Neither his opportunities nor his impressive discipline yielded Chase much in the way of satisfaction. Rather than savoring his progress, he excoriated himself for not achieving enough. “I feel humbled and mortified,” he wrote in his diary, as the year 1829 drew to a close, “by the conviction that the Creator has gifted me with intelligence almost in vain. I am almost twenty two and have as yet attained but the threshold of knowledge…. The night has seldom found me much advanced beyond the station I occupied in the morning…. I almost despair of ever making any figure in the world.” Fear of failure, perhaps intensified by the conviction that his father’s failure had precipitated his death and the devastation of his family, would operate throughout Chase’s life as a catalyst to his powerful ambition. Even as he scourged himself, he continued to believe that there was still hope, that if he could “once more resolve to struggle earnestly for the prize of well-doing,” he would succeed.
As Seward had done, Chase compressed into two years the three-year course of study typically followed by college-educated law students. When the twenty-two-year-old presented himself for examination at the bar in Washington, D.C., in 1829, the presiding judge expressed a wish that Chase “study another year” before attempting to pass. “Please,” Chase begged, “I have made all my arrangements to go to the Western country & practice law.” The judge, who knew Chase by reputation and was aware of his connection with the distinguished William Wirt, relented and ordered that Chase be sworn in at the bar. Chase had decided to abandon Washington’s crowded professional terrain for the open vista and fresh opportunities afforded by the growing state of Ohio.
“I would rather be first in Cincinnati than first in Baltimore, twenty years hence,” Chase immodestly confessed to Charles Cleveland. “As I have ever been first at school and college…I shall strive to be first wherever I may be.” Cincinnati had become a booming city in 1830, one of the West’s largest. Less than two decades earlier, when the state was founded, much of Ohio “was covered by the primeval forest.” Chase knew the prospects for a young lawyer would be good in the rapidly developing region, but could not help feeling, as he had upon his arrival in Washington, like “a stranger and an adventurer.”
Despite past achievements, Chase suffered from crippling episodes of shyness, exacerbated by his shame over a minor speech defect that lent an unusual tone to his voice. “I wish I was as sure of your elocution as I am of everything else,” William Wirt cautioned. “Your voice is a little nasal as well as guttural, and your articulation stiff, laborious and thick…. I would not mention these things if they were incurable—but they are not, as Demosthenes has proved—and it is only necessary for you to know the fact, to provide the remedy.” In addition to the humiliation he felt over his speaking voice, Salmon Chase was tormented by his own name. He fervently wished to change its “awkward, fishy” sound to something more elegant. “How wd. this name do (Spencer de Cheyce or Spencer Payne Cheyce),” he inquired of Cleveland. “Perhaps you will laugh at this but I assure you I have suffered no little inconvenience.”
Bent on a meteoric rise in this new city, Chase redoubled his resolve to work. “I made this resolution today,” he wrote in his diary soon after settling in. “I will try to excel in all things.” Pondering the goals he had set for his new life in the West, Chase wrote: “I was fully aware that I must pass thro’ a long period of probation…. That many obstacles were to be overcome, many difficulties to be surmounted ere I could hope to reach the steep where Fame’s proud temple shines,” complete with “deserved honor, eminent usefulness and a ‘crown of glory.’”
Nonetheless, he had made a good beginning. After struggling for several years to secure enough legal business to support himself, he developed a lucrative practice, representing various business interests and serving as counsel for several large Cincinnati banks. At the same time, following Benjamin Franklin’s advice for continual self-improvement, he founded a popular lecture series in Cincinnati, joined a temperance society, undertook the massive project of collecting Ohio’s scattered statutes into three published volumes, tried his hand at poetry, and wrote numerous articles for publication in various magazines. To maintain these multiple pursuits, he would often arise at 4 a.m. and occasionally allowed himself to work on Sundays, though he berated himself whenever he did so.
The more successful Chase became, the more his pious family fretted over his relentless desire for earthly success and distinction. “I confess I almost tremble for you,” his elder sister Abigail wrote him when he was twenty-four years old, “as I observe your desire to distinguish yourself and apparent devotedness to those pursuits whose interests terminate in this life.” If his sister hoped that a warm family life would replace his ambition with love, her hopes were brutally crushed by the fates that brought him to love and lose three young wives.
His first, Catherine “Kitty” Garniss—a warm, outgoing, attractive young woman whom he loved passionately—died in 1835 from complications of childbirth after eighteen months of marriage. She was only twenty-three. Her death was “so overwhelming, so unexpected,” he told his friend Cleveland, that he could barely function. “I wish you could have known her,” he wrote. “She was universally beloved by her acquaintances…. She was gifted with unusual intellectual power…. And now I feel a loneliness the more dreadful, from the intimacy of the connexion which has been severed.”
His grief was compounded by guilt, for he was away on business in Philadelphia when Kitty died, having been assured by her doctor that she would recover. “Oh how I accused myself of folly and wickedness in leaving her when yet sick,” he confided in his diary, “how I mourned that the prospect of a little addition to my reputation…should have tempted me away.”
Chase arrived home to find his front door wreathed in black crepe, a customary sign “that death was within.” There “in our nuptial chamber, in her coffin, lay my sweet wife,” Chase wrote, “little changed in features—but oh! the look of life was gone…. Nothing was left but clay.” For months afterward, he berated himself, believing that “the dreadful calamity might have been averted, had I been at home to watch over her & care for her.” Learning that the doctors had bled her so profusely that she lost consciousness shortly before she died, he delved into textbooks on medicine and midwifery that persuaded him that, had she been treated differently, she need not have died.
Worst of all, Chase feared that Kitty had died without affirming her faith. He had not pushed her firmly enough toward God. “Oh if I had not contented myself with a few conversations on the subject of religion,” he lamented in his diary, “if I had incessantly followed her with kind & earnest persuasion…she might have been before her death enrolled among the professed followers of the Lamb. But I procrastinated and now she is gone.”
His young wife’s death shadowed all the days of his life. He was haunted by the vision that when he himself reached “the bar of God,” he would meet her “as an accusing spirit,” blaming him for her damnation. His guilt rekindled his religious commitment, producing a “second conversion,” a renewed determination never to let his fierce ambition supersede his religious duties.
The child upon whom all his affections then centered, named Catherine in honor of her dead mother, lived only five years. Her death in 1840 during an epidemic of scarlet fever devastated Chase. Losing one’s only child, he told Charles Cleveland, was “one of the heaviest calamities which human experience can know.” Little Catherine, he said, had “lent wings to many delightful moments…I fondly looked forward to the time when her increasing attainments and strength would fit her at once for the superintendence of my household & to be my own counsellor and friend.” Asking for his friend’s prayers, he concluded with the thought that “no language can describe the desolation of my heart.”
Eventually, Chase fell in love and married again. The young woman, Eliza Ann Smith, had been a good friend of his first wife. Eliza was only twenty when she gave birth to a daughter, Kate, named in memory of both hi
s first wife and his first daughter. For a few short years, Chase found happiness in a warm marriage sustained by a deep religious bond. It would not last, for after the birth and death of a second daughter, Eliza was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which took her life at the age of twenty-five. “I feel as if my heart was broken,” Chase admitted to Cleveland after he placed Eliza’s body in the tomb. “I write weeping. I cannot restrain my tears…. I have no wife, my little Kate has no mother, and we are desolate.”
The following year, Chase married Sarah Belle Ludlow, whose well-to-do father was a leader in Cincinnati society. Belle gave birth to two daughters, Nettie and Zoe. Zoe died at twelve months; two years later, her mother followed her into the grave. Though Chase was only forty-four years old, he would never marry again. “What a vale of misery this world is,” he lamented some years later when his favorite sister, Hannah, suffered a fatal heart attack at the dining room table. “To me it has been emphatically so. Death has pursued me incessantly ever since I was twenty-five…. Sometimes I feel as if I could give up—as if I must give up. And then after all I rise & press on.”
LIKE SALMON CHASE, Edward Bates left the East Coast as a young man, intending, he said, “to go West and grow up with the country.” The youngest of twelve children, he was born on a plantation called Belmont, not far from Richmond, Virginia. His father, Thomas Fleming Bates, was a member of the landed gentry with an honored position in his community. Educated in England, the elder Bates was a planter and merchant who owned dozens of slaves and counted Thomas Jefferson and James Madison among his friends. His mother, Caroline Woodson Bates, was of old Virginia stock.
These aristocratic Southerners, recalled Bates’s old friend Charles Gibson, were “as distinctly a class as any of the nobility of Western Europe.” Modeled on an ideal of English manorial life, they placed greater value on family, hospitality, land, and honor than on commercial success or monetary wealth. Writing nostalgically of this antebellum period, Bates’s grandson Onward Bates claimed that life after the Civil War never approached the “enjoyable living” of those leisurely days, when “the visitor to one of these homesteads was sure of a genial welcome from white and black,” when “the negroes adopted the names and held all things in common with their masters, including their virtues and their manners.”
Life for the Bates family was comfortable and secure until the Revolutionary War, when Thomas Bates, a practicing Quaker, set aside his pacifist principles to take up arms against the British. He and his family were proud of his service in the Continental Army. The flintlock musket he carried was handed down to the next generations with the silver-plated inscription: “Thomas F. Bates, whig of the revolution, fought for liberty and independence with this gun. His descendants keep it to defend what he helped to win.” His decision to join the military, however, cost him dearly. Upon returning home, he was ostracized from the Quaker meetinghouse and never recovered from the debts incurred by the family estate while he was away fighting. Though he still owned extensive property, he struggled thenceforth to meet the needs of his seven sons and five daughters.
Like Seward and Chase, young Edward revealed an early aptitude for study. Though schools in Goochland County were few, Edward was taught to read and write by his father and, by the age of eight, showed a talent for poetry. Edward was only eleven when his father’s death brought an abrupt end to family life at Belmont. Left in straitened circumstances, his mother, like Chase’s, sent the children to live with various relatives. Edward spent two years with his older brother Fleming Bates, in Northumberland, Virginia, before settling into the home of a scholarly cousin, Benjamin Bates, in Hanover, Maryland. There, under his cousin’s tutelage, he acquired a solid foundation in the fields of mathematics, history, botany, and astronomy. Still, he missed the bustle and companionship of his numerous siblings, and pined for his family’s Belmont estate. At fourteen, he entered Charlotte Hall, a private academy in Maryland where he studied literature and the classics in preparation for enrollment at Princeton.
He never did attend Princeton. It is said that he sustained an injury that forced him to end his studies at Charlotte Hall. Returning to Belmont, he enlisted in the Virginia militia during the War of 1812, armed with his father’s old flintlock musket. In 1814, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the flood of settlers into Missouri Territory, lured by the vast potential west of the Appalachian Mountains, lately opened by the Louisiana Purchase. Over the next three decades, the population of this western region would explode at three times the rate of the original thirteen states. From his home in Virginia, Bates set out alone on the arduous journey that would take him across Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana to the Missouri Territory, “too young to think much of the perils which he might encounter,” he later mused, “the West being then the scene of many Indian outrages.”
Young Bates could not have chosen a better moment to move westward. President Jefferson had appointed Bates’s older brother Frederick secretary of the new Missouri Territory. When Edward arrived in the frontier outpost of St. Louis, Missouri was seven years away from statehood. Bates saw no buildings or homes along the riverbank, only battered canoes and flatboats chafing at their moorings. Some 2,500 villagers dwelt predominantly in primitive cabins or single-story wooden houses. When he walked down Third Street to the Market, he recalled, “all was in commotion: a stranger had come from the States! He was ‘feted’ and followed by young and old, the girls looking at him as one of his own town lasses, in Virginia, would have regarded an elk or a buffalo!”
With help from his brother, Bates secured a position reading law with Rufus Easton, a distinguished frontier lawyer who had served as a territorial judge and delegate to Congress. “After years of family and personal insecurity,” Bates’s biographer Marvin Cain writes, “he at last had a stable situation through which he could achieve the ambition that burned brightly in him.” Mentored by his older brother Frederick, the lawyer Easton, and a close circle of St. Louis colleagues, Bates, too, passed his bar examination after two years of study and instantly plunged into practice. Lawyers were in high demand on the rapidly settling frontier.
The economic and professional prospects were so promising in St. Louis that the Bates brothers determined to bring the rest of their family there. Edward returned to Virginia to sell his father’s estate, auction off any family slaves he would not transport to Missouri, and arrange to escort his mother and his older sister Margaret on the long overland journey. “The slaves sold pretty well,” he boasted to Frederick, “a young woman at $537 and a boy child 5 years old at $290!” As for the land, he expected to realize about $20,000, which would allow the family to relocate west “quite full-handed.”
Edward’s attempts to settle family affairs in Virginia dragged on, complicated by the death of his brother Tarleton, a fervent Jeffersonian, killed in a duel with a Federalist. “I am ashamed to say I am still in Goochland,” he wrote Frederick in June 1818, nearly a year after he had left St. Louis; it is “my misfortune rather than my fault for I am the greatest sufferer by the delay.” Finally, with his female relatives ensconced in a carriage and more than twenty slaves following on horseback and on foot, the little party set forth on an exasperating, difficult expedition. “In those days,” one of Bates’s friends later recalled, “there were no boats on the Western rivers, and no roads in the country.” To cross the wilds of Illinois and Indiana, a guide was necessary. The slow pace caused Bates to worry that Frederick would think him “a lazy or squandering fellow.” He explained that if accompanied only by his family, he could have reached St. Louis “in a tenth part of the time & with 1/4 of the trouble and expense—the slaves have been the greatest objects of my embarrassment.” The journey did have benefits, he reported: “Mother & Sister are more active, more healthy & more cheerful than when they started. They bear the fatigues of hot dry traveling surprisingly.” And once they reached St. Louis, Bates assured his brother, he would “make up in comfort & satisfaction for the great suspense and anxiet
y I must have occasioned you.”
As he again settled into the practice of law in St. Louis, the twenty-five-year-old Bates fully appreciated the advantages gained by his older brother’s prominence in the community. In a fulsome letter, he expressed fervent gratitude to his “friend and benefactor,” realizing that Fred’s “public reputation” as well as his “private wealth & influence” would greatly enhance his own standing. His brother also introduced him to the leading figures of St. Louis—including the famed explorer William Clark, now governor of the Missouri Territory; Thomas Hart Benton, editor of the Missouri Enquirer; and David Barton, speaker of the territorial legislature and the guiding hand behind Missouri’s drive for statehood. Before long, he found himself in a partnership with Joshua Barton, the younger brother of David Barton. Together, the two well-connected young men began to build a lucrative practice representing the interests of influential businessmen and landholders.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN faced obstacles unimaginable to the other candidates for the Republican nomination. In sharp contrast to the comfortable lifestyle the Seward family enjoyed, and the secure early childhoods of Chase and Bates before their fathers died, Lincoln’s road to success was longer, more tortuous, and far less likely.
Born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on an isolated farm in the slave state of Kentucky, Abraham had an older sister, Sarah, who died in childbirth when he was nineteen, and a younger brother who died in infancy. His father, Thomas, had never learned to read and, according to Lincoln, never did “more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.” As a six-year-old boy, young Thomas had watched when a Shawnee raiding party murdered his father. This violent death, Lincoln later suggested, coupled with the “very narrow circumstances” of his mother, left Thomas “a wandering laboring boy,” growing up “litterally without education.” He was working as a rough carpenter and hired hand when he married Nancy Hanks, a quiet, intelligent young woman of uncertain ancestry.
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