Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase | Page 5

"the great mutations of the world are acted," the illusion was soon dispelled. It has been sadly said of Greece in the age of Plutarch, that "all her grand but turbulent activities, all her noble agitations spent, she was only haunted by the spectres of her ancient renown." No doubt, forty years ago, in this country, there was a prevalent feeling that the age of the early settlements and, again, of our War of Independence, had closed the heroic chapters of our history, and left nothing for the public life of our later times, but peaceful and progressive development, and the calm virtues of civil prudence, to work out of our system all incongruities and discords. But what these political speculations assigned as the passionless work of successive generations, was to be done in our time, and, as it were, in one "unruly right."
Mr. Chase had supported General Harrison for the presidency in 1840, not upon any very thorough identification with Whig politics, but partly from a natural tendency toward the personal fortunes of a candidate from the West, and from his own State, in the absence of any strong attraction of principle to draw him to the candidate or the politics of the Democratic party. But, upon the death of Harrison and, the elevation of Tyler to the presidency, Mr. Chase, promptly discerning the signs of the times, took the initiative toward making the national attitude and tendency on the subject of slavery the touchstone of politics. Politic and prudent by nature, and with no personal disappointments or grievances to bias his course, he doubtless would have preferred to save and use the accumulated and organized force of one or the other of the political parties which divided the country, and press its power into the service of the principles and the political action which he had, undoubtingly, decided the honor and interests of the country demanded. He was among the first of the competent and practical political thinkers of the day, to penetrate the superficial crust which covered the slumbering fires of our politics, and to plan for the guidance of their irrepressible heats so as to save the constituted liberties of the nation, if not from convulsion, at least from conflagration. He found the range of political thought and action, which either party permitted to itself or to its rival, compressed by two unyielding postulates. The first of these insisted, that the safety of the republic would tolerate no division of parties, in Federal politics, which did not run through the slave States as well as the free. The second was that no party could maintain a footing in the slave States, that did not concede the nationality of the institution of slavery and its right, in equality with all the institutions of freedom, to grow with the growth and strengthen with the strength of the American Union. Nothing can be more interesting to a student of politics than the masterly efforts of patriotism and statesmanship, in which all the great men of the country participated, for many years, to confine the perturbations of our public life to a controversy with this latter and lesser postulate. Seward with the Whig party, Chase with the Democratic party, and a host of others in both, tried hard to conciliate the irreconcilable, and to stultify astuteness, to the acceptance of the proposition that slavery, its growth girdled, would not be already struck with death. Quite early, however, Mr. Chase grappled with the primary postulate, and through great labors, wise counsels, long-suffering patience, and by the successive stages of the Liberty party, Independent Democracy, and Free-Soil party, led up the way to the Republican party, which, made up by the Whig party dropping its slave State constituency, and the Democratic party losing its Free-Soil constituents, rent this primary postulate of our politics in twain, and took possession of the Government by the election of its candidate, Mr. Lincoln.
This movement in politics was one of prodigious difficulty and immeasurable responsibility. It was so felt to be by the prime actors in it, though with greatly varying largeness of survey and depth of insight. In the system of American politics it created as vast a disturbance as would a mutation of the earth's axis, or the displacement of the solar gravitation, in our natural world. This great transaction filled the twenty years of Mr. Chase's mature manhood, say, from the age of thirty to that of fifty years. He must be awarded the full credit of having understood, resolved upon, planned, organized, and executed, this political movement, and whether himself leading or co?perating or following in the array and march of events, his plan, his part, his service, were all for the cause, its prosperity, and its success. To one who considers this