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Sunday, May 04, 2008

Salmon P. Chase, Bull-Bitch


I pass this along without comment, mostly because I'm not sure what a "bull-bitch" even is. It doesn't sound good, though:
The sincerity of [Chase's] hatred of slavery is beyond challenge. The Ohio Free Soil leader had committed himself to the antislavery movement in the 1830s when it was not respectable; he had braved anti-abolitionist mobs; he had waged a long legal struggle for black rights; and he had labored diligently for many years to form a powerful antislavery third party. As his commitment to political activity grew, however, so, too, did his ambition; he was, in the words of one Ohio politician, "as ambitious as Julius Caesar." Chase was . . . also unbearably self-righteous and on occasion decidedly duplicitous in his political dealings -- his enemies called him "a political vampire" and "a sort of moral bull-bitch."

William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, at 72.

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