Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [74]
“Every settler within the territory, by the very act of settlement, became a party to this compact,” Chase argued, “forever entitled to the benefit of its provisions.” These provisions, he maintained, “are the birthright of the people of Ohio. It is their glorious distinction, that the genuine principles of American liberty are imbedded, as it were, in their very soil, and mingled with their very atmosphere…. Wherever [slavery] exists at all, it exists only in virtue of positive law…[and] can have no existence beyond the territorial limits of the state which sanctions it.” The right to hold a person in bondage “vanishes when the master and the slave meet together” in a place, like Ohio, “where positive law interdicts slavery.”
The conservative judge, as expected, ruled against Chase. The next day, Matilda was forcibly removed to the South and returned to slavery. The philosophical and legal arguments Chase had advanced, however, were considered so important by the antislavery community that they were printed in pamphlet form and distributed throughout the nation.
Publication of his arguments in the Matilda case brought Chase immediate acclaim in Northern intellectual circles. By anchoring his arguments firmly in history and law, he opened an antislavery approach that differed from the tactics of the allies of Garrison, who eschewed political organization, dismissed the founding fathers, and considered the Constitution “a covenant with death, an agreement with hell,” because it condoned slavery. Where the Garrisonians called for a moral crusade to awaken the sleeping conscience of the nation, Chase targeted a political audience, hopeful that abolition could be achieved through politics, government, and the courts.
The time had come, Chase decided, to try for public office. Though he had not been active in party politics, he sought a nomination from the Whig Party to the state senate. To his disappointment, he was rebuffed as an abolitionist. Three years later, he tried again, seeking the Whig nomination for the Cincinnati City Council. Although he succeeded in gaining office, he was defeated for reelection after a single term, largely due to his position on temperance, which had led him to unpopular votes denying liquor licenses to city establishments.
Surveying the political landscape, Chase was unable to see a future for himself as either a Democrat or a Whig. Both parties, he wrote, submitted to the South upon the “vital question of slavery.” Consequently, in 1841, he joined the fledgling Liberty Party, which was struggling to establish a solid base of support. The previous year, James Birney, since moved to New York to head the American Anti-Slavery Society, had gained the party’s nomination for president. Unknown beyond abolitionist circles, Birney garnered only 7,000 votes.
Through the 1840s, Chase sought to guide the Liberty Party to a more moderate image so that it could gain wider appeal. Working closely with Gamaliel Bailey, Birney’s astute successor at the Philanthropist, Chase persuaded the Ohio Liberty Party to adopt a resolution that explicitly renounced any intention “to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists.” Concurring with Lincoln, Bates, and a number of progressive Whigs, they pledged to focus only on those areas where slavery was present “without constitutional warrant”—in the District of Columbia, on the high seas, in the new territories. At the same time, Chase encouraged his fellow party members to consider reaching outside their ranks to find a presidential candidate who could command a larger vote than the radical Birney, who, as Chase said, “has seen so little of public service.”
In an 1842 letter to Joshua Giddings, the abolitionist congressman from Ohio’s Western Reserve, Chase suggested that if John Quincy Adams or William Henry Seward “would accept the nomination, great additional strength might be gained for the party.” He had no idea