Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

by Virginia Tatnall Peacock

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.

A knowledge of the proper value of money, abnormally developed in many, was totally lacking in Kate Chase. It appealed to her simply as a means of gratifying the needs and wishes of the moment, never as something to be hoarded for the satisfying of those of a future time. History contains the names of many men and women otherwise illustrious but born apparently with the same defect. The great wealth which came to her through her marriage she expended lavishly, not alone upon herself, but upon all whose happiness it was thus in her power to augment, for such princely natures are rarely selfish. She gave, all her life, frequently with a generosity wholly out of proportion to her means. Sprague probably did not realize her munificent tendencies till after the shrinkage in his fortune caused by the financial panic of the early seventies. They then became the cause of those fatal misunderstandings whence sprung later conditions of insupportable wretchedness. A divorce was granted her by the courts of New York, with permission to resume her maiden name, of which she availed herself some years later, when Sprague married again.

With her three daughters she retired to "Edgewood," a suburban home on the hills two miles north of Washington, which had come to her from her father and which is closely identified with the last years of both their lives. The house, an ample unadorned brick structure, stands on the brow of a hill overlooking the river, the city, and other hills in its vicinity. From her father she had also inherited an income somewhat smaller than might have been anticipated, for, although he had piloted the nation through the financial difficulties of the war, his personal finances were not flourishing. She found a legal adviser in a friend of her father's who had been a frequent visitor at Edgewood during Chase's lifetime, attracted thither both by his admiration for Chase and by the pleasure of that intercourse with his gifted daughter which he shared in common with many men of brilliant minds, few of whom ever came in contact with her without succumbing to a species of intellectual infatuation. With all the feminine graces that attract, however, she had many of a man's characteristics, and was capable of maintaining their intercourse at all times on an intellectual footing. The idle gossip of people who had no conception of the true loftiness of her soul, magnified by those who still felt and feared her political power, cast its blight upon her life. Silently scorning a world that so cruelly misinterpreted her, she voluntarily abandoned her place in its midst.

She took her children to Europe and there educated them, remaining as long as her resources would permit. When they were exhausted she came home. Edgewood gave her a sorry welcome. Everywhere, within and without, it showed signs of long neglect. Yet such as it was, it was home and full of memories of her father, whose portrait still hung in its broad hallway, and whose marble bust still adorned its library. There, too, were his beloved books that he had craved in his youth when he had turned from nature, which became, however, the tender solace of his ailing years, when he liked to be alone with her and his own thoughts, while he took long tramps over the hills. There, during the last three years of his life, he had pursued conscientiously that tranquil existence which he realized could alone prolong his days. To his daughter it was all that remained, and even it was slipping from her grasp. The men of her father's generation were gone, and she was as a stranger in the land that had once resounded with the echo of her name.

Edgewood was advertised for public sale. Something of its history crept into the press of the country. It struck a chord of memory and appealed to a class of men who had the means of gratifying their sympathies, men of a younger generation, but who venerated the memory of Chase and gave substantial proof of their veneration when they saved his home for the daughter he had so idolized.

She never evinced any desire to resume her place in that life in which she had once been a motive power.

Among those who knew her best she had loyal friends who loved and admired her to the end. Her servants had always worshipped her, and her own children frequently lost themselves in the spell her presence wrought.

Her eldest daughter went upon the stage, but married shortly after her début and abandoned whatever hopes she may have had of a histrionic career.