York Civil War Roundtable, February

On Wednesday February 18, Walter Stahr will present on Salmon P. Chase and Abraham Lincoln.

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For the February Roundtable, Walter Stahr looks at the rivalry between Abraham Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary, Salmon P. Chase. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860. But there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the groundwork Chase laid over the previous two decades.

Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln spoke out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery parties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the attorney general for runaway negroes. Tapped by Lincoln to become Secretary of the Treasury, Chase would soon prove vital to the Civil War effort, raising the billions of dollars that allowed the Union to win the war while also pressing the president to recognize Black rights. When Lincoln had the chance to appoint a chief justice in 1864, he chose his faithful rival because he was sure Chase would make the right decisions on the difficult racial, political, and economic issues the Supreme Court would confront during Reconstruction.

Walter Stahr is an honors graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School. After practicing law for 20 years, he turned to writing biographies. His first book was about the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay (published in 2005). After that, he wrote biographies of three of the most important figures in Lincoln’s cabinet: Secretary of State William Henry Seward (2012), Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (2017), and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase (2023). These biographies have been bestsellers and prizewinners. The Chase biography won the 2023 Thomas M. Cooley book prize from the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He is working on a biography of President (and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) William Howard Taft.

Walter is the descendant of a Berks County, PA, resident who served in the 128th PA Volunteers and fought at Antietam.

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