Calvin C. Chaffee

Calvin Clifford Chaffee (August 28 1811–August 8 1896) was an American doctor and politician.

Born in Saratoga Springs, New York, he attended the common schools, studied medicine, and graduated from the medical school of Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, in 1835. He settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he began his medical practice.

In 1854 he was elected on the American Party party ticket to the Thirty-fourth Congress as part of the Know Nothing party sweep of the Massachusetts congressional delegation that year. An abolitionist who received an honorary degree from Amherst in the same ceremony as Charles Sumner, he became a Republican and was reelected to Congress as such in 1856.

Chaffee is perhaps most notable as the second husband of Irene Emerson, the widow of Dr. John Emerson and owner of the slave Dred Scott. There is some speculation [Blaustein, pp 147] that Chaffee advanced the "Dred Scott" case as a test case for slavery, but other authors disagree. Contemporary reports have him discovering on the front page of the "Springfield Argus" that his new wife owned arguably the most famous slave in the world in February 1857, only a month before the Supreme Court handed down the infamous "Dred Scott" decision. Too late to influence the case and lambasted nationwide for his seeming hypocrisy, Chaffee immediately arranged for the transfer of Scott to his original owners, the Blow family, for the purpose of emancipation soon thereafter.

Likely as a result of the negative publicity from the Scott case, Chaffee did not stand for reelection in 1858 and became Librarian of the House of Representatives from 1860-1862, when he returned to practicing medicine in Washington, D.C. until 1876. He returned to Springfield and died there in 1896, aged 84.

References

*cite book
author = Albert P. Blaustein, Robert L. Zangrando
year = 1991
title = Civil Rights and African Americans: A Documentary History
publisher = Northwestern University Press
location = Evanston, IL
id = 0810109204
*CongBio|C000270
* [http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/africanamerican/scott/scott.asp Biography of Dred Scott] by Christyn Elley, Missouri State ArchivesUSRepSuccessionBox
state=Massachusetts
district=10
before=Edward Dickinson
after=Charles Delano
years=March 4, 1855–March 31859