Hampshire, where he planned to teach while preparing for admittance to Dartmouth College. His first position lasted only weeks, however. Employing the harsh methods of his uncle rather than the gentle precepts of his father, he administered corporal punishment to discipline his students. When irate parents complained, he was dismissed.
When Chase made his application to Dartmouth, he found that his schooling in Ohio, though filled with misery, had prepared him to enter as a third-year student. At Dartmouth, for the first time, he seemed to relax. Though he graduated with distinction and a Phi Beta Kappa key, he began to enjoy the camaraderie of college life, forging two lifelong friendships with Charles Cleveland, an intellectual classmate who would become a classics professor, and Hamilton Smith, who would become a well-to-do businessman.
No sooner had he completed his studies than he berated himself for squandering the opportunity: “Especially do I regret that I spent so much of my time in reading novels and other light works,” he told a younger student. “They may impart a little brilliancy to the imagination but at length, like an intoxicating draught, they enfeeble and deaden the powers of thought and action.” With dramatic flair, the teenage Chase then added: “My life seems to me to have been wasted.” While Seward joyfully devoured the works of Dickens and Scott, Chase found no room for fiction in his Spartan intellectual life. After finishing the new novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Last Days of Pompeii, he conceded that “the author is doubtless a gifted being—but he has prostituted God’s noblest gifts to the vilest purposes.”
The years after his graduation found nineteen-year-old Chase in Washington, D.C., where he eventually established a successful school for boys that attracted the sons of the cabinet members in the administration of John Quincy Adams, as well as the son of Senator Henry Clay. Once again, instead of taking pleasure in his position, he felt his talents went unappreciated. There were distinct classes of society in Washington, Chase told Hamilton Smith. The first, to which he aspired, included the high government officials; the second, to which he was relegated, included teachers and physicians; and the third mechanics and artisans. There was, of course, a still lower class comprised of slaves and laborers. The problem with teaching, he observed, was that any “drunken, miserable dog who could thre’d the mazes of the Alphabet” could set himself up as a teacher, bringing the “profession of teachers into utter contempt.” Chase was tormented by the lowly figure he cut in the glittering whirl of Washington life. “I have always thought,” he confessed, “that Providence intended me as the instrument of effecting something more than falls to the lot of all men to achieve.”
Though this thirst to excel and to distinguish himself had been instilled in Chase early on by his parents, and painfully reinforced by the years with Philander Chase, such sleepless ambition was inflamed by the dynamic American society in the 1820s. Visitors from Europe, the historian Joyce Appleby writes, “saw the novelty of a society directed almost entirely by the ambitious dreams that had been unleashed after the Revolution in the heated imagination of thousands of people, most of them poor and young.”
Casting about for a career befitting the high estimation in which he held his own talents, Chase wrote to an older brother in 1825 for advice about the different professions. He was contemplating the study of law, perhaps inspired by his acquaintance with Attorney General William Wirt, the father of two of his pupils. Wirt was among the most distinguished figures in Washington, a respected lawyer as well as a literary scholar. He had served as U.S. Attorney General under President James Monroe and had been kept in office by John Quincy Adams. His popular biography of the patriot
Pip Ballantine, Tee Morris