Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [77]
Chase was profoundly moved by the ceremony. Accepting the engraved pitcher, which he treasured the rest of his life, he pledged to continue his fight for freedom until “the colored man and white man are equal before the law.” In his own state of Ohio, he lamented, various legal provisions known as the Black Laws excluded free blacks from public schools, the witness box, and the voting booth. These exclusions, he asserted (two years before Seward would make a similar argument), were clear infringements of the Constitution. “True Democracy makes no enquiry about the color of the skin, or the place of nativity,” he ardently claimed. “Wherever it sees a man, it recognizes a being endowed by his Creator with original inalienable rights.”
Laws denying black children public school education, while simultaneously requiring that their parents pay school taxes, were reprehensible, he argued. More unjust, blacks were banned from the witness box in all cases where either party was white. This exclusion exposed the black population “to every species of violence and outrage” from whites who felt secure from punishment so long as they committed their crimes only in the presence of black witnesses. “Every law on the statute book so wrong and mean that it cannot be executed, or felt, if executed, to be oppressive and unjust,” averred Chase, “tends to the overthrow of all law, by separating in the minds of the people, the idea of law from the idea of right….
“For myself,” Chase concluded, “I am ready to renew my pledge—and I will venture to speak also in behalf of my co-workers,—that we go straight on, without faltering or wavering, until every vestige of oppression shall be erased from the statute book:—until the sun in all his journey from the utmost eastern horizon, through the mid-heaven, till he sinks beyond the western mountains into his ocean bed, shall not behold, in all our broad and glorious land, the foot print of a single slave.” A tremendous round of applause was followed by an emotional rendition of the hymn “America.” With a benediction, the exercises were brought to a close.
CHASE, UNLIKE SEWARD and Lincoln, did not make friends easily. A contemporary reporter observed that he knew “little of human nature,” and that while “profoundly versed in man, he was profoundly ignorant of men.” His abstractedness often lent an air of preoccupation, aggravated by his extreme nearsightedness. Both prevented him from gauging the reactions of others. Furthermore, his natural reserve, piety, temperance, and lack of humor made for uneasy relationships. Even his stately proportions and fastidious dress worked against social intimacy.
Despite his difficulty in making friends and instilling personal loyalties, Chase did form one significant relationship during the decade of the forties. His bond with Edwin M. Stanton would have important consequences during the Civil War, when the two men would serve together in Lincoln’s cabinet. Six years younger than Chase, Stanton was a brilliant young lawyer from Steubenville, Ohio. He had been active in Democratic politics from his earliest days. A short, stout man, with thick brows and intense black eyes hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses, Stanton had grown up in a Quaker family dedicated to abolition. He later told the story that “when he was a boy his father had—like the father of Hannibal against Rome—made him swear eternal hostility to slavery.”
When Chase and Stanton first met in Columbus in the early 1840s, each was dealing with appalling personal loss, for death had pursued Stanton much as it had pursued Chase. In the five-year span from 1841 to 1846, Stanton had lost his only daughter, Lucy; his young wife, Mary; and his only brother, Darwin. Confronting a similar reign of grief at almost the same time, Chase found in Stanton a solace and friendship