Salmon P. Chase

Source

• Born: 13 January 1808
• Birthplace: Cornish, New Hampshire
• Died: 7 May 1873 (stroke)
• Best Known As: The former Secretary of the Treasury who's on the $10,000 bill

Name at birth: Salmon Portland Chase

Salmon P. Chase was U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the critical early years of the Civil War. Chase had for many years been a leading citizen of Cincinnati and a lawyer well-known for defending escaped slaves. (Angry Southerners called him "The Attorney General of Fugitive Slaves.") Chase was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1848 and served one term, after which he was twice elected governor of Ohio (in 1856 and 1858) and then was again elected senator in 1860. Two days after taking office, he left the Senate to join Abraham Lincoln's cabinet. Chase resigned his Treasury post in 1864 and ran against Lincoln for the Republican nomination for president; he lost, but later that same year Lincoln appointed him to be Chief Justice of the United States. In that role Chase presided over the 1868 impeachment trial of president Andrew Johnson.

Chase graduated from Dartmouth College in 1826... He was a deeply religious man. According to the Ohio History Central site, "During Chase's years as secretary of the treasury, the United States began to print "In God We Trust" on all currency"... The Bureau of Internal Revenue, later the Internal Revenue Service, was established during his time at the Treasury.

For more information on Salmon Portland Chase, visit Britannica.com.

(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.

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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

Chase, Salmon Portland (1808-73) statesman, antislavery leader, and chief justice of the United States, born in Cornish, New Hampshire. A founder of the Republican party, Chase was a four-time presidential candidate, a U.S. senator (1849-55, 1860-1), and governor of Ohio (1855-61). Chase advocated freed slaves' use as soldiers, access to land, and right to vote. As Abraham Lincoln's secretary of the Treasury (1861-64), Chase was responsible for financing a war of unprecedented scale. During his tenure he introduced paper money, established a national banking system, and regulated trade between the Union and the Confederacy. Appointed chief justice by Lincoln (1864-73), Chase supported universal male suffrage and opposed military government in the South.

In 1837 he became interested in the antislavery movement after defending in court the freedom of Matilda, whose master had brought her to Ohio. Chase maintained that slavery depended on local law for its enforcement because the framers of the Constitution had sought not to support it at the national level. On the basis of this analysis, he argued that no law outside of a slave state could support the enslavement of an individual; that is, that once a person had entered free territory, as Matilda had, that person reverted to his or her natural state of freedom. Because of his commitment to the legal defense of slaves, he became known as the “attorney general for fugitive slaves.”

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The American statesman Salmon Portland Chase (1808-1873) was an ardent advocate of African American rights. He was appointed secretary of the Treasury by President Lincoln, who later made him chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Salmon P. Chase was born at Cornish, N.H., on Jan. 13, 1808. He attended public school at Keene, N.H., and, for a time, a private school in Vermont. He established a reputation for good behavior, scholarly interest, and deep religious feelings. When he was 9 years old his father died, and soon he was placed under the stern direction of his uncle, Philander Chase, one of the great pioneer leaders in the American Episcopal Church.

Philander, "a harsh, autocratic, determined man of God," conducted a church school near Columbus, Ohio, where Salmon pursued classical and religious studies. When Philander, now Bishop Chase, became president of Cincinnati College, Salmon was his student. In less than a year, for some unexplained reason, Salmon left the college and entered Dartmouth College as a junior. He graduated in 1826 "without marked distinction." He had by this time decided to become a lawyer, not a clergyman, but he had not lost his religious devotion.

For a time Chase conducted a school for boys in Washington, D.C., and read law "under the nominal supervision" of William Wirt, one of the nation's best lawyers. He was admitted to the bar in December 1829.

Young Lawyer

As a practicing lawyer, Chase made his permanent home in Cincinnati. It was a wise choice. Located on the north bank of the Ohio River, with its busy western trade and with slave territory on the opposite bank, Cincinnati offered splendid opportunities to a young lawyer of ability and strong moral views. Chase's legal talents were quickly recognized, and soon he was being called the "attorney for runaway Negroes." His most famous case was the defense of John Vanzant, who had been arrested while carrying a number of Kentucky runaways to freedom under a load of hay. Chase and William H. Seward, as unpaid lawyers, carried Vanzant's case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where their eloquent appeals for minority rights on constitutional grounds attracted national attention. Chase's insistence that no claim to persons as property could be supported by any United States law won antislavery support among those who rejected William Lloyd Garrison's extreme militant views. It also served to advance Chase's political standing in Ohio and led to correspondence with such national antislavery figures as Charles Summer.

Meanwhile Chase's private life was filled with gloom. His first wife died a year after their marriage, his second after 5 years, and his third after 6 years. Of his six children, only two daughters grew to womanhood. The effects of death, always so near, deepened his religious fervor. Days spent in Bible reading and prayer, and soul torture for possible neglect of duty in not impressing others with the need of salvation, left a deep mark on the man.

Political Rise

As a young man, Chase had voted as a Whig, but when the Liberty party emerged, his strong antislavery feelings drew him into its ranks. He was active in its development but was always ready to change parties if slavery could be ended more quickly by another agency. In fact, as the said, he sympathized strongly with the Democratic party in "almost everything excepting its submission to slaveholding leadership and dictation."

This was good politics in the state of Ohio, where widely differing peoples and interests kept party lines fluid. When the Liberty party gave way to the Free Soil party in 1848, Chase cautiously followed and a year later was elected to the U.S. Senate by a coalition of Democrats and Free Soilers.

In the Senate, Chase worked "to divorce our National and State governments from all support of Slavery" and through constitutional means to "deliver our country from its greatest curse." He labored to unite all the antislavery groups in a futile effort to capture the Democratic party and to make it the champion of freedom. Chase viewed the steps leading to the Mexican War as a proslavery drive but supported war measures as an obligation to the soldiers. He backed the Wilmot Proviso, opposed the Compromise of 1850, and was one of the group that issued the "Appeal of the Independent Democrats," with its false charge that Stephen Douglas's Nebraska Bill had opened that territory to slavery.

Chase was important in creating the new Republican party. In his own state he molded dissenting groups into an efficient machine and in 1855 was elected governor. He was reelected in 1857 and, because of his antislavery political record, was widely considered as a presidential candidate. Because of his shifting political course, however, he could seldom count on solid support from the politicians in his own party. Apparent at the first Republican National Convention at Philadelphia in 1856, this became more clear at the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1860. There, although a "favorite son" candidate, he could not muster a solid vote from his Ohio delegation. Yet Chase and his state were so important to the party that a place in Lincoln's Cabinet was a foregone conclusion. The same held true for William H. Seward and the state of New York. The difficulty was that each of these men thought of himself as superior to the other and even to Lincoln. Both wanted to head the Cabinet as secretary of state, and the rivalry continued even after Lincoln had named Seward to the State Department and made Chase secretary of the Treasury.

Secretary of the Treasury

Chase's task of directing the nation's finances during the Civil War was a difficult one. Vast sums of money had to be borrowed, bonds marketed, and the national currency kept as stable as possible. Interest rates soared; specie payments had to be suspended; and soon a resort to paper money was reluctantly accepted. Yet with the aid of banker Jay Cooke, Chase somehow met the crisis and capped his accomplishments by creating the national banking system, which opened a market for bonds and stabilized currency.

As a member of a Cabinet in which Seward attempted to play the part of "prime minister," Chase led the opposition. To check Seward, he demanded regular Cabinet meetings, gave guarded approval to the provisioning of Ft. Sumter, and openly criticized Seward's handling of foreign affairs. He was equally critical of Lincoln, whom he viewed as incompetent and confused. His main complaints were against the retention of Gen. George McClellan and the refusal to use Negro troops. His constant disagreement with administration policies gained him a following among the Radical Republican element in Congress. In 1862 this led to a Cabinet crisis.

A group of senators, influenced by Chase's complaints, held a secret caucus and drew up a document to be presented to the President, demanding "a change in and a partial reconstruction of the Cabinet." It was, in fact, an effort to remove Seward and to advance Chase. On learning of the plan, Seward sent his resignation to the President, who put it aside. Then, by bringing the protesters and the rest of the Cabinet together for a frank discussion, Lincoln skillfully led Chase to repudiate some of his charges. This hurt Chase with both friend and foe. The next morning he offered his own resignation. Lincoln now held both Seward's and Chase's resignations and, having gained the upper hand, refused to accept either.

As the war dragged on, Chase was increasingly convinced of the impossibility of Lincoln's reelection. The Emancipation Proclamation had been satisfactory as far as it went, he felt, but it had not gone far enough. A new leader with a new approach was needed. Chase decided that it was his duty to seek the Republican nomination. A group of Radical leaders issued a pamphlet declaring Chase as the man who best fit the party's needs. The Chase boom, however, collapsed as Lincoln's hold on the public became clear. This made Chase's place as a Cabinet member embarrassing, and soon Chase submitted his resignation. Lincoln accepted it.

Supreme Court Justice

In the campaign of 1864 Chase made several speeches for Lincoln, and when Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney died in October 1864, Lincoln appointed Chase to that important office. Chase presided over the Supreme Court during the troubled Reconstruction period. The important tasks were to restore the Southern judicial systems and to uphold the law against congressional invasion. Perhaps Chase best revealed his devotion to justice in his insistence on the judicial character of the impeachment proceedings against Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson.

Meanwhile Chase retained his ambition to become president, and with the aid of his beautiful daughter Kate, he made strenuous but futile efforts to secure the Democratic nomination in 1868 and the Liberal Republican nomination in 1872. He died of a stroke in 1873.

Further Reading

David Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (1954), includes notes, commentary, and an introduction which assesses Chase's life. Thomas Graham Belden and Marva Robins Belden, So Fell the Angels (1956), is a composite biography of Chase, his daughter, and her husband. Older but still useful biographies are Albert Bushnell Hart, Salmon Portland Chase (1899), and J. W. Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase (1899).

Additional Sources

Blue, Frederick J., Salmon P. Chase: a life in politics, Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987.

Hart, Albert Bushnell, Salmon P. Chase, New York: Chelsea House, 1980.

Niven, John, Salmon P. Chase: a biography, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

• Born: Jan. 13, 1808, Cornish, N.H.
• Education: Dartmouth College, A.B., 1826
• Previous government service: U.S. senator from Ohio, 1849–55, 1861; governor of Ohio, 1856–60; U.S. secretary of the Treasury, 1861–64
• Appointed by President Abraham Lincoln Dec. 6, 1864; replaced Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who died
• Supreme Court term: confirmed by the Senate Dec. 6, 1864, by a voice vote; served until May 7, 1873
• Died: May 7, 1873, New York, N.Y.

Salmon P. Chase had a lifelong ambition to become President of the United States. He failed to realize his highest goal, but he did become the sixth chief justice of the United States.

After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1826, Chase studied law under U.S. Attorney General William Wirt and became a lawyer in Cincinnati. He achieved a national reputation as an opponent of slavery and a defender of escaped slaves who sought refuge in the free Northern states. His friends and foes called him the “attorney general for runaway Negroes.”

In the 1850s, Chase became a leader in the new Republican party and its antislavery mission. After an unsuccessful bid to become the Republican party's Presidential candidate in 1860, he backed his party's choice, Abraham Lincoln. The new President appointed Chase to his cabinet as secretary of the Treasury. In 1864, Lincoln chose Chase to be chief justice of the United States, even though Chase had tried to take Lincoln's place as the Republican party Presidential candidate in the 1864 election.

As chief justice, Chase continued his concern for the rights of African Americans newly freed from slavery in 1865 by the 13th Amendment. Chief Justice Chase, however, also supported the constitutional rights of a Confederate sympathizer from Indiana in the landmark decision of Exparte Milligan (1866). He joined in the unanimous decision that Lambdin Milligan, who lived in a non–war zone during the Civil War, had been unfairly and illegally tried in a military court, instead of a civilian court, for supposedly committing crimes against the federal government.

Chief Justice Chase presided with dignity and fairness over the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. And he wrote an enduring opinion for the Court in Texas v. White (1869) that endorsed the Republican party position that a state did not have a right to secede from the federal Union. Chase argued that Texas's Confederate government had been unlawful and that its acts, therefore, were null and void. Chase argued conclusively that the Constitution created “an indestructible union, composed of indestructible states” and that secession was illegal.

See also Chief Justice; Ex parte Milligan; Texas v. White

Sources

• Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987)

Salmon Portland Chase served from 1864 to 1873 as the sixth chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was also a distinguished lawyer and politician, serving as U.S. senator from Ohio (1849-55 and 1860-61), governor of Ohio (1855-59), and secretary of the treasury (1861-64). Chase also sought the presidential nomination in every election between 1856 and 1872, even while sitting as chief justice. As a result, many criticized him for neglecting his judicial responsibilities in favor of his political ambitions. Despite his extrajudicial activities, Chase helped navigate the Supreme Court through the dangerous political waters of Reconstruction, preserving the Court's powers when a Radical Republican-dominated Congress sought to control both the president and the Supreme Court. As chief justice Chase presided over the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. Chase was an ardent opponent of slavery his entire life and in his last years on the Court fought against a narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, an interpretation that he rightly surmised would allow future state legislatures to rescind the newly won rights of African Americans.

Chase was born January 13, 1808, in Cornish, New Hampshire, the eighth of eleven children in a family that had lived in New England since the 1600s. His father operated a tavern as well as a glass factory and distillery near Keene, New Hampshire, and died when Chase was nine years old. Chase had two prominent uncles who aided him in his father's absence: Dudley Chase, who served two terms as U.S. senator from Vermont (1813-17 and 1825-31), and Philander Chase, who became bishop of Ohio for the Episcopal Church and president of Cincinnati College. When he was twelve, Chase moved to Ohio to help on Philander Chase's farm. In return for Chase's work, his uncle taught him Greek, Latin, and mathematics in his church school. Chase attended Cincinnati College for a year then eventually returned to his family in New Hampshire and entered Dartmouth College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1826.

After college Chase moved to Washington, D.C., where he studied law under Attorney General William Wirt. He passed the bar and returned to Cincinnati to set up a legal practice. In Cincinnati Chase's personal life was clouded by tragedy. He lost three wives between 1835 and 1852, each marriage cut short by death. He had one daughter by each of his last two wives. He remained single for the last part of his life and was a devoted father to his two daughters.

Chase strongly opposed slavery from his early years, a position that owed much to his deeply religious outlook. In Ohio he was nicknamed the Attorney General for Runaway Negroes for his defense of abolitionists who had aided runaway slaves from Kentucky. He even took two of these cases to the Supreme Court— Jones v. Van Zandt, 46 U.S. (5 How.) 215, 12 L. Ed. 122 (1847), and Moore v. Illinois, 55 U.S. (14 How.) 13, 14 L. Ed. 306 (1852)—both of which he lost. About his nickname, Chase commented that he "never refused … help to any person black or white; and liked the office nonetheless because there were neither fees nor salary connected with it."

In 1849 Chase was elected to the U.S. Senate as a member of the Free-Soil party, a party which sought to keep new states in the West free of slavery. In the Senate, he and CharlesSumner became leading spokesmen for the antislavery movement. He gained renown through his opposition to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed each territory to conduct a popular vote deciding whether it would permit slavery or not. Shortly thereafter he helped found the antislavery Republican party and in 1855 he was elected governor of Ohio. He was considered for the 1856 Republican presidential nomination but was passed over and in February 1860 he was reelected to the U.S. Senate. In May of the same year he sought the presidential nomination at the Republican convention in Chicago. Chase and William H. Seward were considered the chief rivals for the nomination but on the third ballot Chase's supporters gave their votes to Abraham Lincoln, giving the man from Illinois the nomination. After his election, Lincoln offered Chase and Seward the respective posts of secretary of the treasury and secretary of state. Chase then gave up his seat as U.S. senator.

At the Treasury Chase faced the difficult task of financing a government engaged in a civil war. As part of this effort he helped establish a national banking system that gave the federal government its first effective national paper currency. Early in the war Chase also advised military leaders who sought guidance from Washington, D.C. Chase was often unhappy with the decisions of Lincoln and other members of the cabinet and resolved that he could do better as president. He therefore opposed Lincoln for the Republican presidential nomination in 1864. Chase had the support of the more liberal wing of the Republican party but he eventually withdrew his name from consideration, conceding to the more popular Lincoln. In June 1864, after several disagreements with Lincoln, Chase resigned from the cabinet.

Despite their differences, Lincoln admired Chase and in December 1864 he nominated Chase to succeed Roger B. Taney as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He nominated Chase with the expectation that Chase would sustain two extraordinary measures taken by the Union during the war—the emancipation of the slaves and the issuance of paper money to repay debt. Both measures had caused great controversy, and as a result many Americans had lost confidence in agencies of the federal government, including the Supreme Court.

Chase joined a Court with only three other justices who consistently supported Republican positions, Justices David Davis, Noah H. Swayne, and Samuel F. Miller, all appointed by Lincoln. The Court was sharply divided over the various issues surrounding Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War when the country attempted to rebuild itself and readmit the Southern states to the Union. The post-Civil War crisis deepened when Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, and Vice President Andrew Johnson became president.

Chase urged a moderate, conciliatory stance toward the defeated South, a stance that eventually alienated him from the Radical Republicans, a faction of the Republican party that sought to impose strict military measures and punitive new laws on the states of the former Confederacy. Like the Radical Republicans, Chase supported expanded freedoms for African Americans. Unlike them, however, he also supported such measures as ending military government in the South, pardoning Confederate leaders, and quickly restoring Southern states to the Union. Chase's moderation helped spare Jefferson Davis, president of the former Confederacy. After the war Davis had been imprisoned in Virginia, part of Chase's circuit, where the government hoped to try him for treason. Chase refused to hold a civil trial while the area was still under military rule. Although a grand jury indicted Davis for treason, no action was taken against him and eventually the government's case was dismissed.

Many of the Supreme Court's decisions during Chase's tenure involved the thorny issue of Reconstruction. In March 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, which divided the South into five districts and imposed military rule. Reconstruction involved new problems of constitutional interpretation as to the federal government's powers over the states. At issue were questions not only of states'rights but also of the status of freed slaves. In one early decision, Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2, 18 L. Ed. 284 (1866), Chase voted with the Court in challenging Congress over Reconstruction. The Court held that Congress could not authorize military trials where civil courts were still operating. The majority opinion warned of the military's "gross usurpation of power"—a direct challenge to the Reconstruction Acts passed by Congress. However, in later decisions Chase voted to uphold congressional laws pertaining to Reconstruction. In the 1867 Test Oath cases—Cummings v. Missouri, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 277, 18 L. Ed. 356, and Ex parte Garland, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 333, 18 L. Ed. 366—Chase disagreed with the Court's decision to strike down laws requiring that priests and lawyers swear oaths of loyalty to the Union. In his dissenting opinion, joined by Chase, Justice Miller declared that no punishment was inflicted by requiring such an oath and that Congress could impose such requirements. Chase considered Texas v. White, 74 U.S. (7 Wall.) 700, 19 L. Ed. 227 (1868), to be the most important case of his Supreme Court career. Chase, writing the Court's opinion, upheld the general principles of Reconstruction, asserting that Congress and not the Supreme Court possessed the authority to recognize state governments as legitimate.

When Southern states sought to make cases in court against executives of the federal government—including President Johnson and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton—Chase joined the majority in dismissing those cases, thereby aiding Congress in its Reconstruction fervor. In Mississippi v. Johnson, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 475, 18 L. Ed. 437 (1867), Mississippi, in the first court case ever to name the president of the United States as an individual party, attempted to prevent President Johnson from enforcing certain provisions of the Reconstruction Acts. Chase dismissed the case, holding that preventing the president from acting on congressional legislation would cause a "collision … between the executive and legislative departments of the government." This, in turn, would give the House grounds to sue for the president's impeachment. This opinion proved prophetic, of course, when Congress did attempt to impeach President Johnson.

Chase's public standing improved when he ably handled the impeachment trial of President Johnson in March 1868. The Radical Republican-dominated Congress had voted to bring impeachment proceedings against Johnson after he dismissed one of their favorite members of his cabinet, Secretary of War Stanton. The Senate sat as a court of impeachment with Chase presiding as judge. Chase frustrated Radical Republican aims by sticking to procedural rules and helping to bring about Johnson's acquittal, which passed the Senate by one vote. The public acclaim occasioned by his handling of the impeachment trial led Chase to make another try at the presidency in 1868. This time, however, Chase made known his desire to run as a Democratic candidate, largely because his moderate positions toward the South had endeared him to Democrats. His efforts failed.

Although the Supreme Court under Chase's leadership rarely questioned congressional Reconstruction measures after 1867, it did declare other federal legislation unconstitutional. Whereas before 1864 the Court had overturned acts of Congress only twice—in Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 2 L. Ed. 60 (1803), and Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 15 L. Ed. 691 (1857)—between 1864 and 1873 it voided ten pieces of congressional legislation. These decisions included Hepburn v. Griswold, 75 U.S. (8 Wall.) 603, 19 L. Ed. 513 (1870), in which Chase questioned much of his earlier work for the Treasury when he declared the Legal Tender Acts unconstitutional. This decision created a temporary crisis of confidence in the national currency. The Court reversed this decision in 1871 after a change in membership, with Chase sticking to his views of two years earlier. Despite his participation in such judicial activism, Chase at other times advocated judicial restraint. In his opinion for the Licence Tax Cases, 72 U.S. (5 Wall.) 462, 18 L. Ed. 497 (1868), in which he upheld a law that taxed the sale of lottery tickets throughout the United States, Chase wrote:

This court can know nothing of public policy except from the Constitution and the laws, and the course of administration and decision. It has no legislative powers. It cannot amend or modify any legislative acts. It cannot examine questions as expedient or inexpedient, as politic or impolitic. Considerations of that sort must, in general, be addressed to the legislature. Questions of policy determined there are concluded here.

Ulysses S. Grant won the presidential election of 1868 and from that time on the power of Radical Republicanism began to wane. Grant's appointments made the Court a more conservative body. In the Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 21 L. Ed. 394 (1873), Chase dissented from the Court's narrow interpretation of the FourteenthAmendment, which was passed in 1868 and sought to protect the rights of African Americans against infringements by state legislation. In its Slaughter-House decision, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges and Immunities Clause protected only a few select rights of national citizenship, such as the right to travel. The Court did not interpret the amendment as guaranteeing more fundamental rights, such as the right to vote. Chase objected that the Court's opinion jeopardized newly won freedoms for African Americans. It would take another one hundred years before the Court would reverse this narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Chase suffered a series of crippling strokes beginning in 1870. Despite his failing health, his daughter Catherine Chase and other admirers put forth his name for the 1872 presidential nomination. As had happened each time before, his nomination came to nothing. He died May 7, 1873, after suffering a stroke while visiting his daughter in New York City, and was interred in Spring Grove Cemetary in Cincinnati. Although Chase did not achieve his highest goal of becoming president, he nevertheless held more high offices during his life than did any other Supreme Court justice besides James F. Byrnes and William H. Taft. More importantly, Chase successfully guided the Court through some of the most tumultuous years in the history of the nation. His actions as chief justice helped preserve the powers of the Supreme Court in the face of serious congressional challenges during the extraordinary years following the Civil War.

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