Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase /

by William Maxwell Evarts

The first political impeachment in our constitutional history, involving, as it did, the accusation of the President of the United States, required the Chief-Justice to preside at the trial before the Senate, creating thus the tribunal to which the Constitution had assigned this high jurisdiction. Beyond the injunction that the Senate, when sitting for the trial of impeachments, should be "on oath," the Constitution gave no instruction to fix or ascertain the character of the procedure, the nature of the duty assigned to the specially-organized court, or the distribution of authority between the Chief-Justice and the Senate. The situation lacked no feature of gravity—no circumstance of solicitude—and the attention of the whole country, and of foreign nations, watched the transaction at every stage of its progress. No circumstances could present a greater disparity of political or popular forces between accuser and accused, and none could be imagined of more thorough commitment of the body of the court—the Senate—both in the interests of its members, in their political feeling, and their pre-judgments; all tending to make the condemnation of the President, upon all superficial calculations, inevitable. The effort of the Constitution to guard against mere partisan judgment, by requiring a two-third vote to convict, was paralyzed by the complexion of the Senate, showing more than four-fifths of that body of the party which had instituted the impeachment and was demanding conviction. To this party, as well, the Chief-Justice belonged, as a founder, a leader, a recipient of its honors, and a lover of its prosperity and its fame. The President, raised to the office from that of Vice-President—to which alone he had been elected—by the deplored event of Mr. Lincoln's assassination, was absolutely without a party, in the Senate or in the country; for the party whose suffrages he had received for the vice-presidency was the hostile force in his impeachment. And, to bring the matter to the worst, the succession to all the executive power and patronage of the Government, in case of conviction, was to fall into the administration of the President of the Senate—the creature, thus, of the very court invested with the duty of trial and the power of conviction.

Against all these immense influences, confirmed and inflamed by a storm of party violence, beating against the Senate-house without abatement through the trial, the President was acquitted. To what wise or fortunate protection of the stability of government does the people of this country owe its escape from this great peril? Solely, I cannot hesitate to think, to the potency—with a justice-loving, law-respecting people—of the few decisive words of the Constitution which, to the common apprehension, had impressed upon the transaction the solemn character of trial and conviction, under the sanction of the oath to bind the conscience, and not of the mere exercise of power, of which its will should be its reason. In short, the Constitution had made the procedure judicial, and not political. It was this sacred interposition that stayed this plague of political resentments which, with their less sober and intelligent populations, have thwarted so many struggles for free government and equal institutions.

Over this scene, through all its long agitations, the Chief-Justice presided, with firmness and prudence, with circumspect comprehension, and sagacious forecast of the vast consequences which hung, not upon the result of the trial as affecting any personal fortunes of the President, but upon the maintenance of its character as a trial—upon the prevalence of law, and the supremacy of justice, in its methods of procedure, in the grounds and reasons of its conclusion. That his authority was greatly influential in fixing the true constitutional relations of the Chief-Justice to the Senate, and establishing a precedent of procedure not easily to be subverted; that it was felt, throughout the trial, with persuasive force, in the maintenance of the judicial nature of the transaction; and that it never went a step beyond the office which belonged to him—of presiding over the Senate trying an impeachment—is not to be doubted.

The President was acquitted. The disappointment of the political calculations which had been made upon, what was felt by the partisans of impeachment to be, an assured result, was unbounded; and resentments, rash and unreasoning, were visited upon the Chief-Justice, who had influenced the Senate to be judicial, and had not himself been political. No doubt, this impeachment trial permanently affected the disposition of the leading managers of the Republican party toward the Chief-Justice, and his attitude thereafter toward that party, in his character of a citizen. But the people of the country never assumed any share of the resentment of party feeling. The charge against him, if it had any shape or substance, came only to this: that the Chief-Justice brought into the Senate, under his judicial robes, no concealed weapons of party warfare, and that he had not plucked from the Bible, on which he took and administered the judicial oath, the commandment for its observance.

Not long after Mr. Chase's accession to the bench there came before the court a question, in substance and in form, as grave and difficult as any that its transcendent jurisdiction over the validity of the legislation of Congress, has ever presented, or, in any forecast we can make of the future, will ever present for its judgment; I mean the constitutionality of that feature and quality of the issues of United States notes during the war, which made them a legal tender for the satisfaction of private debts. This measure was one of the great administrative expedients for marshaling the wealth of the country, as rapidly, as equally, and as healthfully, to the energies of production and industry, as might be, and so as seasonably to meet the immeasurable demands of the public service, in the stress of the war. That it was debated and adopted, with full cognizance of its critical character, and with extreme solicitude that all its bearings should be thoroughly explored, and upon the same peremptory considerations, upon which the master of a ship cuts away a mast or jettisons cargo, or the surgeon amputates a limb, was a matter of history. Mr. Chase, as Secretary of the Treasury, with a reluctance and repugnance which enhanced the weight of his counsels, approved the measure, as one of necessity for the fiscal operations of the Government, which knew no other seasonable or adequate recourse. Upon this imposing and authoritative advice of the financial minister, the legal-tender trait of the paper issues of the Government was adopted by Congress, and without his sanction, presumptively, it would have been denied.

And now, when, after repeated argument at the bar, and long deliberations of the court, the decision was announced, the determining opinion of the Chief-Justice, in an equal division of the six associate justices, pronounced the legal-tender acts unconstitutional, as not within the discretion of the political departments of the Government, Congress, and the Executive, to determine this very question of the necessity of the juncture, as justifying their enactment.

The singularity of the situation struck everybody, and greatly divided public sentiment between applause and reproaches of the Chief-Justice, as the principal figure both in the administrative measure and in its judicial condemnation. But soon, a new phase of the unsettled agitation on the merits of the constitutional question, drew public attention, and created even greater excitement of feeling and diversity of sentiment. The court, which had been reduced by Congress under particular and temporary motives, hostile to the appointing power of President Johnson, had been again opened by Congress to its permanent number, and its vacancies had been filled. A new case, involving the vexed question, was heard by the court, and the validity of the disputed laws was sustained by its judgment. The signal spectacle of the court, which had judged over Congress and the Secretary, now judging over itself, gave rise to much satire on one side and the other, and to some coarseness of contumely as to the motives and the means of these eventful mutations in matters, where stability and uniformity are, confessedly, of the highest value to the public interests, and to the dignity of government.

Confessing to a firm approval of the final disposition of the constitutional question by the court, I concede it to be a subject of thorough regret that the just result was not reached by less uncertain steps. But, with this my adverse attitude to the Chief-Justice's judicial position on the question, I find no difficulty in discarding all suggestions which would mix up political calculations with his judicial action. The error of the Chief-Justice, if, under the last judgment of the court, we may venture so to consider it, was in following his strong sense of the supreme importance of restoring the integrity of the currency, and his impatience and despair at the feebleness of the political departments of the Government in that direction, to the point of concluding that the final wisdom of this great question—inter apices juris, as well as of the highest reasons of state—was to deny to the brief exigency of war, what was so dangerous to the permanent necessities of peace. But a larger reason and a wider prudence, as it would seem, favor the prevailing judgment, which refused to cripple the permanent faculties of government for the unforeseen duties of the future, and drew back the court from the perilous edge of law-making, which, overpassed, must react to cripple, in turn, the essential judicial power. The past, thus, was not discredited, nor the future disabled.

I have now carried your attention to the round of public service which filled the life of Mr. Chase with activity and usefulness, and yet the survey and the lesson are incomplete without some reference to a station he never attained, to an office he never administered; I mean, to be sure, the presidency. It is of the nature of this great place of power and trust, and the necessity of the method by which alone it can be reached, to present to the ambition and public spirit of political leaders, and to the honest hopes and enthusiasm of the great body of the people, an equally frequent disappointment. This is not the place to insist upon the reasons of this unquestionable mischief, nor to attempt to point out the escape from them, if indeed the problem be not, in itself, too hard for solution. To Mr. Chase, as to all the great leaders of opinion in the present and perhaps the last generation of our public men, this disappointment came, and in his case, as in theirs, brought with it the defeat of the hopes and desires of a large following of his countrymen, who sought, through his accession to the presidency, the elevation of the Government, and the welfare of the people.

That the range and dignity of Mr. Chase's public employments and the large capacity, absolute probity, and unbounded energy which he had shown in them, justified his aspiration to the presidency, and the public calculations of great benefit from his accession to it, may not be doubted. In this state of things it is obvious, that he would necessarily be greatly in the minds of men, as a candidate for the candidacy, and this, too, whether they favored or opposed it, without any implication of undue activity of desire, much less of effort, on his part, to obtain the nomination. But, it was not in the fortunes of Mr. Chase's life to take the flood of any tide, in the restless sea of our politics, which led on to the presidency. In 1860 there was no principle and no policy of the Republican party which could tolerate the postponement of Mr. Seward to Mr. Chase, if a political leader was to be put in nomination. In 1864 the paramount considerations of absolute supremacy, which dictated the reëlection of Mr. Lincoln, would endure no competition of candidates in the Republican party. In 1868, when each party seemed, in an unusual degree, free to seek and find its candidates where it would, Mr. Chase was Chief-Justice, and no issue of the public safety existed, which alone, in the settled convictions of this people, would favor a political canvass by the head of the judiciary.