Kate Chase
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Katherine Jane ("Kate") Chase (August 13, 1840 – July 31, 1899), was the daughter of famous Ohio politician Salmon P. Chase, the Treasury Secretary to President Abraham Lincoln and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. She is best known as a society hostess during the American Civil War, and a strong supporter of her widowed father's presidential ambitions that would have made her First Lady.
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[edit] Early life
Kate was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of Salmon Chase and Eliza Ann Smith, Chase's second wife. His first wife died two weeks after the birth of their first child. Eliza, in turn, died shortly after Kate's fifth birthday, leaving Chase to remarry a woman with whom Kate had a difficult stepmother/stepdaughter relationship. Deciding it would be best for all if Kate went away for some time, Chase sent her to the fashionable school of Miss Henrietta B. Haines in New York City, where she learned languages, elocution and the social graces along with music and history. After nine years of schooling she returned to Columbus, Ohio, to serve as official hostess to her father, the newly-elected Governor of the state, by now widowed a third time. Beautiful and intelligent, she managed to impress such friends of her father as Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts Senator and fellow anti-slavery champion; James Garfield, the future President, and Carl Schurz, the German-American statesman, who described her as follows:
| “ | She was about eighteen years old, tall and slender and exceedingly well formed. . . . Her little nose, somewhat audaciously tipped up, could perhaps not have passed muster with a severe critic, but it fitted pleasingly into her face with its large, languid, but at the same time vivacious hazel eyes, shaded by long dark lashes and arched over by proud eyebrows. The fine forehead was framed in waving, gold-brown hair. She had something imperial in the pose of the head, and all her movements possessed an equisite natural charm. No wonder that she came to be admired as a great beauty and broke many hearts. After the usual commonplaces, the conversation at the breakfast table, in which Miss Kate took a lively and remarkably intelligent part, soon turned itself upon politics. | ” |
[edit] Life in Washington
In 1861 Chase accepted the newly-elected President Lincoln's offer to serve as his Treasury Secretary and he took up residence with 20-year-old Kate at 6th and E Street Northwest in Washington. At a White House levee shortly after the presidential Inaugural, Kate, due to her beauty and charm, outshone Mary Todd Lincoln and from then on the First Lady was jealous and distrustful of her younger rival, all the more so because Chase openly fancied himself more qualified than Lincoln for the Chief Executive position (Chase had vied for the Republican presidential nominiation in 1860 that Lincoln had captured, and Chase viewed himself, with some justification, as a more bona fide abolitionist). Kate set herself up as the hostess whose soirees were the most eagerly attended in the nation's capital; she became, effectively, the "Belle of the North." She visited battle camps in the D.C. area and befriended Union generals, offering her own views on the proper prosecution of the war. She casually dated Lincoln's personal secretary, John Hay (later Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt), who admired her for her wit and intelligence but accurately perceived her extreme ambition.
[edit] Marriage and divorce
Keenly interested in politics and social advancement, Kate married wealthy Rhode Island Governor and textile magnate William Sprague during the height of the war in 1863.
A few months before their wedding, William and Kate paid a visit to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. He recorded these comments in his diary:
| “ | May 19, 1863
Governor Sprague and Miss Kate Chase called this evening. I have been skeptical as to a match, but this means something. She is beautiful, or, more properly perhaps, interesting and impressive. He is rich and holds the position of Senator. Few young men have such advantages as he, and Miss Kate has talents and ambition sufficient for both. |
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The wedding took place on November 12, 1863, at Chase's home in Washington, and was the social event of the day. Sprague's wedding gift to Kate was a tiara of matched pearls and diamonds that cost more than $50,000.[1] As the bride entered the room, the marine band played "the Kate Chase March" that composer Thomas Mark Clark had written for the occasion. President Lincoln attended the reception; his wife did not.
Kate's marriage to Sprague was an unhappy one and ended in divorce in 1882. Sprague had problems with alcohol, had affairs with other women, and lost huge sums of money in poorly conceived business ventures. Some evidence also suggests that he engaged in illegal cotton trading activities during the War. During the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, presided over by Salmon Chase as Chief Justice, Sprague kept his intentions to himself but ended up voting with most Republicans for conviction. This may have furthered his rift with Kate, whose father's chances for the 1868 Republican Presidential nomination would have been damaged had Johnson been removed from office, inasmuch as the next in line to the presidency, under the law at the time, was radical Republican President pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, Benjamin Wade, who could have then run as an incumbent. In the end, Johnson was acquitted by a single vote.
Before their divorce, Kate was accused of having an affair of her own with the flamboyant and powerful New York Senator Roscoe Conkling. According to a well-known story, buttressed by contemporaneous press reports, Sprague confronted the philandering couple at Sprague's Rhode Island summer home and pursued Conkling with a shotgun.
Kate and Sprague had four children, including a girl who suffered from mental retardation and a boy who eventually committed suicide.
[edit] Political action
Kate worked behind the scenes to foster her father's calculated efforts to wrest the 1864 Republican Party nomination for President from Lincoln, but the plot blew up in Chase's face when it became public, requiring Chase to settle back into his Treasury Secretary position. Eventually one of Chase's many perfunctory offers of resignation from the Cabinet was actually accepted by Lincoln (much to Chase's surprise and consternation), but the ever-forgiving (or savvy) President appointed Chase Chief Justice of the Supreme Court upon the death of Roger Taney in 1864. The evidence conflicts as to whether Kate welcomed this prestigious appointment or rued it as an attempt to put her father "on the shelf" so as to preempt any hope of his ever attaining his true goal of the highest office in the land.
Despite his position on the Supreme Court, Chase let it be known in 1868 that he was available as a candidate for the Presidency, even to the point where he switched parties from the Republicans (of whom he had been an important early member) to the Democrats, if they would nominate him. In that summer of 1868, Kate ran her father's campaign for the Democratic nomination from their hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York City, where the convention was being held in famed Tammany Hall. Although tradition prevented her appearance, as a woman, on the convention floor, she did much of the back-room maneuvering with the goal of winning the nomination on a ballot subsequent to the first. At times the prize seemed within their grasp, but the convention ended up nominating Horatio Seymour, the Democratic Governor of New York, whom Kate and other Chase operatives had been counting on to place her father's name in nomination. Kate placed the blame for the defeat on a conspiracy of New York politicians including Samuel Tilden. Kate wrote her father after the convention: "You have been most cruelly deceived and shamefully used by the man [Tilden] whom you trusted implicitly and the country must suffer for his duplicity." Kate would reputedly have her revenge on Tilden eight years later when her paramour Conkling, the most powerful member of the Senate, maneuvered to throw the disputed 1876 election to the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over the Democrat Tilden, who had won the popular vote.
Chase would make one final bid for the presidency in 1872, with Kate's full support, but by then he was physically weakened and a political has-been; this time he ran as a Liberal Republican, challenging the incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, but the effort went nowhere and Chase died a year later, with Kate (and her husband in name-only, Sprague) at his bedside.
[edit] Later years
In 1873, following her father's death, Kate moved onto the “Edgewood” estate in District of Columbia, Northeast, which later became the neighborhood of Edgewood, Washington, D.C. (Her father purchased the bulk of the estate in 1863, and he had constructed a mansion upon it.). She lived a quiet, sometimes reclusive life with her three daughters (according to the 1880 federal census), Ethel Sprague, Kitty Sprague, and Portia Sprague, raising pigs and chickens until she died in poverty in 1899, at age 58, of Bright's disease.
The New York Times wrote, on her death, that "the homage of the most eminent men in the country was hers." The Washington Post called her "The most brilliant woman of her day. None outshone her." The Cincinnati Enquirer, the paper of the city of her birth, had this to say regarding Kate's funeral:
| “ | Hardly more than two or three—and they the nearest relatives on earth—were gathered together yesterday morning around the new-made grave in Spring Grove Cemetery, where, with the simple ceremony of commitment—"Dust to dust, ashes to ashes"—the mortal remains of the daughter of Salmon P. Chase were laid to rest forever beside the dust of her illustrious father. | ” |
And yet, the Enquirer recognized her legacy: "No Queen has ever reigned under the Stars and Stripes, but this remarkable woman came closer to being Queen than any American woman has."
[edit] Further reading
- The Belle of Washington by Eleanor Harper Shumaker
- Kate Chase and William Sprague: Politics and Gender in a Civil War Marriage by Peg A. Lamphier
- Kate Chase for the Defense by Alice Sokoloff
- Kate Chase, Dominant Daughter: The Life Story of a Brilliant Woman and her Famous Father, by Mary Merwin Phelps
- Proud Kate, Portrait of an Ambitious Woman, by Ishabel Ross
- So Fell the Angels, The Story of Chase, Lincoln's ambitious Chief Justice, his bold designing daughter, and the husband who could finance her plans, by Thomas Graham Belden and Marva Robins Belden
- Lincoln by Gore Vidal - Kate Chase is one of the major characters in Vidal's historical novel
- Freedom by William Safire - Kate Chase appears in several chapters of this historical novel
- Two Moons a historical novel by Thomas Mallon, includes a fictionalized account of the Kate Chase/Roscoe Conkling extramarital affair
- Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, who provides comprehensive biographical information about Kate Chase
