Booknotes

NIVEN: Well, no biography had been done of Chase for 60 years or so, and then the only other biography of Chase was an academic biography, and that came out while I was working on the research for Chase. He was a very important statesman in the 19th century. When he became Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, he and Seward were better known to the public than Lincoln was. He had been around for a long time. He had a big reputation as a defender of fugitive slaves. He had been the first republican governor of Ohio. He had been the U.S.. senator before that on the Free Soil ticket. He was actually the founder of the Free Soil party and coined the famous slogan, "free soil, free labor, free men," which energized the Free Soil movement, a third party movement which didn't get anywhere but certainly advertised Chase.

NIVEN: 1808 to 1873. And he was 65 when he died, a man who was supremely industrious and supremely ambitious. And as I noted, I think, in the book, Lincoln referred to him as, the ambition was a maggot in his brain. First of all, he tried to ease Lincoln out of the nomination in 1860. And then while he was an important member of the cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury, he constantly intrigued, trying to get the nomination away from Lincoln in 1864. He was not successful.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: First wife was Katherine Garniss, local belle in Cincinnati. She died of, I guess we would call it, puerperal fever after the birth of the baby. And that child lived to be four or five, and died of scarlet fever, an epidemic in Cincinnati. Second wife was a woman named Smith, not quite the social standing of the first wife, but 18-year-old lovely lady. And she was the mother of Kate Chase Sprague, who became a Washington belle during the Civil War. She had another child and, unfortunately, contracted tuberculosis and died. Third wife came from a very illustrious family in Cincinnati named Ludlow. And she was the mother of Nettie, the younger daughter of Salmon P. Chase, who lived to maturity and way beyond.

NIVEN: Yes, that's the third wife, over here, right here.

NIVEN: Well, He never married again.

NIVEN: Let's see, 1850, '51, somewhere in there, '52.

NIVEN: Sure.

NIVEN: Three wives and a lot of children in that period.

NIVEN: Well, there were two 19th century, so-called biographies of Chase, which were pretty poor biographies, but they had a lot of material in them, personal material and a very rich source for a biography. That was the first effort. And then Chase, when he was running against Lincoln for presidential nomination in 1864, wrote over twenty autobiographical letters to a campaign biographer, where he outlined his previous lives and his personal life and that sort of thing. There was quite a bit of material on his personal life.

NIVEN: Difficult to determine. I tried to find whether he had any affairs with any other women. There was a possibility by a woman named Charlotte Eastman, and she tried hard, I expect, to seduce him. This was in 1867, '66, '67, when he was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But he didn't -- he tried, but -- there's kind of an interesting anecdote in the book. She put her garter across the door and Chase came tiptoeing in his nightgown up there and pushed and felt this resistance and thought, "Well, I better not do it."

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Well, she was a widow.

NIVEN: They were in Massachusetts in the home of another mutual friend, another widow who went away for a couple of days.

NIVEN: They were left there alone.

NIVEN: And he saw the key, and he didn't do anything about this. And she upbraided him a little bit in a coquettish fashion. And then the second night he did; she left him other indications. And so he tiptoed to her door and pushed it and it was open, but she had put a garter across the door and that caused resistance, so he decided he better not do anything.

NIVEN: Well, because he recorded this in a letter which I have access to.

NIVEN: I don't know. I think in the book I indicated that he was happy that he hadn't transgressed, but on the other hand, wished he had. I don't know. That's the only indication, the only indication, that Chase might have had involvement with other women. He wouldn't get married. Charlotte Eastman, the lady in question, tried desperately to get him to marry, but he wouldn't do it.

NIVEN: Yes, in many respects. Certainly a great man as far as American history in the 19th century. Important to historians, much more than to, perhaps, the casual reader. He actually had a lot to do with bringing on the Civil War, not that he wanted to bring on the Civil War, but with his Free Soil outlook and...

NIVEN: Well, that meant wherever Congress had power, territories, high seas, District of Columbia, they should vote against slavery. Not in the States, where it was established and protected by municipal law, local law, but everywhere else where Congress had power. And the anti-slavery forces, in the House at any rate, during the 1850s had a majority, the republicans beginning in that period and free soil democrats and that sort of thing. The Senate managed to block -- even today, as we have the situation between the Senate and the House -- the House was responding more to immediate public opinion and the Senate had a more entrenched and more conservative outlook, especially with the southern senators, the slave state senators. And they were able always to sidetrack the resolutions, the Wilmot Proviso Resolutions, which were passed in the House repeatedly. Lincoln voted for them numerous.

NIVEN: That was in 1846 an appropriation bill that was brought before the House for the Mexican American War. And David Wilmot, a democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, attached a rider, which was taken out of the Northwest Ordinance written by Jefferson, where slavery was prohibited in the northwest territories. And this was hooked on to the rider, and that became the Wilmot Proviso. And this was fiercely opposed by slave state senators.

NIVEN: I think as Treasury Secretary or his defense of fugitive slaves. You probably noted the running heads in the book, A Study in Paradox? That was the original title, and I wish that it had continued to be. But he was a man of all sorts of paradoxes; very difficult to get a handle on him. And as far as the anti-slavery impulse which he cultivated, I think he was genuine about this, even though it also, incidentally, helped his political career.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: New Hampshire. Cornish, New Hampshire, a town that was dominated, really, by the Chase family.

NIVEN: His father was named Ithamar Chase, and he was a very prosperous farmer and a state legislator, a senator in New Hampshire, and a selectman, and that sort of thing; in other words, a leading figure in the town.

NIVEN: In Cornish? His father died when Chase was, I think, eight years old. By that time the family had lost a good bit of their money. By the way, they had moved to Keene, New Hampshire, where father Chase, Ithamar Chase, had invested in the glass business at the wrong time, sold his farm, and had lost all of his money. And so they went from relative affluence to near poverty. This had a tremendous effect on Chase. He had numerous uncles, all of whom had gone to Dartmouth College, but not his father; he's the only one who did not. And one uncle, of course, became the bishop of Ohio, episcopal bishop. They were all the way up in the social hierarchy of New England social hierarchy in the early 19th century.

NIVEN: Yes, that's the bishop.

NIVEN: Philander, Philander Chase.

NIVEN: His father was much influenced by an 18th century book called "Young's Night Thoughts". And all these characters are in "Young's Night Thoughts", and so he named a good many of his children after these people.

NIVEN: Well, his mother shipped him off to Ohio under Uncle Philander's tutelage when he was just a kid, I guess nine, ten, eleven, something like that. And he spent two years in Ohio with his uncle, which he hated; he hated the whole interlude. The bishop was a really tough, tyrannical sort of person, and, I think, beat Chase quite a bit, extracted a lot of labor from him, cheap labor, you know, and he owned farms and something like that. And then Uncle Philander decided he would leave. He became president of the Cincinnati College. And they were there for about a year, the Philander Chase family, including Salmon. And then the bishop decided to go East and go to England to see if he could raise money to found a college. And so the family went East, and then Salmon, who had about a year at Cincinnati College, then went to Dartmouth. The uncle went off to England, raised money, and founded Kenyon College in Ohio.

NIVEN: Another uncle named Salmon, who was the leading lawyer in Portland, Maine.

NIVEN: Portland. He got named after the town.

NIVEN: Yes. Well, he went to Washington after he got out of Dartmouth with vague thoughts of a teaching career. And he went to Washington where another uncle was a senator from Vermont, came from a distinguished family, of course, and he managed to luck out. He ran a school, a boy's school in Washington. And while he was there, he came in touch with William Wirt, who was the attorney general in the Adams' administration. One of Wirt's sons was -- there he is -- a friend of Jefferson, Washington, an old republican from way back and an essayist, lawyer. And he was a foment of influence, in my opinion, in Chase's life.

Whereas the bishop was a harsh, unrelenting individual emphasizing work, Wirt was a genial, 18th century man, really, and a distinguished essayist, literary figure. And he had a lot of beautiful daughters, and they sort of took Chase in. And his Washington career was pleasant while the Wirts were there. And he studied with William Wirt and took his law education from Wirt and passed the bar. When the Jackson administration came in, the Wirt family moved to Baltimore and Chase then took the bar examination in the district and then went out to Cincinnati.

NIVEN: Democrats.

NIVEN: Andrew Jackson. Yes.

NIVEN: 1829.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: No. Sort of a Whig. When the Whig party came into being in the middle 1830s, he tried his hand at being a Whig.

NIVEN: Well, it's pretty hard to say. The followers of Henry Clay, I suppose. The Whigs were Hamilitonian in their approach. They believed in national planning; they believed in a strong central government, as opposed to state's rights on the democratic side, high tariff, that sort of thing, protective tariff. And Chase, as a young lawyer in the business community which he had ties with, were primarily Whigs. And so he leaned towards that party. But the slavery issue came up. Chase had been anti-slavery for -- even while he was in Washington, he wrote a petition for a Quaker group, which was introduced in Congress, but he didn't take any particular side in this early period until there was a riot in Cincinnati against abolitionists and then involving James Birney, a prominent abolitionist who had come from Kentucky and was running a newspaper called the Philanthropist. And Chase took the side of Birney because he promoted law and order. And the anarchy in the streets occurred when Birney's press was broken up. And that sort of thing energized him to become more involved in the anti-slavery movement.

NIVEN: Yes?

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: That's a hard question. Well, he certainly believed in states' rights. I suppose he might be involved in the republican states' rights movement.

NIVEN: That also, because he came a Democrat later on and a Free Soil Democrat, and he embraced, virtually, all of the Democratic canons, particularly Jefferson's ideology, or persuasion, except for the slavery aspect.

NIVEN: Go ahead.

NIVEN: Well, we should start the other way around.

NIVEN: He was all over the place.

NIVEN: Well, the Liberty Party was not much of a party. It began in the East, abolitionist label, and they were what was called a one-idea party; in other words, they were anti-slavery. That was all they were interested in. And they wouldn't organize themselves into a political party that would go into the polls under the liberty rubric. Chase saw that this would never get anywhere with that, and he was very realistic. In Ohio he managed to take the Liberty Party and make it a third party. And in close elections between the Democrats and the Whigs, the Liberty Party was able to hold the balance of power. And that's how he got in the United States Senate the first time, as a matter of fact.

NIVEN: Yes, with a deal of the Democrats. And that caused a lot of trouble for him later on in life. The Whigs never forgot in Ohio about his movement from being a moralistic, presumably moralistic Liberty Party, Free Soil man and then dealing with the Democratic bosses in Ohio.

NIVEN: Well...

NIVEN: Yeah. My first biography was a biography of Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy which is in print now. LSU Press has it in paperback. It was done by Oxford, also initially.

NIVEN: That's Gideon, yes, the great diarist. Chase, by the way, was a diarist also of the Lincoln Administration and much valuable stuff on the emancipation discussions, Emancipation Proclamation, and that sort of thing.

NIVEN: No, by choice. I mean, off and on all through his life he'd kept a diary. And, as a matter of fact, I'm the editor of the Chase Papers at Claremont, and we brought out an edition of his diary from the 1820s all the way up through his death.

NIVEN: Yes. There are two volumes out now, and the third volume is in press. And this is correspondence after the diary. And Welles is a prime source for what went on in the discussions in the Lincoln cabinet during the Civil War, and Chase, too. But I was interested in Welles and wrote a biography of him, and then that led me to Chase, though, rather curcuitously. In between I did one on Van Buren, also for Oxford.

NIVEN: Yes. And this was the third biography I've done with Oxford.

NIVEN: It's in California, about 35 miles -- Southern California, about 35 miles due east of Los Angeles.

NIVEN: I did; I'm retired now, emeritus.

NIVEN: Thirty years; a long time.

NIVEN: These are six independent, interdependent colleges Pomona, Scripps College, Harvey Mudd College , which is engineering, Claremont-McKenna College, Pitzer College, and then the graduate school; and that's where I was affiliated was the graduate school, which is also semi-independent, too, though it is the graduate school of the Claremont Colleges.

NIVEN: Well, I was in the business world for five or six years, doing public relations, advertising. And one of my chores was to go out to California to the various divisions of this big corporation. And when I went to Pamona to get information for annual reports and other things, I met and worked with the assistant to the head of that particular division. And he had formerly been an assistant to the president of the Pamona college, and so he had a wide acquaintance among the faculty there, and he introduced me to them. And it was a rather long courtship, I think a couple of years, when I'd come around. And then in 1960 I went out there.

NIVEN: In Claremont.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Well, he was a Free Soil senator in 1850. He was elected in 1849, and then in 1854 Steven A. Douglas, in an effort, to solve, as he thought, the agitation against slavery, came up with -- well, he didn't come up with it, but he borrowed the popular sovereignty idea where the inhabitants of a given of territory would decide for themselves whether that territory went free or slave. Douglas was a nationalist and and moderate, but, in this case, he followed the pressure from the Southern senators, the slave state senators. And the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise.

The Missouri Compromise had been developed in 1819, 1820, where a line, a geographic line, was drawn between slavery and freedom in the territories. And Missouri came in as a slave state, but the all states north of the line, 36 degrees in 30 minutes, were to be free. Douglas, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, when they were considering the organic act for the admission of Kansas and Nebraska as territories, under Southern pressure, made an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise. And Chase and some of his colleagues wrote what they call "The Appeal to Independent Democrats," a fiery document accusing Douglas of all sorts of chicanery and a slave state conspiracy and so forth.

This was a big sensation, and, of course, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, but Kansas was a terrible problem: First slave and then free, John Brown running around there and all that sort of thing. And so it made big headlines in the papers and became a very important energizing force for the anti-slavery movement in the North. So the document that he wrote was every bit as important as the Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska act in developing the cleavage between the sections.

NIVEN: Well, he and Seward were the most important individuals in the new Republican Party -- coalition, I should say.

NIVEN: He was a Whig, governor of New York, U.S. senator from New York, anti-slavery, and very prominent individual. He almost beat Lincoln. He was the favored nominee in the 1860 convention, but he had been a big shot in politics too long and had too many enemies. And also he was considered a bit too radical, and so he didn't make it. But Lincoln took all of his competitors, both former Democrats and former Whigs, to form his coalition government. And he offered the State Department to Seward, and he offered the Treasury Department to Chase. And he tried to make a balance between geography, geographical areas and prior political involvement. That's Stanton there you're pointing to. He succeeded Simon Cameron as Secretary of War during the Civil War. A very energetic, very abrasive, aggressive and very able secretary of war, and lawyer and that sort of thing.

NIVEN: At first, yes. But after a while his insidious ambition of his and efforts to undercut Lincoln caused an estrangement. Lincoln put up with him until 1864; then over a patronage dispute, he finally gave in at the wrong time time and accepted Chase's resignation.

NIVEN: It was on the New York -- well, the Customs House was involved, it was the assistant treasurer, so-called in New York, who was the Treasury Department's primary agent in collecting excises -- no, not collecting excises, but in dealing with the money market and the bankers and that sort of thing.

NIVEN: Ambivalent. He, surely, recognized Lincoln's humane qualities, his generosity, and, eventually, he finally accepted his political astuteness. But, on the other hand, Chase was one of these people who was a tidy administrator and also, of course, he had this tremendous drive to run things. And, in that respect, where, in the beginning, Lincoln did consult with Chase on military and high policy matters, as the war developed, Lincoln leaned on Chase less and less, and this caused Chase all sorts of irritations and criticisms which he spread around among his friends in the Congress.

NIVEN: Right.

NIVEN: Oh, yes, lovely young woman.

NIVEN: She's this one right here, the tall one.

NIVEN: The tall one, yes. Chase lavished his attention on both daughters, but particularly on Kate. Brought her up to speak French and to be involved in politics and all that sort of thing. She was a very intelligent, self-indulgent also, person, but the love of Chase's life. And she reciprocated; her father was everything to her.

NIVEN: In Washington?

NIVEN: With great style, yes.

NIVEN: Not much money. He was never a rich man, though people who were involved with the Treasury Department like Jay Cooke, became millionaires; never Chase. However, he did live in great style and entertained, of course, a lot, and lots of servants and that sort of thing. And, yet, at the same time, I think another one of the paradoxes, he had great faith in the common man and particularly great faith in the African Americans.

NIVEN: Oh, yes. And that was genuine, I think, in that respect.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Well, it's hard to say, in a way. I think probably William Wirt was the influence there, one of the influences. Wirt was a Southerner, but he was of the older generation, the Jefferson generation. And he was concerned about the plight of the African Americans and also concerned about slavery itself. And I think that Chase absorbed some of that. His uncle, the bishop, was also anti-slavery, too. And so he came from a general background, New England background melded with this courtly Virginia person of an older generation, and that tended to make him an anti-slavery person. He was very conservative at first; he believed in colonization; he was like Henry Clay. That was his early period. But then, as riots and other things developed and as he sensed a reform movement coming -- he was pretty good on that -- became a progressive individual. He became more and more anti-slavery, dropped the colonization business and began to think in terms of free soil as a political constitutional alternative.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Yes. First Cincinnati city counsel.

NIVEN: Yes. Then the legislature; he was elected senator in 1849 on the Free Soil ticket.

NIVEN: A six-year term.

NIVEN: Then he ran for governor. You had to be elected by the people there and he campaigned and won the election.

NIVEN: Two terms, four years.

NIVEN: Yes. And then reelected as U.S. senator in 1860.

NIVEN: Yes. But the two terms of governor, he was elected by the people.

NIVEN: 1861 to the end of June 1864.

NIVEN: Well, when Lincoln accepted his resignation, which upset Chase, he didn't think it was going to be accepted, then Chase, yearned for more public duty and more public exposure. And he'd always thought about the Supreme Court as a possible place anyway, and so he lobbied for himself, and he had a lot of what we call radical, or progressive, spokesman like Charles Sumner, who is just above that picture you've got of the Supreme Court.

NIVEN: He was a senator from Massachusetts, a violently anti-slavery individual and sort of the conscience of the senate, I suppose. And Lincoln, who was under great pressure at the time, decided he had to have a progressive, or radical, person. And Chase, he had high respect for Chase's abilities, rather lower respect for his deviousness and his intriguing qualities. And so finally he decided to listen to the pressure, or respond to the pressure, and so he appointed Chase.

NIVEN: No, the Senate was predominantly republican, anyway.

NIVEN: I'm not sure when he was, either December of 1864 or January of 1865 until his death in 1873, May.

NIVEN: That's right.

NIVEN: That's right.

NIVEN: That's right; he's the presiding officer, as the Constitution provides.

NIVEN: Well, that's another difficult question. I think predominantly because Johnson was considered to be a stumbling block for reconstruction. He had been a democratic, he was a war democratic, but he was a very conservative, in fact, a Jacksonian approach to politics. And this didn't set well in the period after the war when they were trying to determine what kind of peace terms for the South. And Johnson wanted lenient ones and the Congress, spurred on by the radicals, or the progressives, wanted much more stringent ones, and so they passed a reconstruction act. All of these acts Freedmans' Bureau Act, Civil Rights Act, 14th Amendment, all these were bitterly opposed by Johnson. And so they really had it up to here on Andrew Johnson.

NIVEN: Well, the Congress, the leading spokesman in Congress, in the House particularly. The republicans won a big election in 1866, and they took that as a mandate to push through their reconstruction ideas.

NIVEN: Yes. In the 1864 election it was the union, they called it the republican label, was transmuted into the union because they brought in some more democrats, including Andrew Johnson. He was elected with Lincoln as Vice President, of course. And then by 1866-'67, the republican coalition dropped the union label, and then it became just the republicans and democrats.

NIVEN: Well, he was what you would call a union...

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Congress had passed a law called the Tenure of Office Act, which, in effect, said that the president could not fire any of his cabinet members or any other federal officers without the consent of the Senate. The reverse, you know, the Senate has to confirm a presidential appointment, and this is the reverse' of that, and there's some plausibility to their argument. This was an effort to keep Johnson from filling all the federal offices with his own spokesmen.

At that point Stanton, who was his Secretary of War, had been Lincoln's Secretary of War and was openly opposed to Johnson's policies, and Johnson wanted to get rid of him, and he wanted to get rid of some of the generals who were involved in various parts of the South under the Reconstruction Acts. And so Johnson decided deliberately to break the law, the Tenure of Office Act, which he regarded as unconstitutional, obviously it was unconstitutional. And that was the grounds for the House bringing charges against him, for willfully disobeying the law.

NIVEN: Stanton.

NIVEN: Because Stanton was an open enemy now of the Administration and the Administration's policies.

NIVEN: Lincoln appointed him, and then that was one of the problems of the Tenure of Office Act. The argument was made by Johnson's attorneys -- I mean, after all, the Tenure of Office Act, only applies to appointments made by the president and from there on. Now, Stanton had been appointed by Lincoln and, therefore, Johnson did not have responsibility for him.

NIVEN: One vote.

NIVEN: Oh, rather overwhelming.

NIVEN: Sure, and they had their impeachment managers Ben Butler and Thaddeus Stevens, people like that.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: That's right.

NIVEN: Well, Chase, being Chase, decided to expand his role. I mean, the Constitution says the Chief Justice shall preside at any trial of the president. And Chase then raised the point with the Senate Committee on Rules, as Chief Justice, he wanted, not only be presiding officer, but to be like the vice president, have a vote, and a tie, and also to rule on the competency of witnesses. In other words, as Chase said, he wanted to make it as judicial a trial as possible, and not a legislative or political trial.

NIVEN: Well, he managed to get his way. And on roll calls and things like that, there were efforts to deprive him of this, but they didn't succeed. And so as Chief Justice and presiding officer, I think we owe a lot to Chase for making sure that Johnson was not found guilty. It would have wrecked our system of government.

NIVEN: One vote. That's all right; that was enough.

NIVEN: Well, one vote over the, yeah.

NIVEN: Well, I don't either. I mean, not offhand. But Johnson was acquitted by one vote. And they brought it up again a couple of weeks later and the same thing happened. And then finally the Senate gave in, and Johnson completed his term. He only had about seven or eight months to go anyway.

NIVEN: Very impressive, magisterial, dignified.

NIVEN: Yes, well he lost all of his weight. And this was after he had strokes and heart attacks and things like that.

NIVEN: Well, there was a lot of family discord. Kate, his beloved daughter, had married this dissipated scion of a textile fortune, William Sprague. And Chase continually tried to patch up their marriage, but was unsuccessful. And I think at the end he realized that he had sacrificed his daughter to this kind of materialistic existence.

NIVEN: Yes, a senator from Rhode Island, had been governor of Rhode Island, and, as a matter of fact, voted against Johnson in the impeachment trial, even though he and Chase lived together in their mansion in Washington.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Oh, well, I guess he began to get sick in, I think, 1868 or '69 he had a heart attack and recovered from that.

NIVEN: That was a little bit later, I think 1969 or maybe '70 he then had a bad stroke, and he recovered but was put on a diet and all that sort of thing. And tried to resume his regimen in the Supreme Court, but even he began to realize that his health was shattered.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: I think that the constitutional scholars would not put him that high. I tend to think that he ought to be higher than they consider, because of the problems that he faced and the reconstruction of the nation, not just the legal and constitutional problems, Civil Rights problems, but also the business problems as the two sections had to come together again. And he made a lot of important decisions on his circuit as a the Chief Justice. All the justices had circuits; they didn't have the circuit court at that point. A little later on they did. And in that guise Chase played a very important role in reestablishing business connections and that sort of thing.

NIVEN: Right.

NIVEN: No, no, no, no, no, arduous duty, very arduous.

NIVEN: Well, of course, there were railroads, and he went on railroads. He did a lot of work in Virginia and North Carolina and the circuit in Richmond, for example. Well, even though Richmond had been badly damaged during the war, it was being rebuilt. And so he was able to get to Richmond fairly easily from Washington by railroad. And in North Carolina he also was on the circuit there and, again, railroad transport.

NIVEN: I think one of the great ones. He'd founded the national banking system which, for the time, put the United States on a central banking system. He managed to fund the three- or four billion dollars that it cost him in 1860 terms, which would be an enormous amount today, without too excessive inflation and without controls. And he was a successful Secretary of the Treasury, unprecedented demands on the Treasury Department.

NIVEN: As an important senator, particularly -- he really only served one term in the senate. And I mentioned the appeal to the independent democrats which really energized the anti-slavery feeling in the North and was a body blow to Steven A. Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Library of Congress.

NIVEN: Archives.

NIVEN: Well, we had the Chase project, you see, going at Claremont, and a lot of this material was uncovered by my editors on that project. I spend some time, myself, though, in the national archives, quite a bit of time.

NIVEN: Well, because I was interested in it, I suppose. I'm the one who decided I wanted to do a biography of Chase, and so I decided the best way to do it would be to try and get some support for the research end of it. And I didn't feel at my age I wanted to go traveling around the country and live in third-rate motels; this is something for a younger person. And so I managed to get some sponsorship.

NIVEN: From the NEH and the National Archives.

NIVEN: Yes, right, which we still have. We still have support from them.

NIVEN: Of the...

NIVEN: Yes, Lynne Cheney. She was the director of the NEH, and the Bush administration. The Bush administration was much more favorable to -- I found it, at any rate -- to projects like this than the Reagan administration had been. And now the Clinton administration, I'm not sure about if it's more of a continuation.

NIVEN: Oh, I think really modest grants. They funded the salary of one person, $50- or $60,000 a year, something like that.

NIVEN: Yes, it does. It goes through the graduate school and then supports the editorial project.

NIVEN: A project, no there wouldn't be, I don't think. You see, we might have been able to raise private funds, and indeed, we did raise some private funds, but not very much. But this, generally, at our place, at any rate, ran counter to the development policies of the graduate school. They didn't want people like me going out and trying to raise $5- or $10,000 when they were after much bigger sums, and you can understand that. So we did try a couple of times to raise money and we did raise a little bit, but we've supported primarily by the National Historical Records Commission from the Archives and by the NEH.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Well, I had a contract. I wrote a proposal, sent it in to Oxford, and they accepted it, and I had a contract to do it. And, so, that's how it came about. I don't have an agent; I just did it directly with the press.

NIVEN: Well, I was told that they printed 10,000 copies, which astounded me, but I suppose they must have some kind of projection for that many copies. I can't imagine selling that many copies, but maybe they will.

NIVEN: I think, first of all, Civil War buffs would be interested or those who are interested in the anti-slavery politics and the anti-slavery movement in the 19th century, Civil Rights, that sort of thing; those who are interested in constitutional history, the Supreme Court. So there are various, discrete constituencies that would be interested in this book. There's quite of bit of social history, 19th century social history in there, western history in Cincinnati i the 1820s and '30s and '40s, and that sort of thing.

NIVEN: My sister, who died four or five years ago, and I was devoted to her. She was unmarried, lived in New York, and we lived out in California. And the only family she had was my family, and it was quite a blow when she died.

NIVEN: Sixty four.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Connecticut.

NIVEN: In Westminster, a little village between Mystic and Noank, I suppose, on the Long Island Sound, the mouth of the Mystic River.

NIVEN: University of Connecticut and Columbia.

NIVEN: History.

NIVEN: Allan Nevins was my mentor at Columbia, and I tried to emulate, in a way, his great narrative style, and that sort of thing.

NIVEN: Allan Nevins?

NIVEN: Well, he was a professor of Columbia for many years. He had been a newspaperman before that. He'd never had a Ph.D. He had a master's degree only from the University of Illinois, I think. He twice won the Pulitzer price for biography. And his "Ordeal of The Union" series was six or seven, maybe eight volumes; it's just a fantastic history of the coming of the Civil War and the Civil War itself. And it's the literary, the legal, the Constitutional, the social, political, economic... A great historian of the grand tradition, in my opinion.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: Yes.

NIVEN: No, certainly not. I wouldn't possibly think that anybody would be interested -- I'm no Allan Nevins, I'll tell you that. His approach and scope of history, his understanding of historical touches far surpasses anything I have.

NIVEN: All of them, I suppose. I think Seward would have really amused me. He amused Lincoln. Well, as a cabinet member, Seward, well, he was closest to Lincoln. And there he is; he was a funny little man. Henry Adams said if you put some orange paint on his nose, he would look just like a parrot,

NIVEN: I don't think I would particularly -- who else? Well, not Chase, I don't think; he would have probably been too chilly and dignified. I suspect Stanton would have been aggressive and abrasive. Montgomery Blair is a -- I'm not so sure any of the other cabinet members would have been interested in me. I think Seward would, and I think you would like him, too. He was a great raconteur, smoked cigars all the time, told stories, exaggerated. He had a bad side to him, too. He was selfish and egotistical and that sort of thing, but he was an amusing, entertaining person and a great politician.

NIVEN: Well, I suppose he'd be a impressive grande dame. I would think she would have fit in very well, very materialistic, very self-indulgent, very assured person. She could move in all circles of society. As I said, she spoke French fluently, and she'd been well-educated, polished by her father by expensive boarding schools.

NIVEN: I think it comes from the Supreme Court. I think that's a Supreme Court portrait of Chase.

NIVEN: Thank you very much.