[KATE CHASE]
(MRS. WILLIAM SPRAGUE)
There was a name in America a little more than a generation ago that possessed a power amounting almost to enchantment, the name of Kate Chase, a woman who holds a unique place in both the political and social history of this century. The story of her life, between the high lights of its early days and the shadows in which it closed, presents a peculiar succession of superlatives. There stands forth, however, through all its changes, one unvarying dominant feature which must strike us at once, whether we approach it in the spirit of a student or actuated merely by a passing curiosity: her absolute devotion to her father. Through our knowledge of him, therefore, we may, in a measure, penetrate those mists in which she is enveloped by the divided opinion of a public, some of whom loved and idealized her as a social divinity, while others hated and maligned her as an opposing political force. Thus may we reach some just valuation of a character that with its man's virility and woman's delicacy was in itself singularly enigmatical, of its incentives and ideals, and, indirectly, therefore, of the failure and disappointments which have left their indelible stamp upon the life of Kate Chase.
In her father, profoundly cultured and endowed with inexhaustible intellectual resources, she found the complete realization of her most exalted conception. She well knew the tenderness of the heart, the sensitiveness of the nature, he carried beneath that superb exterior of majestic and unapproachable dignity. She lived in close communion with the man, the angry rebuke of whose eye, says one of his biographers, no transgressor could support. She was the central feature of his remarkable home. Upon both of his daughters he expended a tenderness of devotion of which those who lived beyond the sphere of a personal acquaintance with him had no conception. Yet there have been inconspicuous women whom he might have fathered with more ultimate happiness to themselves than the remarkable daughter who is the subject of this sketch. Though he was a great man, winning justifiable distinction in every branch of the government of his country, he was yet not competent to cope with the problems which the life of such a woman as Kate Chase was continually presenting. In her presence alone, in the proud carriage of her regal head, there was that singular power that, while it drew forth the love and admiration that are the expression of a generous nature, likewise provoked in those of a baser order a hideous envy and hatred that assailed her even as a young girl. With his benignant belief in the universal goodness of mankind, Chase was singularly deficient in that knowledge of human nature which should have enabled him to throw about her that sort of aggressive protection which she peculiarly required.
There is one little incident in his life that throws light upon his own character, and upon the principle he pursued in directing his daughter. He was a man of the most delicate tastes and with a high appreciation of all the niceties of life. When he took the platform as an abolitionist, he was rotten-egged. Removing as much as possible of the offensive effusion with his handkerchief, he continued with what he was saying. He made no modification in his statements, nor did he close the window through which the unsavory missiles had made their entrance. As far as possible he ignored the occurrence.
The scandal-monger he treated with the same silent scorn, continuing the tenor of his life as if he had not been made aware of his existence. But while he, a courageous man, might walk fearlessly amid the storm of the angry nation that impeached Andrew Johnson, and, regardless of its threats, discharge the duties of his high office with that calmness that distinguished all the acts of his judicial career and adds to the glory of his name in the eyes of a later generation, his daughter, though no less courageous, was yet "too slight a thing" to defy the gossips of even one Western town. "Ah! little woman," she once said, laying her hand on the shoulder of one of her loyal friends to whom sorrow had come, "you, at least, have never made the mistake that I made. I never cared for the opinion or good-will of people. I ran my head against a stone wall. It did not hurt the wall but it has hurt the head." This is perhaps the nearest approach to self-justification she ever made for having essayed, with a man's independence, to live that most circumscribed life of a conspicuously beautiful woman.
Losing her own mother when she was scarcely beyond her infancy, and her step-mother before she had reached womanhood, and realizing early that she was treated in all things as his equal in years and understanding by the man whose superiority among his fellow-men she conceived to be beyond question, that spirit of self-reliance that is the natural outcome of all positive characters was intensified in her to an abnormal degree. While it gave her the fundamental qualifications of that leadership which she maintained with unparalleled brilliancy, it likewise, through lack of direction, developed that imperious tendency that proved so fatal to her own happiness.
She was the first child of Chase's marriage to his second wife, Eliza Ann Smith, and was named by her mother after his first wife, Katherine Garniss, for whom she had had a tender friendship and sincere admiration.
Of her birth, which occurred on the 13th of August, 1840, her father's journal contains the following record, a characteristic statement of the event from a God-fearing man whose knowledge, not only of children, but of the human family in general, was largely drawn from "judicious treatises."