chase’s family life, political writings, behavior, and even his travels–which were not as interesting as many since he never went further than Cuba. Of particular interest is that Chase married three times but all of his wives died very young, and while he was interested in women after the death of his third wife, he did not want to marry a non-intellectual woman and his eldest daughter Kate (everyone seems to forget his other daughter Nellie, who married happier and became a noted writer of books for children) opposed him marrying another woman and giving her a possibly less than gracious stepmother. A surprisingly large amount of this book also deals with Chase’s thoughts about states’ rights and his complicated view of certain matters of civil rights as well as economic policy.

Was Chase Lincoln’s vital rival, as the author claims? He certainly was Lincoln’s rival, and even sought during the Civil War to manufacture crises within the cabinet to make himself the candidate for President in 1864, a notable election campaign that took place while the Civil War was ongoing. While Chase sought to cover his tracks and claim that he was not acting against the interests of President Lincoln, his ambitions were known by Lincoln, who chose to disregard and overlook them because he (correctly) did not see Chase as a threat to his own popularity with the Republican base as well as those who saw Lincoln as an essentially unifying figure between the Radical and Moderate wings of the Republican party. Chase, for all of his efforts, was never really a unifying figure. The author notes some of Chase’s rather close relationship with financiers and somewhat shady means of collaborating with some of the attorneys for cases in which he was a judge, which would not pass muster with contemporary ethics on the neutrality that judges should have. The author, though, does his best to point out Chase’s role as an important political figure during the mid-1800’s and as an underrated legal mind during his short time as a Chief Justice. While I think these arguments are, in general, successful at demonstrating Chase’s importance to history, this book is full of a lot of pointless minutiae that most readers will find to be dull in the extreme.