h of January 1808.
His father died in 1817, and the son passed several years (1820-1824) in
Ohio with his uncle, Bishop Philander Chase (1775-1852), the foremost
pioneer of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the West, the first bishop
of Ohio (1819-1831), and after 1835 bishop of Illinois. He graduated at
Dartmouth College in 1826, and after studying law under William Wirt,
attorney-general of the United States, in Washington, D.C., was admitted
to the bar in 1829, and removed to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1830. Here he
soon gained a position of prominence at the bar, and published an
annotated edition, which long remained standard, of the laws of Ohio. At
a time when public opinion in Cincinnati was largely dominated by
Southern business connexions, Chase, influenced probably by James G.
Birney, associated himself after about 1836 with the anti-slavery
movement, and became recognized as the leader of the political reformers
as opposed to the Garrisonian abolitionists. To the cause he freely gave
his services as a lawyer, and was particularly conspicuous as counsel
for fugitive slaves seized in Ohio for rendition to slavery under the
Fugitive Slave Law of 1793--indeed, he came to be known as the
"attorney-general of fugitive slaves." His argument (1847) in the famous
Van Zandt case before the United States Supreme Court attracted
particular attention, though in this as in other cases of the kind the
judgment was against him. In brief he contended that slavery was "local,
not national," that it could exist only by virtue of positive State Law,
that the Federal government was not empowered by the Constitution to
create slavery anywhere, and that "when a slave leaves the jurisdiction
of a state he ceases to be a slave, because he continues to be a man and
leaves behind him the law which made him a slave." In 1841 he abandoned
the Whig party, with which he had previously been affiliated, and for
seven years was the undisputed leader of the Liberty party in Ohio; he
was remarkably skilful in drafting platforms and addresses, and it was
he who prepared the national Liberty platform of 1843 and the Liberty
address of 1845. Realizing in time that a third party movement could not
succeed, he took the lead during the campaign of 1848 in combining the
Liberty party with the Barnburners or Van Buren Democrats of New York to
form the Free-Soilers. He drafted the famous Free-Soil platform, and it
was largely through his influence that Van Bu