Mrs. Lincoln's Rival

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Then Kate held open her arms to him, and sobbed out his name, and he rushed to embrace her, as if she and their child were all he had ever wanted in the world.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  APRIL–MAY 1865

  T

  he day after Kate and William reunited, President Abraham Lincoln lay in state in the East Room of the White House, watched over by an honor guard of two generals and ten other officers. At half past nine o’clock in the morning, nearly thirty thousand shocked and grieving citizens began to file past the coffin to pay their last respects in a slow procession that lasted into the evening.

  On Wednesday morning, April 19, a warm, gentle spring day, Father, William, Nettie, and Kate were among the dignitaries invited to attend the private funeral ceremony. Many thousands of grieving citizens had assembled outside the White House, but a strong cavalry guard kept the Avenue clear for the official mourners’ arrivals and for the procession that would follow after.

  Kate and her family were ushered to their places in an East Room transformed by mourning. Mirrors and chandeliers were draped with black crepe, risers had been erected and lined with chairs covered in black muslin, and the president’s casket, richly ornamented in silver, rested upon a black catafalque beneath a black canopy. Swathed in mourning black, Kate watched John Hay through her veil as he entered, pale and stricken, and took a seat of honor near the foot of the casket. Robert Lincoln alone represented the family, for Mrs. Lincoln and Tad were too distraught to attend.

  There were sermons and prayers but no music.

  After the service, a funeral procession carried the president’s remains to the Capitol, where he lay in state in the rotunda so that thousands more could pay their respects. On Friday, April 21, nearly a week after the president’s death, a nine-car funeral train bedecked with bunting, crepe, and a portrait of Mr. Lincoln left Washington on a seventeen-hundred-mile journey west to Springfield, carrying three hundred passengers and the remains of the president and his young son Willie. The Lincoln Special traveled at only five to twenty miles per hour out of respect for the thousands of mourners who had assembled along the rail lines. The train made scheduled stops in twelve cities, where tens of thousands gathered to mourn and to bid farewell to their fallen leader.

  For six weeks Mrs. Lincoln and young Tad remained at the White House. It was said that the esteemed Mrs. Keckley rarely left her side, sleeping on a lounge in the distraught widow’s chamber at night, comforting and soothing her as best she could throughout the long, sorrowful days. Mrs. Lincoln’s closest friends in Washington, Mrs. Mary Jane Welles and Mrs. Elizabeth Blair Lee, attended her sometimes too, but she denied admittance to nearly everyone else. John Hay had told Kate, in a voice taut with indignant anger, that President Johnson had not called on her, nor had he sent a single note to express his sympathies. Kate had heard rumors that on the night Mr. Lincoln had been killed, Mr. Johnson had gone to the Peterson boardinghouse to visit the president on his deathbed, but had been turned away lest the sight of him upset the First Lady, who had never forgiven him for his outrageous performance at the inauguration. Apparently the new president could hold a grudge as firmly as the former First Lady.

  Kate thought it was unbecoming a gentleman to show so little forgiveness for a grieving widow, and yet, in a singular act of generosity, he did not demand that Mrs. Lincoln vacate the White House promptly so that he might move in. Instead he lived under guard at a residence on Fifteenth and H streets and worked out of a small office in the Treasury Building, forgoing the use of the White House residence, offices, and reception rooms that were rightfully his.

  Week after week, Mrs. Lincoln lingered in the home she loved so well, too prostrate from grief to leave, too uncertain about the future to decide where to go. At first it was assumed that she would return to Springfield, then it was rumored that she intended to go abroad, and finally it was confirmed that she had decided to settle in Chicago. Mr. Lincoln had hoped to retire there after his second term, Mrs. Lincoln reportedly claimed, and it was a city that had always been kind to him. It was in Chicago that he had received his first nomination as the Republican candidate for president, and so it was a city reminiscent of triumph, not despair and loss. It was also near Mr. Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, where Mrs. Lincoln might visit him in the years to come, and find comfort in his silent presence.

  Although Mrs. Lincoln desperately clung to the vestiges of her former life as long as she could, the White House was no longer hers, and eventually, reluctantly, she chose May 22 as the day of her departure. Kate heard this first from John Hay, but since it was soon announced in all the papers, she assumed a large crowd would line the circular drive in front of the mansion, people on foot and in carriages, waving handkerchiefs, tossing flowers, and calling out for God to bless the widow of the beloved martyred president as she departed the White House. Perhaps the crowds would be so vast that they would fill the sidewalks all the way to the train station.

  Kate hoped so, for she meant to conceal herself within that crowd.

  After all that had passed between her and Mrs. Lincoln, she felt compelled to see her rival one last time before she left Washington, but Kate was determined not to be recognized. If malicious gossips spotted her there, they would insist that she had come to gloat, and that was not her intention. If anyone had asked, she would have been unable to explain precisely what her intention was, but it was not to celebrate another woman’s misery. It was, in fact, something closer to a tribute.

  But when Kate arrived at the White House at the appointed hour, concealed beneath a heavy veil within a borrowed carriage, she was stunned to see the adjacent streets empty except for the usual traffic, and only a handful of people gathered around the front portico. The contrast between Mrs. Lincoln’s departure from the White House and her husband’s the month before was stark and astonishing, even shameful. Mr. Lincoln’s casket had been carried from the Executive Mansion in a grand and solemn state. Thousands had gathered to bow their heads reverently as the plumed hearse bore him off to the Capitol rotunda surrounded by the mournful pomp of military display—battalions with reversed arms, a riderless horse with boots turned about in the stirrups, the flags at half-staff, the melancholy strains of funeral dirges. Mrs. Lincoln left to complete indifference, the only music the chirping of birds, with scarcely anyone to bid her farewell. The silence was excruciating.

  Kate watched through veil and carriage window as Mrs. Lincoln and a small entourage, including Tad, Robert, and Mrs. Keckley, emerged from the White House. On the threshold, she paused for a moment, drew a deep, shaky breath, and took Tad’s hand in hers. She spoke briefly to him, then fixed her gaze straight ahead and left the White House without looking back. She boarded her carriage, the rest of her party climbed in after her, and at the driver’s signal, they drove briskly past the bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson in the center of the driveway and turned in the direction of the train station. There, Kate knew, they would board the private railcar that had so often carried Mrs. Lincoln to and from the capital and New York City, in far happier days that were only memories now.

  Kate watched until her rival’s carriage disappeared around the corner and out of sight. Mrs. Lincoln might have been the first to quit the field, but Kate felt no sense of triumph, no victory, only sadness and loss and regret. It pained her to think of what might have been, and what never would be. Father might make another attempt to win the presidency, but Kate knew his chances to win even the nomination were slim. William, who had once seemed full of promise and ambition, had through his own lapses and failures diminished so precipitously in the view of the public and his fellow senators that Kate no longer believed he could win the White House, not even with her to direct him.

  At that moment, Kate knew she would never be First Lady—and that she would never be as loved and honored by her husband as Mrs. Lincoln had been by hers.

  For a brief season Kate and Mr
s. Lincoln had both lived and loved, grieved and celebrated, schemed and triumphed in the great capital city of a nation at war. Now Mrs. Lincoln was gone and Kate alone remained—but Kate knew that although her star had burned brighter, Mrs. Lincoln’s had shone higher in the firmament, and would forevermore, in the memory of the nation.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Mrs. Lincoln’s Rival is a work of fiction inspired by history. Many events and people from Kate Chase Sprague’s life, though noted in the historical record, have been omitted from this book for the sake of the narrative. While many characters appearing in this novel are based upon historical figures, in some cases two or more individuals have been combined to form a single composite character. With a few exceptions, quotes from speeches, letters, and newspaper articles have retained the spelling, capitalization, and other stylistic features of the primary sources.

  In June 1865, Kate gave birth to a son. She wanted to name him after her father, but Salmon P. Chase had always loathed what he called his “fishy name,” and he urged her to name the child after her husband instead. “It is natural enough that you should want to name him after me in some way,” Chase wrote to Kate from Cincinnati, “but my only tolerable name is my surname; and William is not only a better one; but is the name of one to whom your first duties belong, and it was the name of his father, was it not? It should be borne by his first boy.” Chase was wrong on two counts—William’s father was named Amasa, and Kate’s newborn was not his first boy—but she named her son William even so.

  In 1868, after presiding as chief justice over President Johnson’s impeachment trial, Salmon P. Chase again sought the presidency. Realizing he had no chance of taking the Republican nomination from the tremendously popular General Ulysses S. Grant, he turned to the Democratic Party instead. In July, Kate attended the Democratic National Convention in New York as his de facto campaign manager, and although women were not allowed on the convention floor, she held court at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where she wielded her considerable skill and influence on his behalf. Despite her best efforts, Chase was never really in contention, losing the nomination to former New York governor Horatio Seymour, who lost to General Grant in the general election in November.

  In 1872, Chase was again put forward as a candidate, but he had suffered a stroke in August 1870, and although he still served as chief justice, his private correspondence reveals his reluctance to seek the presidency. “I do not desire it,” he wrote to one eager supporter. “There has been a time when I did. I say this frankly, and say just as frankly that I have no such desire. If those who agree with me in principle think that my nomination will promote the interests of the country, I shall not refuse the use of my name. But I shall not seek a nomination, nor am I willing to seem to seek it.” Chase had made such assertions before, of course, but that year he seemed to truly mean it, and he appeared more relieved than disappointed when he lost the Democratic nomination to Horace Greeley. Kate had hosted one magnificent reception for him in Washington, but otherwise she had seemed neither hopeful nor approving of his candidacy, for she was far more concerned with his health than his political career.

  On May 7, 1873, almost six months after President Grant won reelection, Salmon P. Chase died of a stroke in New York at the home of Nettie, her husband, and their newborn daughter, ending his political ambitions forever.

  Kate and William’s marriage produced a son and three daughters, but ultimately ended in an acrimonious divorce in May 1882. While they had enjoyed a few periods of relative contentment, William’s alcoholism, abusiveness, and repeated infidelities ruined any chance they might have had for lasting happiness. It was an act of great courage for Kate to leave her abusive husband in an era when divorce, for a woman, almost always meant scandal, ostracism, and poverty. She legally reclaimed her maiden name and was awarded custody of her three daughters, but to her great sorrow—and ultimately his own—her son, Willie, almost seventeen, chose to live with his father.

  William passed on his worst traits and habits to his son, dragged him into his most notorious escapades, and ultimately left him feeling utterly unloved and betrayed. Willie eventually broke free of his father’s influence and tried to reconcile with his relieved and grateful mother, but her faithful love, compassion, and encouragement could not overcome his deep depression, anger, and sense of futility. In October of 1890, William Sprague, Junior, committed suicide in Seattle, leaving behind a bitter, accusatory letter addressed to his father—and a devastated, heartbroken mother, who blamed her former husband for their son’s despondency and never forgave him.

  Kate lived out her final years quietly at Edgewood, an estate on the outskirts of Washington left to her by her father. (Chase had bequeathed it to both of his daughters, but Nettie much preferred her home in New York City and had gladly sold her share to her sister.) Near the end of her life, Kate supported herself and her second-eldest daughter—Kitty, who had special needs and would never live independently—on contributions from kindhearted friends, and also by selling vegetables, eggs, milk, and other produce she raised on the estate grounds.

  Kate died at Edgewood on July 31, 1899, of acute kidney disease and was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, near the graves of her beloved father and mother. “No name could possibly be spoken in this city among the older residents that would evoke the flood of reminiscence always accorded the mention of Kate Chase,” the Washington Evening Star lauded her on the day of her death. “No woman as young ever held here the prominent and controlling position as leader which came to her as mistress of her father’s household, nor has the most critical observer failed in according to her a brilliancy all her own and a queenship undisputed.” From the time she arrived in the nation’s capital, “here Kate Chase held a court of her own and her reputation spread far and wide as the most brilliant woman of her day . . . [N]one outshone her in grace of manner, nor the ability to attract and to hold all her admirers. She had rare personal magnetism, a faculty of drawing out the best traits in others, and while shining herself pre-eminently, she was able to keep about her the most prominent leaders in politics, in society or in fashionable life.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I offer my sincere thanks to Denise Roy, Maria Massie, Liza Cassity, Christine Ball, Brian Tart, Kate Napolitano, and the outstanding sales teams at Dutton and Plume for their support of my work and their contributions to Mrs. Lincoln’s Rival. I appreciate the generous assistance of my first readers, Geraldine Neidenbach, Marty Chiaverini, and Brian Grover, whose comments and questions were, as always, insightful and helpful. I also thank Heather Neidenbach, Nic Neidenbach, Marlene and Len Chiaverini, and friends for their ongoing support and encouragement.

  I am indebted to the Wisconsin Historical Society and their librarians and staff for maintaining the excellent archives I have come to rely upon in my work. The resources I consulted most often are David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corps During the Civil War (New York: The Century Company, 1907); Thomas Graham Belden and Marva Robins Belden, So Fell the Angels (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1956); Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997); Catherine Clinton, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Columbia Historical Society, Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. Vol. 13 (Washington, D.C.: Columbia Historical Society, 1910); Daniel Mark Epstein, The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008); Jennifer Fleischner, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave (New York: Broadway Books, 2003); Ernest B. Furgurson, Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2004); James M. Goode, Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington’s Destroyed Buildings, second edition (Washington and London: Smithsonian B
ooks, 2003); Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005); Horace Greeley, Proceedings of the First Three Republican National Conventions of 1856, 1860 and 1864 (Minneapolis, MN: Charles W. Johnson, 1893); Janet Chase Hoyt, “Setting Free a Race: How the Emancipation Proclamation Was Made,” New York Tribune, February 22, 1893: 8; Janet Chase Hoyt, “Sherman and Chase: An Interview at Beaufort,” New York Tribune, February 22, 1891: 16; Janet Chase Hoyt, “A Woman’s Memories: The Battle of Bull Run, General McDowell,” New York Tribune, June 7, 1891: 16; Janet Chase Hoyt, “A Woman’s Memories: A Privateer, General Scott, Charles Sumner,” New York Tribune, April 5, 1891: 16; Janet Chase Hoyt, “A Woman’s Memories: Washington in War Time,” New York Tribune, March 8, 1891: 16; Virginia Jeans Laas, ed., Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Peg A. Lamphier, Kate Chase and William Sprague: Politics and Gender in a Civil War Marriage (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); Eba Anderson Lawton, Major Robert Anderson and Fort Sumter 1861 (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1911); James P. McClure, Peg A. Lamphier, and Erika M. Kreger, eds., Spur Up Your Pegasus: Family Letters of Salmon, Kate, and Nettie Chase, 1844–1873 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2009); John Niven, Salmon P. Chase: A Biography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); John Niven et al., eds., The Salmon P. Chase Papers Volumes 1–5 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1993); Mary Merwin Phelps, Kate Chase, Dominant Daughter (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1935); Ishbel Ross, Proud Kate: Portrait of an Ambitious Woman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953); Carl Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz Volume 2 1852–1863 (London: John Murray, 1909); Frederick W. Seward, Seward at Washington as Senator and Secretary of State: A Memoir of His Life, with Selections from His Letters, 1846–1861 (New York: Derby and Miller, 1891); Alice Hunt Sokoloff, Kate Chase for the Defense (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1971); and Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1972). Unfortunately, I found that most early biographies about Kate Chase were written with such obvious contempt for their subject that it was a challenge to wade through the snark and find the facts. I encourage readers interested in learning more about Kate Chase to refer to primary sources such as the great many letters the Chase family exchanged, and secondary sources from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.