st, was born in Somerset county,
Maryland, on the 17th of April 1741. He was admitted to the bar at
Annapolis in 1761, and for more than twenty years was a member of the
Maryland legislature. He took an active part in the resistance to the
Stamp Act, and from 1774 to 1778 and 1784 to 1785 was a member of the
Continental Congress. With Benjamin Franklin and Charles Carroll he was
sent by Congress in 1776 to win over the Canadians to the side of the
revolting colonies, and after his return did much to persuade Maryland
to advocate a formal separation of the thirteen colonies from Great
Britain, he himself being one of those who signed the Declaration of
Independence on the 2nd of August 1776. In this year he was also a
member of the convention which framed the first constitution for the
state of Maryland. After serving in the Maryland convention which
ratified for that state the Federal Constitution, and there vigorously
opposing ratification, though afterwards he was an ardent Federalist, he
became in 1791 chief judge of the Maryland general court, which position
he resigned in 1796 for that of an associate justice of the Supreme
Court of the United States. His radical Federalism, however, led him to
continue active in politics, and he took advantage of every opportunity,
on the bench and off, to promote the cause of his party. His overbearing
conduct while presiding at the trials of John Fries for treason, and of
James Thompson Callender (d. 1813) for seditious libel in 1800, drove
the lawyers for the defence from the court, and evoked the wrath of the
Republicans, who were stirred to action by a political harangue on the
evil tendencies of democracy which he delivered as a charge to a grand
jury at Baltimore in 1803. The House of Representatives adopted a
resolution of impeachment in March 1804, and on the 7th of December 1804
the House managers, chief among whom were John Randolph, Joseph H.
Nicholson (1770-1817), and Caesar A. Rodney (1772-1824), laid their
articles of impeachment before the Senate. The trial, with frequent
interruptions and delays, lasted from the 2nd of January to the 1st of
March 1805. Judge Chase was defended by the ablest lawyers in the
country, including Luther Martin, Robert Goodloe Harper (1765-1825),
Philip Barton Key (1757-1815), Charles Lee (1758-1815), and Joseph
Hopkinson (1770-1842). The indictment, in eight articles, dealt with his
conduct in the Fries and Callender trials, with his trea