Any Democratic Party hope of persuading General Grant to become its standard-bearer finally ended with his acceptance of the Republican nomination in May.  In Grant's absence, the leading Democratic candidate was Congressman George Pendleton, the party’s 1864 vice-presidential nominee.  Pendleton, however, faced considerable opposition from influential Eastern Democrats uneasy with his "soft money" views.  As the Republicans began coalescing around Grant in the spring of 1868, Salmon Chase started courting the Democrats and secured the support of influential congressmen like Samuel “Sunset” Cox of New York and Daniel Voorhees of Indiana.  Democrats in his home state of Ohio hated the chief justice, but the main obstacle to his nomination was his insistence on black manhood suffrage and other basic civil rights for black Americans.   

Before the Civil War, Chase became one of the leading antislavery lawyers in the nation, earning the nickname of "the Attorney General of Fugitive Slaves."  In the 1840s, he helped found the Liberty and Free-Soil Parties in Ohio, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1849.  While serving as Ohio's governor in the late 1850s, Chase championed public education, prison reform, and women's rights, while continuing to speak out against slavery and its expansion.  During the Civil War, he served skillfully as Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, creating a national banking system, issuing fiat money, and establishing an internal revenue division within the department.

Chase's real ambition was to be president, and he certainly thought he could do a better job than President Lincoln.  Chase was a constant critic of Lincoln’s policies, inundating the president with unsolicited advice and proffering his resignation four times in fits of anger.  In the winter of 1863-1864, a group of radical Republicans turned to Chase as an alternative to Lincoln as a presidential candidate, but the Chase “boom” collapsed within a few months.  In June 1864, the treasury secretary once again offered the president his resignation, and this time Lincoln accepted it.  

When Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney became fatally ill in the late summer of 1864, Chase hoped that Lincoln would promise him the appointment.  But the president hesitated.  Taking the hint, Chase began campaigning for the president’s reelection.  Taney died in early October and two months later the reelected president appointed Chase to the coveted position.  In one of his first acts as chief justice, Chase authorized John Rock as the first black attorney to argue cases before the Supreme Court.  In March 1868, Chase presided over the removal trial of the impeached President Andrew Johnson in the U.S. Senate. 

From March into June 1868 (when this cartoon appeared), signs for a Chase nomination by the Democrats were positive.  By the time of the convention in early July, though, his star had faded.  Despite dimmed prospects, ardent Chase-backers, led by John Van Buren (President Martin Van Buren’s son) and Kate Chase Sprague (daughter of Chase and wife of Republican Senator William Sprague) worked behind the scenes at the convention for his nomination.  Because of the large field of candidates, though, they decided not to place his name in contention in the early rounds. 

The first ballot confirmed that Pendleton, with 105 votes, was the man to beat, but his count was far from the required two-thirds majority.  Finally, on the 22^nd ballot, Horatio Seymour, former New York governor and chair of the convention, was nominated, causing spontaneous cheering and demonstrations of approval.  While Seymour had not been an active candidate and genuinely seemed not to want the nomination, he was widely respected within the party and had the fewest enemies of any of the current contenders. His nomination was quickly made unanimous.  The Democratic Party in 1868 would stand against black manhood suffrage and other Reconstruction policies.  A disappointed Chase continued serving as chief justice, but largely withdrew from partisan politics.