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tion of the nation; and, he continued, “Had you consulted me for a subject to paint, I should not have given you the Cabinet Council on Emancipation, but the meeting which took place when the news came of the attack upon Sumter, when the first measures were organized for the restoration of the national authority. That was the crisis in the history of this administration -not the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation." And referring again to the comparative unimportance of the slavery question, he continued: "If I am to be remembered by posterity, let it not be as having loved predominantly white men or black men, but as one who loved his country." Mr. Carpenter argued to the contrary, but the Secretary stuck to his opinion. "Well," he said, "you may think so, and this generation may agree with you, but posterity will hold a different opinion." It may be added, that the picture of Mr. Buchanan in the corner, white with terror, and with a stump of a cigar between his teeth, with his Cabinet quarreling so hard that he had to turn them all out, according to Mr. Stanton's description, would have been a strange subject to adopt as the characteristic scene of the war. In this preference Mr. Seward was His reasoning as a statesman may have been correct enough in one sense, but the chief cause or occasion of a circumstance is not necessarily the best artistic representation of its spirit; and Mr. Carpenter certainly judged justly as an artist.

wrong.

The position and attitude of Mr. Seward in Mr. Carpenter's picture are prominent and characteristic. The Secretary of State is by etiquette the senior member of the Cabinet; Mr. Seward was, moreover, by virtue

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of his abilities, attainments, and principles, a chief adviser with the President, unofficially. So he sits at the front of the table, his hand rested upon it in an argumentative posture, with fore-finger, as it were, distinguishing the exact point to be made. The face expresses steady sense and calm thought, as the Secretary advises to wait for military success before the issuing of the Proclamation, instead of putting it forth upon the heels of disaster.

VI.

S. P. CHASE.

SALMON PORTLAND CHASE now Chief-Justice of the United States, was born in Cornish, New Hampshire, January 13, 1808. His father was a farmer, and the country was so unsettled, schools so scarce, and books so costly, that when at three years of age it was time for the boy to learn his letters, they were set down for him on smooth pieces of birch-bark.

The name of Chase is somewhat widely spread in New Hampshire and Vermont. It is said that it was of the family to which the Chief-Justice belongs, that the saying was first uttered which has since, with a difference, been applied to Dr. Lyman Beecher. The story is that some one said of an old yellow house in Cornish, long the Chase homestead, that in it had been born more brains than in any other house in New England. Philander Chase, the eminent pioneer Episcopal bishop of Ohio, was the Chief-Justice's uncle; and so was Dudley Chase, at one time United States senator from Vermont. Another uncle, Salmon, a lawyer in Portland, had died there, and after him and the city the Chief-Justice was named. The men of the Chase family are tall, strong, large-framed, large-headed, decided, energetic, and progressive men, and the Chief-Justice does no discredit to his kinsmen, either in physique or in mind and will.

cess.

In 1815, his father, Ithamar Chase, removed to Keene, to superintend a glass factory there in which he was largely interested; but three years afterward died suddenly, probably by a sun-stroke. His affairs were at the time much deranged in consequence of the ruinous competition of English glass with the products of his factory; and the widow, upon the settlement of the estate, was able to retain nothing, either from the factory, or from a tavern, or a farm which the energetic man had carried on at the same time with reasonable sucBut Mrs. Chase had much of the prudence and force of character of her own Scottish ancestry, and having a small property of her own, she removed to a little cottage in the neighborhood and set to work with good courage and full faith to bring up her children. Salmon, with one of his sisters, a little afterward spent some time at a boarding-school, in Windsor, Vt., where he made a good beginning in Latin, and where he partook in an odd style of chastisement, invented apparently by the Yankee principal. This gentleman, when the boys were noisy at night and awoke him, used to come noiselessly up to their door, burst in, drag them all out of bed by the hair into a pile in the middle of the floor, and disappear to allow them to digest his hint. One of the youths shaved his hair close to elude the teacher's hand; but only to discover that portions of the human frame, very distant from the head, could also be made to suffer pain.

In 1820, Bishop Chase offered to take charge of the boy in Ohio and give him an education, and with an elder brother on the way to join the expedition of General Cass to the upper Mississippi, and with Mr. School

craft, geologist to the same expedition, he went West. The party stopped at Buffalo, and Alexander Chase and Mr. Schoolcraft made a two days' visit to Niagara, leaving the boy behind as too young. He was, however, quite as curious and enterprising as he was young; and finding at the tavern a companion of his own age equally desirous to see the Falls, the two little fellows walked through the snow twenty miles to Niagara, saw the sight, found their surprised seniors, and returned with them. At Cleveland Salmon stopped, to proceed to Worthington, Ohio, the other two going on to Detroit. As he could not go alone through the woods, he had to wait some weeks for convoy at Cleveland, and turned the time to account by running a sort of extempore ferry across the Cuyahoga. This was in order to pay his board with his entertainer; but that gentleman, a warm admirer of Bishop Chase, refused to accept the money.

At Worthington young Chase remained about two years, and had a reasonably severe experience. His uncle the bishop was a somewhat absolute person and stern in his manner. He was poor besides; for in Ohio in those days money was so scarce, transportation so dear, produce so cheap, and postage so high, that it took a bushel of wheat to pay the postage on a letter, and the bishop used to say that all the revenues of his bishopric would not pay his postage bill. So he kept a school, by means of an assistant, and carried on a farm, as unavoidable means for supporting himself. Salmon, therefore, not being a boarder like the other boys, but a member of the family, had to work as the family did, "doing chores" and all sorts of

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