Samuel Chase

In May 1762 Chase married Anne Baldwin, a match made for affection rather than advantage, since the bride brought him neither fortune nor rank. They would have seven children, of whom only four survived to grow up. That same year an Annapolis debating society expelled him for conduct it called “extremely irregular and indecent,” an early sign that the rowdiness would outlast his youth. He also struck up a friendship with the lawyer William Paca that would carry both men all the way to the Declaration of Independence. In 1764 the voters of Anne Arundel County sent him to the assembly, where he would sit for the next twenty years.

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a busy, restless incendiary, a ringleader of mobs

Then came the Stamp Act, and Chase found his calling. He threw himself against the tax before most of his cautious colony dared, leading a band of young men who seized stamps and burned the distributors in effigy. The colony’s more careful gentlemen were appalled. When Annapolis loyalists denounced him in print as “a busy, restless incendiary, a ringleader of mobs,” Chase did not so much defend himself as counterattack, accusing them of ruling by “proprietary influence, court favour, and the wealth” that infested the city. He made enemies in that quarrel who would nurse the grudge for decades. He did not appear to mind.

When the Stamp Act fell and new taxes rose to replace it, Chase moved past mere protest to the idea his colleagues least wanted to hear, which was independence. He helped found the Anne Arundel Sons of Liberty with Paca and lent his considerable lungs to Maryland’s Committee of Correspondence. Admirers took to calling him “the Samuel Adams of Maryland,” and for once the comparison was apt.

Glory did not pay Chase’s bills, and in 1778 his career nearly ended in scandal. Rivals accused him of using what he had learned in Congress to corner the flour market, and the charge cost him his seat. He retreated to the law, moved to Baltimore in 1786, and rebuilt himself on the bench, first as chief judge of the Baltimore criminal court and then of the Maryland General Court.

His arrival at the Supreme Court came by an unlikely road. The Court in 1796 was nobody’s idea of a prize, ill-paid and burdened with brutal circuit-riding, and capable lawyers tended to decline the honor. But Washington admired Chase’s legal gifts and remembered his Revolutionary zeal, and James McHenry, a Maryland friend of the president, spent more than seven months lobbying on his behalf. When the offer finally came, McHenry reported that he had “made an old veteran very proud and happy.” Washington named Chase on January 26, 1796, to fill John Blair’s seat, the Senate confirmed him the next day, and he took his oath on February 4.

He joined a small and very young institution. The Court held only six seats, and Chase became its ninth member, with just eight men ahead of him in its short history, all of them Washington’s choices. John Jay had led it as the first Chief Justice, while James Wilson, William Cushing, John Blair, and John Rutledge had sat early, and James Iredell, Thomas Johnson, and William Paterson rounded out the bench. Blair’s resignation had opened the very chair that Chase now filled.

The choice annoyed a good many Federalists, who had not forgotten his past. Chase had fought their Constitution at Maryland’s ratifying convention in 1788, had tried to keep his state from approving it, and had skipped the Constitutional Convention altogether the year before. Yet age and office had cooled his fear of central power, and on the bench he turned into one of the most ferocious Federalists of the age, the sort of conversion that tends to embarrass everyone involved.

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Every ex post facto law must necessarily be retrospective; but every retrospective law is not an ex post facto law.

His opinions outlasted his temper. In Ware v. Hylton he held a national treaty superior to conflicting state law, an early and important assertion of federal authority. In Hylton v. United States the Court for the first time measured an act of Congress against the Constitution. And in Calder v. Bull he fixed the meaning of the Ex Post Facto Clause, ruling that it reaches only retroactive criminal laws and not civil ones, while insisting that no legislature held unlimited power over its citizens. “I cannot subscribe to the omnipotence of a State legislature,” he declared from the bench, in a line that still echoes through constitutional argument.

The election of 1800 swept Thomas Jefferson and his Republicans into power, but the courts stayed stubbornly Federalist. John Adams had spent his last weeks in office stocking the bench for life and installing John Marshall as Chief Justice, and Jefferson meant to break that grip. He needed only a pretext, and Chase, never shy, obligingly supplied one.

The justice had run his sedition trials more like a prosecutor than a judge, bullying defendants and their lawyers in the Callender and Fries cases. Then in May 1803 he stood before a Baltimore grand jury and delivered a frank political tirade, warning that the republic would “sink into a mobocracy, the worst of all governments.” Jefferson read the speech and saw his opening. He wrote to a Maryland congressman to ask, with studied innocence, whether Chase’s “seditious and official attack on the principles of our Constitution” should “go unpunished.”

The Republicans had already removed one federal judge, the unfortunate John Pickering of New Hampshire. Chase was a far larger target, the first Supreme Court justice in their sights, and everyone understood the stakes. If Chase fell, Marshall would surely be next, and with him the Court’s young authority, including the power of judicial review that Marshall had just claimed in Marbury. Marshall himself read the charges and found them cause to alarm the friends of an independent judiciary. He was not wrong to worry.

The acquittal saved Chase’s seat but not his spirits. He returned to the bench a diminished figure, ill, deep in debt despite his thousands of acres, and weighed down by the disgrace of having been tried at all. Arthritis and gout crippled him, and by 1807 he was missing sessions of the Court. He died of a failing heart on June 19, 1811, at the age of seventy, and they buried him at Old Saint Paul’s in Baltimore, the parish his father had once served. He left behind less money than land, and more reputation than either.