command. The movement was to be slow, sometimes halting and apparently
falling back, in some respects insignificant, in all respects
desperate, but there was to be no permanent defeat and no compromise.

The espousal of Abolitionism by Mr. Chase was a remarkable
circumstance. He was not an enthusiast like Garrison and Lundy and
many other Anti-Slavery pioneers, but precisely the opposite. He was
cold-blooded and cool-headed, a deliberate and conservative man. His
speeches were described as giving light but no heat. His sympathies
were seemingly weak, but his sense of justice was immense. Apparently,
he opposed slavery because it was wrong rather than because it was
cruel. He had a big body, a big head, and a big conscience, the
combination making a strong man and a good fighter.

That he did, in fact, sympathize with the slaves was shown by his
professional work in their behalf, more particularly in pleading
without fee or other reward the cases of escaped fugitives in the
courts. So numerous were his engagements in this regard that his
antagonists spoke of him sneeringly as the "Attorney-General for
runaway niggers." Upon some of his Anti-Slavery cases he bestowed an
immense amount of work. His argument in the case of Van Zant--the
original of Van Tromp in Mrs. Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_,--an old man
who was prosecuted and fined until he was financially ruined for
giving a "lift" in his farm wagon to a slave family on its way to
Canada, was said at the time to have been the most able so far made
in the Supreme Court of the United States. That and other similar
utterances by Mr. Chase were published for popular reading, and were
widely distributed by friends of the cause.

It is possible that, in performing this arduous labor, Mr. Chase, who