was a prevalent feeling that the age of the early
settlements and, again, of our War of Independence, had closed the
heroic chapters of our history, and left nothing for the public life of
our later times, but peaceful and progressive development, and the calm
virtues of civil prudence, to work out of our system all incongruities
and discords. But what these political speculations assigned as the
passionless work of successive generations, was to be done in our time,
and, as it were, in one "unruly right."

Mr. Chase had supported General Harrison for the presidency in 1840, not
upon any very thorough identification with Whig politics, but partly
from a natural tendency toward the personal fortunes of a candidate from
the West, and from his own State, in the absence of any strong
attraction of principle to draw him to the candidate or the politics of
the Democratic party. But, upon the death of Harrison and, the elevation
of Tyler to the presidency, Mr. Chase, promptly discerning the signs of
the times, took the initiative toward making the national attitude and
tendency on the subject of slavery the touchstone of politics. Politic
and prudent by nature, and with no personal disappointments or
grievances to bias his course, he doubtless would have preferred to save
and use the accumulated and organized force of one or the other of the
political parties which divided the country, and press its power into
the service of the principles and the political action which he had,
undoubtingly, decided the honor and interests of the country demanded.
He was among the first of the competent and practical political thinkers
of the day, to penetrate the superficial crust which covered the
slumbering fires of our politics, and to plan for the guidance of their
irrepressible heats so as to save the constituted liberties of the
nation, if not from convulsion, at least from conflagration. He found
the range of political thought and action, which either party permitted
to itself or to its rival, compressed by two unyielding postulates. The
first of these insisted, that the safety of the republic would tolerate
no division of parties, in Federal politics, which did not run through
the slave States as well as the free. The second was that no party could
maintain a footing in the slave States, that did not concede the
nationality of the institution of slavery and its right, in equality
with all the institutions of freedom, to grow with the g