George F. Hoar

Chase had been elected President of the United States he would have administered that lofty office honorably and to the advantage of the country.

I think there can be no doubt that Chief Justice Chase, like many other great men, was consumed by an eager and passionate ambition for the Presidency.

If he had attained to the supreme object of his ambition and reached the goal of the Presidency, if his life had been spared to complete his term, it would have been a most honorable period, in my opinion, in the history of the country.

It will be better for his reputation that the chapter of that history which relates to him shall be written by a historian with a full and clear sense of those faults and infirmities, concealing nothing, and extenuating nothing.

But the people always have made and always will make a distinction between such offences and the final unpardonable guilt of corruption in office.

The great doctrines of which they are the influential advocates must not be imperiled by any smell of fire on their garments.

Their influence and character are the property of their country, and especially valuable to their political associates.

Members of legislative bodies, especially great political leaders of large influence, ought to be careful to keep a thousand miles off from relations which may give rise to even a suspicion of wrong.

But after all I feel that great and representative men of other sections can assist the Southern people in these questions quite as much, if not more, than we can assist ourselves.

And I hope that in the vexing questions of the future, that by a temperate course of thought and action, that my influence may be worth something, however small, to my people beyond even a party view.

I go to Washington as a Democrat, but with full knowledge that my party does not contain all the right or all the wrong in it.

In one way these questions mean so little to the sections of the country not immediately interested in them, but they mean so much to the Southern people who have to deal with them as live, every day matters.

We look to you and other great Northern men to keep us in our sectional and racial questions.

But I confess I like to leave on record, if I may, some evidence which will contradict the charge so constantly made by critics near home, that I am a man of intense partisan and personal bitterness.

But beneath all this there were genuine truth and manhood in Hoar that lifted him above the sordid feeling of malignant passion.

But at the same time I endeavored to do full justice to the better qualities of the Southern people and to explain how it happened that men otherwise so honorable and brave and humane could be led by the passions of a political warfare and…

He was profoundly religious, absolutely incorruptible, a man of very kind heart, not afraid to break out new paths, apt to succeed in all his undertakings, a lover of Liberty and thoroughly devoted to his work.

As it is, the jetties have been of great value and well worth their cost.

I think everybody now agrees that Eads was right, and that the scheme would have been perfectly successful, and would have continued to perform all that was desired of it, if his counsel had been taken.

Ships from seas by nature barred, Mount along ways by man prepared; Along far stretching vales, whose streams Seek other seas, their canvas gleams, And busy towns grow up on coasts Thronged yesterday by airy ghosts.

But I said: "Captain Eads, can you not frame a bill, which will provide that you shall not have any money from the Treasury for your work until you have accomplished something.

He made a most admirable Judge, and my action was abundantly vindicated by the result.

I dissented from the Committee, of which I was a member, and I exerted myself with all my might to secure his confirmation, and was successful.

But he construed the Constitution very strictly and was opposed to many measures of the Administration.

But in spite of the horror and indignation that the people of the South felt for John Brown's raid he did full justice to the heroic quality of the man.