Salmon P. Chase
Lincoln's Vital Rival
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- $36.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Best Book of 2022
From an acclaimed New York Times bestselling biographer, an “eloquently written, impeccably researched, and intensely moving” (The Wall Street Journal) reassessment of Abraham Lincoln’s indispensable Secretary of the Treasury: a leading proponent for black rights during his years in cabinet and later as Chief Justice of the United States.
Salmon P. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860—but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the groundwork Chase laid over the previous two decades. Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln was speaking out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery parties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the attorney general for runaway negroes.
Tapped by Lincoln to become Secretary of the Treasury, Chase would soon prove vital to the Civil War effort, raising the billions of dollars that allowed the Union to win the war while also pressing the president to recognize black rights. When Lincoln had the chance to appoint a chief justice in 1864, he chose his faithful rival because he was sure Chase would make the right decisions on the difficult racial, political, and economic issues the Supreme Court would confront during Reconstruction.
Drawing on previously overlooked sources, Walter Stahr offers a “revelatory” (The Christian Science Monitor) new look at the pivotal events of the Civil War and its aftermath, and a “superb” (James McPherson), “magisterial” (Amanda Foreman) account of a complex forgotten man at the center of the fight for racial justice in 19th century America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Stahr (Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man) delivers a comprehensive and largely admiring portrait of U.S. Treasury Secretary and Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase (1808–1873). Contending that "Lincoln could never have become president without the vital work that Chase had done in the two preceding decades," Stahr documents the Ohio lawyer's evolution from a "rank-and-file Whig, with no strong views on slavery" in the late 1830s to a prominent legal defender of fugitive slaves and abolitionists. A founder of the Republican Party, Chase actively campaigned for Abraham Lincoln after falling short in his own quest for the party's nomination in the 1860 presidential election. Lincoln put Chase in charge of the U.S. Treasury, where he created a national standard currency, known as the "greenback," and helped establish a national bank system. In 1864, Lincoln appointed Chase to the Supreme Court, where he presided over the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Prodigious research and abundant use of diaries, letters, and other primary sources support Stahr's nuanced portrait, which makes room for criticism that Chase put his presidential ambitions ahead of his principles in seeking the 1868 Democratic nomination for president. This robust reassessment sheds new light on an undersung hero in the battle to end slavery.
