Salmon P. Chase was one of the preeminent men of 19th-century America. A majestic figure, tall and stately, Chase was a leader in the fight to end slavery, a brilliant administrator who as Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury provided crucial funding for a vastly expensive war, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the turmoil of Reconstruction, and the presiding officer of the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. Yet he was also a complex figure. As John Niven reveals in ...

The vivid, lucid and extremely illuminating diary of Salmon P. Chase remained scattered until 1954 when they were published under the editorship of eminent Civil War historian David H. Donald. Chase served as Secretary of the Treasury in President Lincoln's cabinet from 1861 to 1864, during the Civil War, despite the crisis he instituted the establishment of a national banking system and the issue of paper currency. Ambitious, talented and underhand, his diaries reveal the Civil War at its...

An NPR Best Book of the YearFrom an acclaimed New York Times bestselling biographer, an “eloquently written, impeccably researched, and intensely moving” (The Wall Street Journal) Civil War biography of Abraham Lincoln’s indispensable Secretary of the Treasury: antislavery leader, Republican Party founder, and leading proponent for Black rights during his years in cabinet ...