ter  a  year  there  he  returned  to  New  Hampshire
and  entered  Dartmouth  College,  where  he  grad-
uated in  1826.  He  tanght  school  and  studied  law
iu  Washington,  D.  C,  and  was  admitted  to  the
bar  there  in  1829.  The  next  year  he  went  to
Cincinnati  to  practise  his  profession,  where  he
became  eminent.  He  prepared  an  edition  of  the
statutes  of  Ohio,  with  copious  notes,  which  soon
siiperseded  all  others.  In  1834  he  became  so-
licitor of  the  Bank  of  the  United  States  in  Cin-
cinnati. Acting  as  counsel  for  a  colored  wom-
an who  was  claimed  as  a  slave  (1837),  he  contro-
verted the  authority  of  Congress  to  impose  any
duties  or  confer  any  powers,  in  fugitive-slave
cases,  on  state  magistrates.  The  same  year,  in  his
defence  of  J.  6.  Birney  (which  see),  prosecuted
under  a  state  law  for  harboring  a  fugitive  slave,
Mr.  Chase  asserted  the  doctrine  that  slavery  was
local,  anddependent  upon  state  law  for  existence,
and  that  the  alleged  slave,  being  iu  Ohio,  where
slavery  did  not  exist,  was  free.  From  that  time
he  was  regarded  as  the  great  legal  champion  of
the  principles  of  the  Anti-slavery  party.  He  en-
tered the  political  field  in  1841,  on  organizing
the  "Liberty  party"  (which  see)  in  Ohio,  and
was  ever  afterwards  active  in  its  conventions,  as
well  as  in  the  ranks  of  the  opposers  of  slavery.
