Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [75]
Though he had never met Seward, Chase opened an intriguing correspondence with the governor, in which they freely debated the role of third parties. Seward expressed his belief that “there can be only two permanent parties.” In his view, the Democratic Party, with its strong base in the South, would always be the party of slavery, while the Whig Party would champion the antislavery banner, “more or less,” depending “on the advancement of the public mind and the intentness with which it can be fixed on the question of Slavery.” Seward conceded that while he was disheartened by the Whig Party’s current “lukewarmness on the Subject of Slavery,” he had no choice but to stay with the party he loved, and to hope for a more advanced position in the future. “To abandon a party and friends to whom I owe so much, whose confidence I do in some degree possess,” he wrote, “would be criminal, and not more criminal than unwise.”
Chase saw the situation differently. Though originally “educated in the Whig school,” with Whiggish views of the tariff, banking, and government, he had never considered party loyalty among his defining characteristics. Nor had he experienced the camaraderie of fellow party loyalists that Seward enjoyed when he and his colleagues boarded together in Albany during the lengthy legislative sessions. For Chase, the decision to leave the Whigs for the Liberty Party was not the momentous separation that it would have been for Seward.
Chase clearly understood that so long as the Liberty Party remained a “one idea” party, it would never attract majority support. Risking the displeasure of his abolitionist friends, who wanted no diminution of their principles, he envisioned a gradual movement of the Liberty Party toward one of the major parties. His efforts revealed a practical side to his principled stance, but old acquaintances in Ohio were troubled by his decision to set his sights on the more powerful Democratic Party, where he had a greater chance of statewide success than with the Whigs.
In his bid to cultivate Democratic leaders, Chase shifted his positions on the tariff and the banking system to align himself with the Democrats, though he insisted that the economic policies of either party were insignificant compared to the issue of slavery. For the moment, since neither major party would take a resolute stand on slavery, he remained with the Liberty Party, attending conventions, drawing up resolutions, and searching for candidates.
In the years that followed, in part because the free city of Cincinnati was a natural destination for runaways crossing the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, a number of fugitive slave cases ended up in the Cincinnati courts. Chase volunteered his services in many such cases. The eloquent power of his arguments soon earned him the honorary title “Attorney General for the Negro.” In the famous case that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s good-hearted John Van Trompe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chase represented John Van Zandt, an old farmer who had moved from Kentucky to Ohio so that he might live in a free state.
On an April night in 1842, Van Zandt was returning from the Cincinnati market to his home twenty miles north. On the road, he encountered a group of slaves who had crossed the river from Kentucky. “Moved by sympathy,” Chase would argue, the farmer “undertook to convey them in his wagon to Lebanon or Springfield.” En route, two slave catchers accosted the wagon. They captured the slaves and returned them to their Kentucky owner, receiving a $450 bounty for their efforts.
The owner then brought suit against Van Zandt for “harboring and concealing” the slaves, in violation of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. Chase “very willingly” agreed to represent the elderly farmer, who faced substantial penalties if found guilty. Chase’s defense of Van Zandt transcended the particulars of the Matilda case,