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Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
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with a right good will. He ruled by kind words & kind looks.”
Young Salmon, like Seward, demonstrated an unusual intellectual precocity. His father singled him out to receive a better education “than that given to his other children.” The boy thrived in the atmosphere of high expectations. “I was…ambitious to be at the head of my class,” he recalled. During the summer months, his elder sister, Abigail, a schoolteacher in Cornish, kept him hard at work studying Latin grammar. If he failed to grasp his lessons, he would retreat to the garden and stay there by himself until he could successfully read the designated passages. At Sunday school, he strove to memorize more Bible verses than anyone else in his class, “once repeating accurately almost an entire gospel, in a single recitation.” Eager to display his capacity, Chase would boast to adults that he enjoyed studying volumes of ancient history and perusing the plays of Shakespeare “for the entertainment they afforded.”
While he was considered “quite a prodigy” in his written work, Chase was uneasy reciting in public. In contrast to Lincoln, who loved nothing better than to entertain his childhood friends and fellow students with stories, sermons, or passages from books, the self-conscious Chase was terrified to speak before fellow students, having “little notion of what I had to do or of the way to do it.” With his “hands dangling and head down,” he looked as awkward as he felt.
From his very early days, Chase showed signs of the fierce, ingrained rectitude that would both fortify his battle against slavery and incur the enmity of many among his fellows. Baptized Episcopalian in a pious family, where the Lord’s day of rest was strictly kept, the young boy needed only one Sunday scolding for “sliding down hill with some boys on the dry pine leaves” to know that he would never “transgress that way again.” Nor did he argue when his mother forbade association with boys who used profane language: he himself found it shocking that anyone would swear. Another indelible childhood memory made him abhor intemperance. He had stumbled upon the dead body of a drunken man in the street, his “face forward” in a pool of water “not deep enough to reach his ears,” but sufficient, in his extreme state of intoxication, to drown him. The parish priest had delivered sermons on “the evils of intemperance,” but, as Chase observed, “what sermon could rival in eloquence that awful spectacle of the dead drunkard—helplessly perishing where the slightest remnant of sense or strength would have sufficed to save.”
When Chase was seven years old, his father made a bold business move. The War of 1812 had put a halt to glass imports from Europe, creating a pressing demand for new supplies. Sensing opportunity, Ithamar Chase liquidated his assets in Cornish to invest in a glass factory in the village of Keene. His wife had inherited some property there, including a fourteen-room tavern house. Chase moved his family into one section of the tavern and opened the rest to the public. While a curious and loquacious child like the young Lincoln might have enjoyed the convivial entertainments of a tavern, the reticent Salmon found the move from his country estate in Cornish unsettling. And for his father, the relocation proved calamitous. With the end of the war, tariff duties on foreign goods were reduced and glass imports saturated the market. The glass factory failed, sending him into bankruptcy.
The Chase family was unable to recover. Business failure led to humiliation in the community and, eventually, to loss of the family home. Ithamar Chase succumbed to a fatal stroke at the age of fifty-three, when Salmon was nine. “He lingered some days,” Chase recalled. “He could not speak to us, and we stood mute and sobbing. Soon all was over. We had no father…the light was gone out from our home.”
Left with heavy debts and meager resources,
Young Salmon, like Seward, demonstrated an unusual intellectual precocity. His father singled him out to receive a better education “than that given to his other children.” The boy thrived in the atmosphere of high expectations. “I was…ambitious to be at the head of my class,” he recalled. During the summer months, his elder sister, Abigail, a schoolteacher in Cornish, kept him hard at work studying Latin grammar. If he failed to grasp his lessons, he would retreat to the garden and stay there by himself until he could successfully read the designated passages. At Sunday school, he strove to memorize more Bible verses than anyone else in his class, “once repeating accurately almost an entire gospel, in a single recitation.” Eager to display his capacity, Chase would boast to adults that he enjoyed studying volumes of ancient history and perusing the plays of Shakespeare “for the entertainment they afforded.”
While he was considered “quite a prodigy” in his written work, Chase was uneasy reciting in public. In contrast to Lincoln, who loved nothing better than to entertain his childhood friends and fellow students with stories, sermons, or passages from books, the self-conscious Chase was terrified to speak before fellow students, having “little notion of what I had to do or of the way to do it.” With his “hands dangling and head down,” he looked as awkward as he felt.
From his very early days, Chase showed signs of the fierce, ingrained rectitude that would both fortify his battle against slavery and incur the enmity of many among his fellows. Baptized Episcopalian in a pious family, where the Lord’s day of rest was strictly kept, the young boy needed only one Sunday scolding for “sliding down hill with some boys on the dry pine leaves” to know that he would never “transgress that way again.” Nor did he argue when his mother forbade association with boys who used profane language: he himself found it shocking that anyone would swear. Another indelible childhood memory made him abhor intemperance. He had stumbled upon the dead body of a drunken man in the street, his “face forward” in a pool of water “not deep enough to reach his ears,” but sufficient, in his extreme state of intoxication, to drown him. The parish priest had delivered sermons on “the evils of intemperance,” but, as Chase observed, “what sermon could rival in eloquence that awful spectacle of the dead drunkard—helplessly perishing where the slightest remnant of sense or strength would have sufficed to save.”
When Chase was seven years old, his father made a bold business move. The War of 1812 had put a halt to glass imports from Europe, creating a pressing demand for new supplies. Sensing opportunity, Ithamar Chase liquidated his assets in Cornish to invest in a glass factory in the village of Keene. His wife had inherited some property there, including a fourteen-room tavern house. Chase moved his family into one section of the tavern and opened the rest to the public. While a curious and loquacious child like the young Lincoln might have enjoyed the convivial entertainments of a tavern, the reticent Salmon found the move from his country estate in Cornish unsettling. And for his father, the relocation proved calamitous. With the end of the war, tariff duties on foreign goods were reduced and glass imports saturated the market. The glass factory failed, sending him into bankruptcy.
The Chase family was unable to recover. Business failure led to humiliation in the community and, eventually, to loss of the family home. Ithamar Chase succumbed to a fatal stroke at the age of fifty-three, when Salmon was nine. “He lingered some days,” Chase recalled. “He could not speak to us, and we stood mute and sobbing. Soon all was over. We had no father…the light was gone out from our home.”
Left with heavy debts and meager resources,
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