Free Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Janette Chase was forced to assume the burden of housing, educating, and providing for her numerous children on her own. Only by moving into cheap lodgings, and scrimping “almost to suffering,” was she able to let Salmon, her brightest and most promising child, continue his studies at the local academy, fulfilling her promise to his “ever lamented and deceased father.” When she could no longer make ends meet, she was forced to parcel her children out among relatives. Salmon was sent to study under the tutelage of his father’s brother, the Episcopal bishop Philander Chase, who presided over a boys’ school in Worthington in the newly formed state of Ohio. In addition to his work as an educator, Philander Chase was responsible for a sizable parish, and owned a farm that provided food and dairy products for the student body. Young Chase, in return for milking cows and driving them to pasture, building fires, and hauling wood, would be given room and board, and a classical and religious education.
    In 1819, at the age of twelve, the boy traveled westward, first by wagon through Vermont and New York, then by steamboat across Lake Erie to Cleveland, a tiny lakeside settlement of a few hundred residents. There Salmon was stranded until a group of travelers passed through en route to Worthington. In the company of strangers, the child made his way on foot and horseback through a hundred miles of virgin forest to reach his uncle’s home.
    The bishop was an imposing figure, brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking. His faith, Chase observed, “was not passive but active. If any thing was to be done he felt that he must do it; and that, if he put forth all his energy, he might safely & cheerfully leave the event to Divine Providence.” Certainty gave him an unbending zeal. He was “often very harsh & severe,” recalled Chase, and “among us boys he was almost and sometimes, indeed, quite tyrannical.” The most insignificant deviation from the daily regimen of prayer and study was met with a fearful combination of physical flogging and biblical precept.
    “My memories of Worthington on the whole are not pleasant,” Chase said of the time he spent with his domineering uncle. “There were some pleasant rambles—some pleasant incidents—some pleasant associates: but the disagreeable largely predominated. I used to count the days and wish I could get home or go somewhere else and get a living by work.” One incident long remained in Chase’s memory. As punishment for some infraction of the daily rules, he was ordered to bring in a large stack of wood before daybreak. He completed the task but complained to a fellow student that his uncle was “a darned old tyrant.” Upon hearing these words, the bishop allowed no one to speak to the boy and forbade him to speak until he confessed and apologized. Days later, Chase finally recanted, and the sentence was revoked. “Even now,” Chase said, telling the story decades later, “I almost wish I had not.”
    When the bishop was made president of Cincinnati College, Chase accompanied his uncle to Cincinnati. At thirteen, he was enrolled as a freshman at the college. The course of study was not difficult, leaving boys time to indulge in “a good deal of mischief & fun.” Salmon Chase was not among them. “I had little or nothing to do with these sports,” he recalled. “I had the chores to do at home, & when I had time I gave it to reading.” Even Chase’s sympathetic biographer Robert Warden observed that his “life might have been happier” had he “studied less and had more fun!” These early years witnessed the development of the rigid, self-denying habits that, throughout his life, prevented Chase from fully enjoying the companionship of others.
    When Chase turned fifteen, his uncle left for England to secure funding for the new theological seminary that would become Kenyon College. At last, Chase was allowed to return to his mother’s home in Keene, New