Salmon P. Chase: A Biography
by John Niven
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Book Summary Information
Author: John NivenEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-03-09
ISBN: 0195046536
Number of pages: 576
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of Salmon P. Chase: A Biography
Book Review: Great biography of a thoroughly unpleasant man
Summary: 5 Stars
Salmon P. Chase wanted to be President so bad that it hurt. His great ambition almost consumed him. From the 1850 on, as he became more and more prominent in politics, he planned, plotted and schemed unabashedly to get into the White House. He never got there, well not as President anyway. Chase hid his burning ambition behind an exterior of dull respectability, humourless piety, and lots of sanctimonious, pretentious pontificating.
Yet Chase was also a man of great intelligence and enormous ability: he was an excellent Secretary of the Treasury from 1861 to 1864. He did a great job putting the Union war effort on a sound financial and fiscal basis. In doing so he undoubtedly made a powerful contribution to the Union victory.
But he was ever ridden by the demon of his own ambition, even during the war, when he should have put his ambitions aside. But Chase never forgave Lincoln for becoming President in 1860 and in order to trip Lincoln up he stooped very low. He spread vicious stories about Mary Todd Lincoln and more than once tried to undermine the President's position.
Lincoln, who had seen through Chase from the start, was convinced it would be better having him in the Cabinet p***ing out of the Administration, than having him in Congress p***ing in. He deftly avoided the traps Chase laid for him, but made sure Chase trod in quite a few that Lincoln set up for him.
Powerless against Lincoln's wily political handiwork Chase resorted to huffiness and wounded pride and time and again offered to resign form the Cabinet. In the spring of 1864, when the country's finances were in fine order and the war effort assured, and Lincoln did no longer need Chase in Cabinet, he accepted Chase's umpteenth offer of resignation, to Chase's surprise and dismay.
Then came a masterstroke: Lincoln appointed Chase to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Chase had an excellent legal mind and was eminently qualified for the post, but his political ambitions were at once wrecked: the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the highest judge of the Republic, could of course not be actively involved in politics!!
Lincoln had thus eliminated a contender for the republican nomination for the presidential election of 1864, while seemingly honouring and rewarding Chase for his services in the Cabinet with high and distinguished office.
After that, nothing ever went right for Chase anymore: his role in the impeachment proceedings of Andrew Johnson was widely critiscized, and his repeated attempts to get nominated for presidential candidate were frowned at, he was after all the Chief Justice!
For though Chase desperately wanted to be President, there were far too many people who did not want him to be. Chase never seemed to realise this: his ambitions had blinkered him too much. In the end it left him a lonely man: friendless, disappointed, embittered and widely distrusted.
He had offered everything to his ambition: his self-respect, his reputation and his health: you just have to look at a photograph taken in 1864 where he poses as the newly appointed Chief Justice with the other members of the US Supreme Court, and then look at his portrait taken only a few years later: Chase's hair has gone snow white and his emaciated face looks like his own death mask.
He even offered the respectability and happiness of his family to his ambition: in order to further (and finance) his own political goals, Chase goaded his beautiful and intelligent daughter Kate, the apple of his eye, into marriage with the dissolute, corrupt drunk William Sprague, the millionnaire Governor of Rhode Island, who later became a Senator. The marriage proved disastrous and it disintegrated spectacularly. Sprague's fortune evaporated after he had invested it badly.
Chase's political prospects were damaged by rumours about his son-in-law's dealings with the Confederacy during the war. Some of Sprague's textile factories had smuggled in southern cotton during the war, an act of treason of which Sprague had been fully aware, and likely even the initiator. There are strong indications that, among others, Seward and the powerful Blair clan used this information to keep Chase from the Presidency after 1865. The scandal would have wrecked his career.
But it had been Chase himself who had wanted his daughter to marry Sprague, so again he had been his own worst enemy.
Dr. Niven's excellent book on this important figure of the Civil War era is readable and entertaining, yet scholarly and thoughtful. Read about Salmon P. Chase: how a capable and smart man can be too ambitious for his own good.
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