Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [73]
Though Chase had yet to take a public stand on the issue of abolition, he was appalled by the violence. Hearing of the mob’s intention to raid the Franklin House where Birney was thought to reside, he raced to the hotel to warn the publisher. As the mob surged forward, Chase braced his arms against the door frame, blocking the hotel’s entrance with his body. Six feet two, with broad shoulders, a massive chest, and a determined set to his jaw, Chase gave the rioters pause. The crowd demanded to know who he was. “Salmon P. Chase,” the young lawyer replied. “You will pay for your actions,” a frustrated member of the mob told him. “I [can] be found at any time,” Chase said. “His voice and commanding presence caught the mood of the mob at just the right time,” his biographer observes. The hour was late and the mob backed off.
The dramatic encounter had a profound effect on Chase. He became a hero in the antislavery community and began to see his future in a different way. In the years that followed, he became a leader in the effort to protect antislavery activists and their organizations. “No man of his time,” the historian Albert Hart argues, “had a stronger conception of the moral issues” involved in the antislavery movement; “none showed greater courage and resolution.” His passionate awakening to the antislavery cause was not surprising, given his receptiveness to religious arguments in favor of emancipation and equality. As time went by, however, Chase could not separate his own ambition from the cause he championed. The most calculating decisions designed to forward his political career were justified by advancement of the cause. His personal defeats would be regarded as setbacks for freedom itself. “By dedicating himself to moral activism,” the historian Stephen Maizlish argues, “Chase could join his passion for personal advancement to the demands of his religious convictions…. ‘Fame’s proud temple’ could be his and he need feel no guilt in its pursuit.”
In 1837, a year after he had faced down the anti-Birney mob, Chase once more lent his support to the abolitionist publisher. He undertook the defense of a light-skinned young slave named Matilda, brought to Ohio on a business trip by a Missouri planter who was both her master and her natural father. While in Ohio, encountering black men and women in a free society, she begged her father to grant her liberty. When he refused, she took matters into her own hand, seeking refuge in Cincinnati’s black community until her father returned to Missouri. She eventually secured employment in Birney’s house, where she remained until she was discovered by a slave catcher and brought before a judge to be remanded to Missouri under the Fugitive Slave Law enacted by Congress in 1793 to enforce the constitutional provision requiring that slaves escaping from one state to another “be delivered up” to their original owners.
Perhaps Chase could have argued successfully that Matilda was not a fugitive from Missouri, since she had been brought into Ohio by her father. Rather, he chose to make a fundamental assault on the applicability of the Fugitive Slave Law to the free state of Ohio. He argued that as soon as Matilda stepped into Ohio, she acquired the legal right to freedom guaranteed by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which forbade the introduction of slavery into the vast Northwest Territory later occupied by the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. To many opponents of slavery in later years, including Abraham Lincoln, the Ordinance of 1787 became, like the Declaration of Independence, a sacred document expressing