Salmon P. Chase: Greenbacks, the $1 Bill Portrait, and Texas v. White

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Salmon P. Chase was born in New Hampshire in 1808, lost his father at nine, and was sent to Ohio to live with his uncle, Episcopal bishop Philander Chase. After Dartmouth he studied law under Attorney General William Wirt and opened a practice in Cincinnati in 1829. The deaths of three wives pushed him toward abolition, and critics called him the attorney general for fugitive slaves after cases such as the 1837 Matilda case, where he argued slavery was a local law that ended at a free state's border. He moved from the Whigs to the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party and the Republican Party, and served as a U.S. senator and Ohio's first Republican governor.

After losing the 1860 nomination to Abraham Lincoln, he became Treasury Secretary with no finance background and built the National Banking Acts, the first federal paper currency known as greenbacks, and mass market war bonds sold with financier Jay Cooke. He used Treasury patronage to court support for 1864 and offered his resignation four times until Lincoln accepted it in June 1864, then named him Chief Justice. On the Court he admitted John Rock, wrote Texas v. White, dissented in the Slaughterhouse Cases, and presided over Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial while seeking the presidency in 1868 and 1872. He died in 1873.

• He is one of the few Americans to serve in all three federal branches and as a state governor.
• He put his own portrait on the first federal $1 bill for name recognition.
• He started the process of stamping In God We Trust on U.S. coins.
• Texas v. White in 1869 declared the United States an indestructible union of indestructible states.
• Chase National Bank, a forerunner of JPMorgan Chase, was named for him though he had no tie to it, and his face appeared on the $10,000 bill.