Salmon P. Chase

Salmon P. Chase was an American antislavery politician and secretary of the treasury during the Civil War. He financed the Union war effort through taxation, national banking and paper currency, later serving as chief justice of the United States.

The wider career recorded for Salmon P. Chase also included service as United States Secretary of the Treasury, Governor of Ohio, and United States senator. The biographical record places the beginning of Salmon P. Chase’s life at Cornish and the end at New York City, giving the career a geographical span that is not apparent from the headline events alone.

Gore Vidal’s Lincoln follows the new administration through the competing perspectives of Mary Todd Lincoln, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edwin M. Stanton, John Hay and other figures around the White House. Cabinet rivalry, patronage and social life continue while armies are raised, defeats are absorbed and the conflict expands from a struggle to preserve the Union into a war that will also destroy slavery.