Samuel Chase

American jurist

• Born: April 17, 1741
• Birthplace: Somerset County, Maryland
• Died: June 19, 1811
• Place of death: Baltimore, Maryland

Chase is the only U.S. Supreme Court justice to have faced an impeachment trial. He was both a partisan firebrand and a Founding Father whose political and legal theory helped shape the republic.

Early Life

Samuel Chase’s mother, British-born Matilda Walker Chase, died the day he was born. Three years later, the young boy moved to Baltimore with his father, Thomas Chase, a British-born Church of England clergyman. The elder Chase’s profession conferred on him the status of a gentleman, but father and son seemed always beset by money worries. From his father, Chase received both a good education in the classics and an ambivalent attitude toward wealth and aristocracy.

At age eighteen, Chase left for Annapolis, Maryland, to pursue a legal career. As was the custom, he did not attend law school but rather “read” law in the offices of legal practitioners, those of Arthur Hill in Chase’s case. Four years later, in 1763, he was admitted to the Maryland bar.

One year earlier, Chase had married Ann Baldwin, whose father was a bankrupt farmer. The marriage produced seven children, only four of whom survived infancy, and lasted until Ann died sometime between 1776 and 1779. This union did little to further Chase’s prospects, and he had a difficult time attracting wealthy clients. For several years, his practice focused on defending debtors from their creditors. Eventually, however, he built a successful law firm in Annapolis.

Like many lawyers, Chase was attracted to politics. In 1764, he was elected to the lower house of the Maryland assembly, where he would spend two decades representing Annapolis and Ann Arundel County. By the early 1770’s, he had established himself as one of the colony’s most important and most controversial politicians. His leadership of demonstrations against the city of Annapolis caused the mayor to call him a “busy, restless incendiary, a ringleader of mobs, a foul-mouthed and inflaming son of discord.”

Life’s Work

Samuel Chase was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the revolutionary cause. In 1774, he helped organize the Sons of Liberty, a militant group that demonstrated against British rule. The same year, Maryland sent him as a delegate to the First Continental Congress. At age thirty-three, he was one of the youngest participants at the congress, where he signed the Declaration of Independence. He again represented Maryland at the Second Continental Congress in 1775, where he served on more than thirty committees and urged colonial unity in an economic boycott of English goods.

At the same time, Chase continued to serve in the state legislature and develop his legal practice. He was one of the authors of the Maryland constitution, a document that ultimately reflected his belief that governing should be left in the hands of an elite group of property holders. Later, the ruling senate he helped design opposed him, and Chase reverted to the role of champion of the common person. In 1788, he opposed Maryland’s ratification of the state constitution because at the time it lacked a bill of rights, and the opposition cost him his seat.

Chase found himself out of office and bankrupt. For many years, he had lived beyond his means, attempting to transform himself into a property holder. In 1778, in fact, he had been suspended from the Continental Congress owing to accusations of war profiteering connected with an attempt to corner the flour market. Now in his forties and just married to his second wife, Hannah Kitty Giles, who would bear two daughters, Chase sought a position that would bring him both public respect and financial security: He became a judge.

Chase first served as a local judge in Baltimore County. Then, in 1791, he also became chief judge of the Maryland General Court. Objecting to this dual role and annoyed by the overbearing manner Chase displayed on the bench, certain members of the state assembly attempted to remove him from both posts. In a preview of Chase’s later judicial impeachment, the vote went in his favor by the narrowest of margins.

By all accounts Chase was a larger-than-life figure. More than 6 feet tall and broadly built, he had a brownish-red complexion that caused his detractors to refer to him as Old Bacon Face. More kindly, U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story compared Chase to the legendary eighteenth century English man of letters Samuel Johnson “in person, in manners, in unwieldy strength, and severity of reproof, in real tenderness of heart; and above all in intellect.”

On the bench, the once ardent Republican reverted to his earlier elitist orientation, aligning himself with the Federalists, who favored a strong central government. His intense commitment to the Federalist cause was one of the reasons President George Washington nominated Chase to the Supreme Court in 1796; it also nearly proved to be his undoing. Like all Supreme Court justices in his day, Chase was obliged to perform two roles: one as an appellate judge on the highest court in the land and the other as a circuit judge who heard cases in an assigned geographical area. In two cases for which he served as a judge, Chase’s Federalist partisanship caused him to conduct criminal trials in a highly questionable manner.

In 1798, the Federalist Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were meant to quell political dissent during the war then raging between Britain and France. The United States was officially neutral, but Republicans, who supported the French, feared that the administration of President John Adams favored the British. Several publishers and editors of Republican newspapers were prosecuted under the act, which made it a punishable offense to oppose the federal government in word or deed. One of these journalists was John Callender, who had published a book claiming that President Adams was an “alleged aristocrat” who served British interests. When Chase, along with a district judge, heard the case against Callender in the spring of 1800, he repeatedly interfered with defense counsel’s attempts to present its case, seating an admittedly biased juror despite objections and refusing to allow the testimony of one of the defense witnesses.

Only months earlier, Chase had presided over the Philadelphia trial of John Fries, who was accused of treason. The question before the court was whether Fries’s leadership of a tax revolt amounted to treason. Chase, however, forestalled any debate on the issue by delivering an opinion defining the crime even before the trial began. As a result, Fries’s attorneys withdrew from the case, whereupon Chase declared that the court would act as Fries’s advocate. Not surprisingly, Fries was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

Chase’s partisanship became more pronounced as the presidential election of 1800 approached. In August of that year, the start of the Supreme Court’s term had to be delayed because Chase was detained in Maryland working for Adams’s reelection. Despite Chase’s efforts, the Republican candidate, Thomas Jefferson, was elected. Undeterred, Chase pursued his Federalist campaign, in 1803 delivering a charge to a Baltimore grand jury in which he openly, and egregiously, criticized Republican policy. Jefferson responded by suggesting to one of the leaders of the House of Representatives that Chase be impeached.

Under Article I of the U.S. Constitution, only the House is endowed with the power to impeach for offenses that Article II outlines as “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” In 1804, the House voted to impeach Chase on eight charges, the most serious of which grew out of the Fries and Callender trials and the 1803 grand jury charge. Chase’s trial was held in 1805 before the Republican-controlled Senate, where the justice was so well represented and the case against him so badly managed that even some Republicans voted not to impeach. In the end, many senators—both Federalists and Republicans—came to believe that the charges against Chase were either politically motivated or not serious enough to warrant his removal from the bench. Although eighteen—all of them Republicans—of the thirty-four members of the Senate voted in favor of convicting Chase, their votes did not constitute the two-thirds extraordinary majority the Constitution requires for conviction.

By the time of Chase’s acquittal, the Supreme Court was dominated by Chief JusticeJohn Marshall, who wrote most of the Court’s major opinions. It is difficult, therefore, to know just how the impeachment trial affected Chase’s participation in the affairs of the national judiciary. He did, however, continue to serve on the high court until his death from heart failure in 1811.

Significance

Samuel Chase’s acquittal scotched any further impeachment plans the Republicans might have been entertaining in an attempt to wrest control of the judicial branch from the Federalists. It has also had long-term significance in that it established the principle that impeachment was not to be used as a political weapon. No Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached, and the two presidents faced with an impeachment trial, Andrew Johnson and William Clinton, were likewise acquitted. Those who voted against impeachment in these two cases undoubtedly saw the trials as political and perhaps also recollected the partisanship that occasioned Chase’s trial.

However, Chase’s legacy does not stem solely from his impeachment trial. During his early years on the Supreme Court, he clearly was the intellectual leader of the bench. Before Justice Marshall enshrined the principle of judicial review in law in the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803), Chase had spoken out in support of the principle, which made the Supreme Court the final authority on the constitutionality of state and federal laws. Chase also helped to establish the doctrine of substantive due process, which holds that rights not expressly laid out elsewhere in the Constitution can be justified by the due process clause found in either the Fifth or the Fourteenth Amendments.

By nature a conservative, Chase adhered to the principle of judicial restraint, which holds that the Court should customarily defer to Congress with regard to changes in legislation, and advocated a strict, literal interpretation of the words of the Constitution. It is a mark of his genius that he was able to reconcile these seeming contraries, all of which remain vital in American jurisprudence.

Bibliography

Burger, Warren E. It Is So Ordered: A Constitution Unfolds. New York: W. Morrow, 1995. A historical look at the U.S. Constitution and constitutional law, with chapters on Chase’s impeachment trial and the subpoena of President Jefferson’s papers by Justice Marshall. Includes an index.

Chase, Samuel. Trial of Samuel Chase. 1805. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1970. Chase’s own legal responses to the articles of impeachment filed against him in the House of Representatives.

Elsmere, Jane Shaffer. Justice Samuel Chase. Muncie, Ind.: Janevar, 1980. Still the best full-length biography of the justice.

Haw, James A., et al. Stormy Patriot: The Life of Samuel Chase. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1980. Includes valuable information about Chase’s judicial and political career in his home state.

Malone, Dumas. Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. The fourth installment of this multivolume biography of Jefferson provides an excellent historical and political backdrop for the drama of Chase’s impeachment. Includes illustrations, maps, and an extensive bibliography.

Presser, Stephen B. The Original Misunderstanding: The English, the Americans, and the Dialectic of Federalist Jurisprudence. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1991. A history of the federal courts in the late eighteenth century, focusing on Chase’s career. The author describes how law, politics, and morality in the United States drew from, and contrasted with, that of England.

Rehnquist, William H. Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson. New York: W. Morrow, 1992. Rehnquist provides a clear and concise exploration of the historical background and legal complexities of two significant impeachment trials in U.S. history.