26 Facts About Kate Chase

Katherine Jane Chase Sprague was a Washington society hostess during the American Civil War.

Kate Chase was the daughter of Ohio politician Salmon P Chase, who served as Treasury Secretary during President Abraham Lincoln's first administration and later Chief Justice of the United States.

Kate Chase was a strong supporter of her widowed father's presidential ambitions that, had he been successful, would have made her acting First Lady.

Eliza Chase died shortly after Kate's fifth birthday; Chase later married Sara Bella Ludlow with whom Kate had a difficult relationship.

Kate Chase was educated at the Haines School in New York City, where she learned languages, elocution and the social graces along with music and history.

Beautiful and intelligent, Kate Chase impressed such friends of her father as Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator and fellow anti-slavery champion; future President James Garfield; and Carl Schurz, a German-born American politician, who described her as follows:.

Kate Chase was about eighteen years old, tall and slender and exceedingly well formed.

Kate Chase had something imperial in the pose of the head, and all her movements possessed an exquisite natural charm.

In 1861, Salmon P Chase became Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln's administration.

Kate Chase set up residence at 6th and E Streets Northwest in Washington, with Kate Chase as his hostess.

Kate Chase married Rhode Island Governor William Sprague, a textile magnate, on November 12,1863 at Chase's home in Washington.

Kate Chase financially backed Chase's fathers unsuccessful efforts to secure support to become the 1864 Republican presidential nominee.

The shotgun incident with Conkling happened in 1879, but Kate Chase was suspected of infidelities at least 10 years earlier.

Willie Sprague continued to live with his father, while the daughters went with Kate Chase, who took back her maiden name after the divorce.

Kate Chase had already been through one marriage and divorce.

Kate Chase's wife gave birth to a child of questionable lineage only six months after they were married.

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.

The evidence conflicts as to whether Kate Chase 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 attaining his most-cherished ambition for the highest office in the land.

Kate Chase switched parties from the Republicans to the Democrats, hoping they would nominate him.

Kate Chase placed the blame for the defeat on a conspiracy of New York politicians including Samuel Tilden.

In 1873, following her father's death, Kate moved onto the "Edgewood" estate, which later became the neighborhood of Edgewood, Washington, DC; her father had purchased the bulk of the estate in 1863 and constructed a mansion on it.

Kate Chase lived a very quiet life with her three daughters, Ethel, Kitty, and Portia Sprague.

Kate Chase eventually lost her fortune and, to get by, resorted to raising chickens, growing vegetables and selling them door to door.

Kate Chase died in poverty in 1899, at age 58, of Bright's disease and was buried at Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Kate Chase is prominent in both Gore Vidal's historical novel Lincoln and William Safire's Freedom and is portrayed by Deborah Adair in the 1988 made-for-TV movie of Vidal's book.

Kate Chase was the principal character in the 1967 two-act play "Kate Chase" by Jack LaZebnik.