After court adjourned that afternoon, the Chief Justice went down to Alexandria to see an old servant who had sent for him. He said to her: "Oh, Auntie, I received a great blessing yesterday; all life is different. I want to have a closer walk with God."
Within a few days he went to New York to transact some business. The morning after his arrival he did not come down to breakfast. The clerk waited till eleven o'clock, and receiving no answer to his frequent knocks, the door was forced, and there was found the dead body of the Chief Justice. He had entered on his closer walk with God.
It was well known throughout the country that Lincoln was not in harmony with Chase, even when the latter was Secretary of the Treasury, but Carpenter, in his "Six Months in the White House," says: "Notwithstanding his apparent hesitation in the appointment of a successor to Judge Taney, it is well known to his intimate friends that there had never been a time during his Presidency, when in the event of the death of Judge Taney, Mr. Lincoln had not fully intended and expected to nominate Salmon P. Chase for Chief Justice."
The appointment must have come to Chase with a little of the effects of "coals of fire," for he had not been very loyal to Lincoln. He had the Presidential bee in his own bonnet.
From 1874 to 1888 Morrison R. Waite, of Ohio, was Chief Justice. Our present Chief Justice, Melville W. Fuller, of Illinois, was called to the highest judicial position in the country in 1888.
XII
TEACHING PATRIOTISM IN THE CAPITOL
One can fancy a patriotic Englishman taking his son to Westminster Abbey, and there telling him the story of liberty, in the history of the renowned dead who sleep about him, until the youth is inspired with a patriotism deeper than the love of kindred, and second only to the love of God.
So an American father who desires his children to assume their proper place among the great force of American youth who are to perpetuate American institutions, might well bring them to the Capitol of the nation, and there in glowing words, and amid reminders of every decade of the nineteenth century and the latter part of the eighteenth, tell the story of liberty as shown in republican institutions.
He could also take his children to Mount Vernon for a day; there they might read together the history of that serene, majestic character whose eminence has carried him beyond national lines and made him belong to the world as well as to us—a citizen of all lands and of all ages.