A controversial figure, Samuel Chase was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and was tried for impeachment as a U.S. Supreme Court justice by the Senate. Born in Maryland, Chase trained as a lawyer and was admitted to the bar in 1761. He served in the Maryland assembly from 1764 to 1784, quickly establishing his credentials as an opponent to the royal governor and as a leader of the resistance movement (1764-75) against imperial regulation.

Oddly for a man who would later declare that expanding suffrage would lead to a mobocracy, Chase took an active role in the Maryland anti-Stamp Act mobs, served on a variety of Revolutionary committees, and was a leading radical as the Revolutionary War (1775-83) broke out. He attended both the First Continental Congress and the Second Continental Congress, orchestrated Maryland's support for the Declaration of Independence, and rode 150 miles in two days to Philadelphia in time to vote for that document in 1776. In 1777 and 1778 he was an important member of Congress and supported George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental army without reservation. Toward the end of 1778, however, Chase became embroiled in a controversy concerning his efforts to speculate in flour based on knowledge he had gained as a government official. Accused of corruption, he was compelled to withdraw from public life. When he was again chosen as a delegate to Congress two years later, he was not as active as he had been. Like many of his generation, he sought new opportunities in the independent United States, only to find his speculations and business enterprises ending in failure. He declared bankruptcy in 1789.

At the same time Chase again entered politics, opposingthe U.S. Constitution written in 1787 and voting against it at Maryland's ratifying convention. He became a Maryland judge in 1788 and chief justice of the Maryland general court in 1791. Although he had been rabidly anti-British, sometime in the 1790s he became more conservative. As a result, his old friend George Washington nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court in January 1796. Quickly ratified by the Senate, Chase played a prominent role in the court prior to the rise of John Marshall, and he wrote several significant opinions, which helped to assert national treaties over state laws, defined ex post facto laws, articulated procedures for amendments to the Constitution, and clarified the relationship between federal and the common law.

At times, Chase behaved high-handedly. When he delivered a charge to a Baltimore grand jury that attacked the Democratic-Republican Party and the expansion of the right to vote in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson encouraged supporters to impeach Chase. This effort was part of a general Jeffersonian assault on a judiciary dominated by the Federalist Party. Had the Senate managed to remove Chase, many scholars believe that the Jeffersonians would have next acted against Chief Justice John Marshall. However, the case against Chase, presented in the Senate in 1804, was not particularly strong. Although he had uttered intemperate remarks and behaved so badly in the trial of John Fries for his role in a tax rebellion that President John Adams had pardoned the convicted Fries (who had been sentenced to death in Chase's court), none of the eight counts levied against him could stand up to an able legal defense and careful scrutiny. In short, they did not amount to high crimes and misdemeanors.

Chase remained on the court for the rest of his life, but ill health limited his attendance. He died on June 19, 1811.

Bibliography:

1) Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

2) William H. Rehnquist, Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson (New York: Morrow, 1992).

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