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Salmon Portland Chase (1808-73) was one of the most significant politicians in nineteenth-century America. A leading antislavery statesman, Chase held office as U.S. senator from and governor of Ohio, secretary of the Treasury under Abraham Lincoln, and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

From 1984 to 1998, historians at Claremont Graduate University working under the direction of John Niven, James P. McClure, and Leigh Johnsen located, collected, and organized facsimile copies of more than 28,000 documents related to Chase's career and published two major works: a microfilm edition of approximately 14,000 papers and an annotated, selective letterpress edition of five volumes that includes all of Chase's diaries and significant samples of his correspondence.

Copies of the microfilm edition can be obtained from University Publications of America, a division of Lexis-Nexis, Inc. The publisher of the Chase Papers letterpress edition is Kent State University Press. Facsimile documents, research papers, and other materials related to the project can be consulted at the A. K. Smiley Library, in Redlands, California.

Funding for the project came from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Claremont Graduate University, the Chase Papers' host institution.