Part 14

Of the early age at which Chase elected to test that understanding, his journal also furnishes an evidence. An entry therein, under date of November 24, 1845, about two months after her mother's death, shows the dawn of that remarkable intellectual intercourse which he maintained with his daughter till the end of his life. "This day," it reads, "has been marked by no extraordinary event. Rose, as usual of late, before sunrise; breakfasted with sister Alice and little Kate. Read Scriptures (Job) to little Kate, who listened and seemed to be pleased, probably with the solemn rhythm, for she certainly can understand very little; then prayed with her; then to town in omnibus, unshaven for want of time."

Within that same year he also recorded in his journal that he was teaching "dear little Kate to read verses in the Bible and listening to her recite poems."

Thus early, without any particular system probably, but wholly delightfully and under a most patient and winning master, begun the training of one of the most astute and brilliant minds with which a woman was ever gifted. She was keen and clever rather than profound, and her quick intelligence caught and assimilated the fruit of her father's years of study. Without having his absorbing love of books, she yet read much and forgot nothing. Chase used to say that in the miscellaneous reading of his boyhood, it was the pleasure he derived from a stray law-book that determined his choice of career. He pursued his profession with the ardor of real love, and his daughter imbibed from him a substantial knowledge of its technicalities. He used to go over his cases with her very much at first in the spirit in which he had read Job to her, later because he delighted in her understanding, and finally because she had become genuinely helpful to him.

Well ordered and simple was the atmosphere of the home in which she grew up. As was his custom from the time he established his own home till the end of his life, Chase called his household together at the beginning of every day to ask the blessing and protection of God. There were times, as seen from his journal, when little Kate seems to have been his only companion, yet the duty was never omitted.

She walked with him often to his office or to court in the morning, both in Ohio and after they had removed to Washington, talking sometimes of the things which interested her, but more frequently of those which engrossed him, for it was his life and his ambitions that gave color to both of their existences. He had taught her early his favorite games, chess and backgammon, which she often played with him in the quiet evenings they spent together, or, if it were out of doors, croquet or some simple childish game, for she was part of the relaxation of his lighter hours as she was the repository of all the confidences and hopes of his public career.

His third marriage, in 1846, to Sarah Ludlow identified him with one of the prominent families of Cincinnati; Israel Ludlow, his wife's grandfather, having been one of the founders of the city. Chase, himself, though an Eastern man, born in Cornish, New Hampshire, whence he had migrated on coming of age, was now one of the prominent figures of Cincinnati, a busy, prosperous lawyer, with excellent political prospects, which met their first realization when, in 1849, he was elected to the United States Senate. When he came, six years later, into the governorship of his State he was again a widower, and Kate, though less than fifteen years of age, took her place at the head of his home.

Accustomed since the dawn of memory to the most considerate attentions from the most kingly of men, she already carried herself with that noble grace that made her presence felt in every assemblage above that of all others, no matter how simply she clothed herself nor how quietly she deported herself.

[Illustration: Kate Chase

(Mrs. William Sprague)

From photograph by Julius Ulke]

Chase was the first of Ohio's governors to take up his official residence at Columbus. There, for a year, Kate went as a day pupil to Mr. Heyl's seminary, and later studied in the same institution music and languages, having for the latter an unusual gift. She spoke French faultlessly, especially after her long residence abroad, which came later in her life. Her German, while it was fluent, had always a suggestion of a foreign accent that in her seemed rather pleasing than otherwise. Her native tongue she wielded with rare perfection, and no one who has heard Kate Chase talk will ever forget the magic of her voice, the life her graphic and discriminating language breathed into every thought to which she gave utterance, while her wonderful eyes expressed, even betrayed, every emotion. An old man who served the Chase family for years in the capacity of coachman once paid a tribute to the delicacy and power of her verbal delineations which many a man of more enlightened intelligence more gracefully, perhaps, but not more aptly acknowledged. He said he knew no greater pleasure than to take Miss Kate off in the carriage with a book in her lap, and, without opening it, for her to tell him every word that it contained from beginning to end.

The positive element of her character had already manifested itself by the time she was sixteen years old. She was, at about that period, out of compliment to her father, elected to the secretaryship of a charitable organization of women, all of whom were many years her senior. During the course of one of the meetings, a physician, of whose services the body had availed itself, and who had given offence to some of its members, was made the object of an abuse as senseless as it was verbose. The spirit of opposition was more timorous in the feminine organization of that day than it is in those that have been the outgrowths of later years, and Kate Chase, alone, had the courage to rise in defence of the absent doctor. Appealing to the chair to silence the undignified outburst, she won on the spot an ill-will that followed her long after those who cherished it had forgotten its original cause. But her young life was full of a sweet homage, and such a graceful tribute as was conveyed in the knowledge that one of the ex-governors of the State had named the most beautiful rose in his famous garden after her, easily atoned for the ill-will of a few people which seemed, after all, but a ripple on the ever-broadening surface of her life.

The growing strength of the Republican party, which had been ushered into existence in her father's law offices in Cincinnati, under the inspiration of Dr. Gamaliel Baily, revealed possibilities to a man of Chase's ambition and ability that haunted him thenceforth till the end of his life. Kate knew intimately the strong men who formed the nucleus of that great party. She knew its aims and purposes, and was in possession of its secret history contained in her father's letters and journals and in her own memory of its inception and progress. Yet nothing ever wrung them from her, though she was frequently approached by magazine editors with offers that would have been a temptation even to those in less need.

Her father's ambition became the absorbing object of her life, developing in her, before she had reached her twentieth year, a scientific knowledge of politics that no woman, and few men, have ever surpassed. "I know your bright mind," once wrote Roscoe Conkling, in submitting to her a political problem, "will solve this quicker than mine." It has been said that many details of the campaign of 1884, against Blaine, who was Conkling's political enemy, were planned at Edgewood.

To an intellect naturally endowed with many masculine qualities, she added a woman's quicker wit and greater powers of divination and an overmastering love for the father in whose interest she exercised every faculty of her gifted mind.

When the first convention of the Republican party met at Chicago, in 1860, to nominate a president, Chase was a prominent candidate for that honor. His daughter accompanied him to Chicago, and thence for the first time her name went forth over the land. His confidence in her, his reliance upon her, treating her in all respects more as if she were a son than a daughter, her youth, and the purely feminine quality of her beauty rendered her unique and conspicuous.

The choice of the new party fell upon Abraham Lincoln, and Seward, who supported him and opposed Chase's pretensions, received later the recognition of his services when he was tendered the first place in Lincoln's cabinet. Chase was, however, elected for the second time to the United States Senate, where he took his seat March 4, 1861. Two days later he had resigned and gone into Lincoln's cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury. His home was thus transferred to Washington, where, going later on the Supreme Bench, he passed the balance of his days, neither he nor his children ever returning to Ohio. Chase was even laid to rest in Washington, and slept over thirteen years in beautiful Oak Hill. In the fall of 1886, however, his daughter had him removed to Ohio, that he might rest finally in the State that had been his home and that was associated with his early fame. There, a few months ago, she was laid by his side.

At the capital of the nation Kate Chase attained a social prestige never before enjoyed by so young a woman, and a political power which no woman before or since her day has ever possessed. Men of such eminence and distinction paid her the court of an homage so absolute that it would be difficult to estimate how much of her father's prominence was owing to her. Radiant as she was in her youth and beauty, the most lovable side of her character ever discovered itself in her tender, worshipping affection for him.

In September, 1860, some months before Chase left Ohio, there was unveiled at Cleveland, on the shores of the Lake to which his valor brought fame, a statue of Commodore Perry, many of the States sending deputations to do honor to his memory. At the head of Rhode Island's troops, in the military parade which opened the ceremonies of the day, rode the governor of that State, his alert young figure impressing itself upon all the spectators of the scene. That night, during the ball at the Kennard House which closed the event of the day, Colonel Richard Parsons presented him to Kate Chase. She was twenty years old at the time, and her slender young figure already possessed that beautiful symmetry that later found such unqualified favor in the eyes of Worth, that great modern connoisseur of the proportions of the female figure, drawing from him such commendation as he never accorded to any other woman. In a ball-gown showing the faultless contour of her neck and throat, and the exquisite poise of her lovely head, she was the revelation of a perfection which the human form rarely attains. Hazel eyes, auburn hair, and the marvellous whiteness of skin that usually accompanies this combination, a full, low, broad brow, mobile lips, a small, round chin, and a nose whose suggestion of an upward tilt added its own peculiar touch of piquancy to a face that was altogether charming rather than classically beautiful,--thus to the eye was Kate Chase, whose fame then superseded that of every woman in Ohio, and was shortly to surpass that of every woman of her generation in America. That she should hold the interested attention of not only one but several men for hours at a time was no unusual spectacle to the people among whom her belleship days had dawned early. Governor Sprague's devotion to her, however, on the night that he first met her, because he was a distinguished stranger and a man of prominence in his own State, and because there seemed, perhaps, in the entire situation many of the elements of romance, became at once a subject of interested comment.

The outbreak of the war took him to Washington. Still governor of his State, he had raised a regiment and equipped it at his own expense, for he was a man of immense wealth. His generosity, his patriotism, and his valor at Bull Run, together with his youth and the success of his political career, appealed to the enthusiasm of his countrymen. The news not only that he was to marry, but to marry a woman so universally idolized as was Kate Chase, heightened the effect his achievements had already produced upon the mind of the public. With a delicate sort of beauty and a somewhat clerical appearance that belied his reputation for military prowess, he had at the moment a fame quite equal to that of his bride. Their marriage, which took place at Washington on the 12th of November, 1863, was the social event of that turbulent period. All the details of the ceremony and of the reception which followed it, and which were planned by her, were on a scale of magnificence worthy of the woman whose advent into Washington had marked a new epoch in its social history.

She was the inspiration of the wedding-march composed for the occasion and played by the Marine Band. Under circumstances when a plain woman is an interesting figure, of what moment was not the appearance of one who could not, even on ordinary occasions, enter a church without her presence being in some mysterious way heralded to its remotest recesses so that every head involuntarily turned towards her! To those who beheld her on that day she was the beautiful realization of the ideal bride, and the life opening before her promised every possible happiness. The ceremony was witnessed by many men and women whose names were then household words when the eyes of the whole nation, watching the direction of the war, were fixed on Washington.

The first days of their married life were spent in Rhode Island, where Mr. Sprague built for his bride the beautiful home that was worthy of her lofty conceptions of a magnificent existence, Canonchet. It was one of the first of the palatial homes of that period, and of which this country now possesses so many, and the cost of its construction was unprecedented in the annals of a people incredibly rich in all life's comforts, but with their luxuriant tendencies for the most part still latent.

From the governorship of his State Sprague went into the United States Senate, and Kate Chase appeared in Washington as the wife of the youngest member of that body. The elegance of the new home there over which she presided, her husband's wealth and prominence, her maturer beauty, and the dignity with which she carried a matron's honors, all tended to bring her before the popular imagination in a more enchanting light than even the glories of her girlhood had done.

The birth of her first child, a son, was a matter of national interest, and the press of the day contained lengthy accounts of the dawn of the little life for which fate held in store so forlorn and tragic an ending. His christening robe was as elaborately described as if it had been that of a royal infant, and the figures of the handsome settlement made upon him were widely published.

Chase, however, still loomed the central figure of his daughter's life, for he continued to confide in her and take counsel with her in all that concerned him personally, as well as those measures that hand his name down as that of the greatest Secretary who ever presided in the Treasury Department. He was the intellectual power of Lincoln's cabinet, and though he contributed much to the success of his administration, there was small sympathy between the men personally, and being overruled by the President in some of the details of his department, Chase, in 1864, resigned his position as a member of the cabinet. Donn Piatt, who was one of the many young Ohioans to whom he was a shining example and a high ideal, said of Chase, that though he came in direct and intimate contact with Lincoln for three years, he never appreciated nor understood the man who could clear the heavy atmosphere of a cabinet meeting, called to consider some such stupendous proposition as the emancipation proclamation, by a hearty laugh, induced by the reading of a chapter from Artemus Ward. Lincoln, however, with his keen knowledge of human nature, discerned Chase's character more readily, and justly estimating the judicial qualities of his superior mind, he sent his nomination as Chief Justice of the United States to the Senate. It was immediately and unanimously confirmed by that body, and on the 6th of December, 1864, Chase, already a great man, entered upon the duties of that office, to which, with one exception, no name has given greater renown.

On February 24, 1868, the House of Representatives passed a resolution to impeach the President of the United States. During his trial, which terminated on May 26 of the same year, the country passed through a storm of violent political passion. Above the roar of an angry people and the threats which assailed him daily from all sections of the country, rose the august presence of the great Chief Justice, hearing but not heeding, feeling but not fearing their sting. Throughout the country there was no name more frequently heard during those days than that of Chase, and in Washington the President himself was not a more prominent figure. He followed his usual custom of walking to the court in the mornings, being frequently accompanied by the daughter who had so often been his companion in days when there had rested upon him no such burden as the grave question then in hand imposed. She forms one of the bright spots in the memory of that dark period, and he often lifted his eyes during the sessions of the court to refresh them with a glimpse of her face, in whose luminous sympathy there was inspiration. She sat in the gallery of the court chamber every day, surrounded always by men whose names go down in history among those of the foremost of their period and country,--Garfield, Conkling, Sherman, Carl Schurz, with Grant, the military idol of the hour, and Greeley, of editorial eminence.

The chief-justiceship of his country is generally supposed to fill the measure of a man's political aspirations. Upon Chase, however, the honors of his office imposed no such quietus, and in 1868 he again came forward for the Presidential nomination. As a Democrat, who had left his party only on the slavery question, he offered himself as a candidate for the nomination of that party. During the convention, which met in New York, Mrs. Sprague, more ably with her maturer mind and greater resources at her command than she had possessed in 1860, endeavored to bring about the realization of that dream of his whole public life. She was the first, however, to recognize the fact that the only platform on which he could secure the nomination asked more than he could honorably grant. Chase, watching the convention from a distance, confirmed her judgment.

Our history furnishes the names of three men whose ungratified ambition for the Presidency robbed them of their motive in life. Chase, however, survived his disappointment longer than either Webster or Blaine. He was, by nature, profoundly religious, and he endeavored to support with Christian heroism a blow whose crushing force undermined his very vitality. In 1870 he suffered a physical collapse, from which, however, stimulated by his remarkable will-power, he rallied so far as to be able to resume his duties on the Supreme Bench.

On March 23, 1871, the younger of his daughters, the child of his third marriage, was married to William Sprague Hoyt, of New York, a cousin of her sister's husband. Her wedding fastened another brilliant memory upon her father's Washington home at Sixth and E Streets. In the drawing-room, to which she had already brought so much fame, Kate Chase again stood beside her father, and their presence on that day constitutes to many people still living at the capital a memory-picture which, with all deference to the bride, yet supersedes all others of that eventful day. He was a magnificent man, over six feet in height, fair as a Saxon in coloring, with a fine head, clearly defined and well-made features, and a noble beauty of countenance; and she, robed in blue velvet of a turquoise tone, that brought out the glorious red-gold of her hair and the hazel of her eyes, with an Elizabethan collar rolling high about her patrician neck, tall, slender, and full of willowy grace. Perhaps the picture abides because it was the last before the falling of those lengthening shadows whence neither ever emerged.

On the 4th of March, 1873, Chase administered the oath of office to President Grant, and in May of the same year he occupied his chair as Chief Justice for the last time. A few days before the last on which he had felt able to go to court, his daughters and his grandchildren, whom he was accustomed to have much with him, being away from him, a sudden sense of loneliness, a yearning for some loving human presence, seems to have overpowered him, for he wrote to a young relative in New York that he was going to her to be for a while with her and her children. The day after he arrived, however, he went forth quietly and perhaps suddenly on that lonely voyage whence neither love nor the glow of any human presence may withhold us when it comes to be our turn. His body was sent back to Washington, where it arrived on Sunday morning, the 11th of May. There, clad in the awful dignity of death, he lay a day and a night within the bar of the court his living presence had rendered so illustrious. A simple wreath of white rosebuds, not more spotless than the life of him they crowned, was the last offering of the daughter to whom his death, so far as the world knew, brought her first sorrow.

She had, however, already come to the turn in her short road of happiness, and had confronted not alone the spectre of disillusion, which in itself would have been formidable enough to a woman of her temperament, but a substantial form of unhappiness that neither her pride nor a brave spirit that never quailed before it could long conceal. Her life has been so probed, so bared to the scrutiny of the world, that but little of its sorrow can be left to conjecture. That in one of her own deficiencies lay undoubtedly the cause of much of her unhappiness, while it served to render others less culpable, in no degree lessened the force of the misery it entailed upon her.