Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase | Page 5

of jurisprudence.
If it had seemed ever to Mr. Chase and his youthful contemporaries,
that they had come upon times when, as Sir Thomas Browne thought
two hundred years ago, "it is too late to be ambitious," and "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