Mrs. Lincoln's Rival (30 page)

Father persisted in criticizing Mr. Lincoln so boldly and so often that Kate carefully encouraged him to adopt a more moderate tone, but he had already provided enough grist for the rumor mill to keep it grinding away long after he turned his attention to other pressing matters. Rumors circulated that the rift between the president and the secretary of the treasury would disrupt the cabinet and bring about Father’s dismissal. The
New York Times
scoffed at such speculation, saying, “It does not follow that the Cabinet will dissolve on so small a point,” but Kate felt as if she were holding her breath, waiting for the controversy to subside, hoping that her father would not do or say anything that would compel Mr. Lincoln to replace him as he had Secretary Cameron. Father’s ambitions for the White House would be ruined if he were compelled to leave the cabinet in disgrace.

Eventually the press and the gossips found other controversies and events to occupy their thoughts, but Kate knew that Mr. Lincoln would not forget how, when Father did not get his way, he had chosen to air his grievances in public rather than in the privacy of the president’s office, where they would not jeopardize his administration.

Kate could think of only two reasons why President Lincoln did not ask her father to resign over the conflict: He was a man of preternatural tolerance and forbearance, and he knew it would be disastrous for the Treasury if her father were not there to sustain it. As long as the president knew that he, and the nation, could not afford to lose Father, his position was secure.

• • •

While Father was airing his disagreement with President Lincoln in Radical Republican circles and in the press, Kate stumbled into a conflict of her own, bewildering, disheartening, and one she could not have foreseen.

William Sprague’s letters had become less frequent with the passage of time, though no less ardent, but Kate knew the governor was exceptionally busy and did not worry that his affections had faded. Then, in early May, he sent her one chilly, brief, and strangely formal note, and then nothing more. Puzzled and concerned for his well-being, Kate continued to write to him as always, although she did not receive a reply. Eventually, citing his enjoinder that they must always be honest with each other, Kate wrote again to ask him plainly why she had not heard from him in so long. “I assume it is because you are occupied every moment with the business of Rhode Island, the Union, and your mills,” she said. “You have enough work for three men, I know, and little time to spare for correspondence with a friend. However, if there is another reason, I trust you will tell me.”

This time, her letter provoked an immediate reply: “Dear Miss Chase: I regret that I am unable to correspond with you at present. Please give my best regards to the Secretary of the Treasury. Sincerely, Gov. Wm. Sprague.”

Astounded, Kate read the letter over twice more, her heart plummeting. If not for his familiar handwriting, she might have imagined he had dictated the letter to a secretary, so cold and distant was his tone. She considered leaving the matter alone, but curiosity compelled her to write back. “May I inquire as to the reason?”

A week dragged by while she waited, and just as she abandoned hope of ever understanding him, he replied, “I would have preferred to part amicably without belaboring the issue to the point of embarrassment, but since you persist, I will say that I have received news from an acquaintance in Columbus that suggests you have not represented your conduct honestly. In light of this, I find I can no longer continue the friendship we once enjoyed.”

Shocked, Kate stared at the incomprehensible words as if they might rearrange themselves on the page into something that made sense. Then, with a flash of anger, she took her pen in hand and sent back an equally brief, direct note: “Tell me who has apparently disparaged my character, and what he has said. If I have been judged, I should at least know the nature of these accusations, and be afforded the opportunity to confront my accuser.”

She sent the letter off to Rhode Island and waited impatiently for a reply, but William retreated into silence.

Stunned and heartbroken, Kate refrained from writing to him again, but his abrupt decision to accept someone else’s condemning story without offering her the chance to defend herself confused and hurt her deeply. Although many of her peers in Columbus had been jealous of her and sometimes even spiteful, she could not imagine any of them carrying malicious tales about her to William. She told herself that if his feelings for her were so ephemeral that a stranger’s stories could send them scattering like leaves in the wind, she was well rid of him. Nevertheless, her heart was heavy and she often caught herself brooding. Even Father noticed that she was dispirited, although he attributed it to the stifling summer heat and discouraging news from the battlefield.

It was he who suggested that she escape the sweltering air and strife of Washington for more pleasant climes and company, and, thinking that a change of scenery might indeed do her some good, she traveled to Ohio to visit her beloved grandmother and other relations. Amid the familiar landscape of home, within the affectionate circle of family and longtime friends, Kate began to feel somewhat restored to herself, although she was not truly happy. Her spirits rose when Nettie joined her there—her younger sister had been obliged to remain at school through the first week of July to make up for the weeks she had missed due to illness in January—but she missed the excitement and intrigue of Washington City even more than she missed William, whose absence had become a dull ache in her heart, one she fervently hoped would fade with time.

“You don’t need him,” Nettie declared after prying the truth out of her, if only part of it, after noticing her lingering sadness. “You have so many admirers, and Governor Sprague is too often away from Washington to be a suitable suitor anyway. You should like Mr. Hay instead. He is very nice and very amusing.”

“Yes, he is,” acknowledged Kate, allowing a small smile. She liked John Hay quite a lot, and she suspected that he had felt more than friendship for her for quite some time, but he did not capture her passions the way William Sprague had from the moment they had met. Also, although she would never admit it to anyone, and she did not like what it said about her, she was mindful that John was only the assistant secretary to the president, while William could be president himself someday.

“And let us not forget Lord Lyons,” Nettie mused. “He is terribly old, but still handsome even so, and quite rich, I think. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have everyone obliged to call you Lady Kate?”

Kate laughed. “Yes,” she declared, embracing her younger sister. “You are absolutely right. What I need most out of marriage is wealth and a title. Mutual affection is a luxury I can well do without.”

Nettie laughed and hugged her back, knowing that Kate didn’t mean it—at least, not entirely.

While Kate was away from Washington, she followed the news of the war through the papers, and Father kept her well apprised of political machinations in the capital.

General McClellan had at last led his army deeper into Virginia toward Richmond, only to be driven back by Confederate General Robert E. Lee in seven days of brutal fighting that ended with the Union forces retreating to the James River.

Although Mrs. Lincoln was still deep in mourning, the Lincoln family had relocated to their summer residence on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home about two miles north of the city, a cool, wooded, secluded haven on a hilltop, far enough away from the Capitol and the White House to act as a restful retreat, but near enough for Mr. Lincoln to travel back and forth as needed.

In the aftermath of emancipation becoming the law in Washington, thousands of contraband had flooded the city, arriving alone or with their families in tow, footsore, hungry, exhausted, most of them field hands with no trade or training except farm labor, almost all of them illiterate. Very few contraband could find or afford rooms in colored homes or boardinghouses, and so the first arrivals were accommodated in Camp Barker, a complex of empty soldiers’ barracks, stables, and tents. When these places filled to overflowing, the refugees built shacks of blankets, mud, and scraps of wood in camps that sprouted up near military hospitals, beside the forts on the outskirts of the city, or tucked away in alleys. Diseases like dysentery, smallpox, and typhoid flourished in the overcrowded, filthy camps, and the dead were buried in makeshift cemeteries not far away. Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker, Mrs. Keckley, founded the Contraband Relief Association to help provide for their needs, and Father made a generous contribution.

By the end of June, General McClellan’s campaign on the Peninsula and increased military activity in the West had spent the entire first issue of greenbacks, so on July 11, the president signed the second Legal Tender Act to allow for the issue of another one and a half million dollars’ worth of currency. Father and his allies in the House and Senate had battled mightily to get the measure through Congress, and as soon as it had passed, Father became responsible for designing the new greenbacks.

“If only I had your artistic skill, Nettie,” Father wrote to her at Kate’s grandmother’s house in Ohio. “Of course, I will have artists and engravers at my disposal, but an artist’s eye would help me provide the concepts. Others have determined that my visage must grace one of the bills, but I have been unable to decide which one. It seems the height of arrogance to put one’s own face on currency at all.”

“Father should appear on the hundred-dollar bill,” Nettie declared after she finished reading the letter aloud to Kate. “Or the thousand. The highest value that is printed, is what I mean, since he is so important.”

“No,” said Kate thoughtfully, “I think not.”

“You think he is not important?”

Kate laughed. “Of course that’s not what I meant.”

She promptly found pen, ink, and paper, and wrote to their father that he should arrange for his visage to appear on the one-dollar greenback.

“The one-dollar note?” protested Nettie, reading over her shoulder as she wrote. “Father’s worth much more than that. He’ll be president someday.”

“That is indeed his ambition, and that is why he should do as I suggest.”

Anticipating that her suggestion might hurt her father’s feelings as they had Nettie’s, Kate explained her reasoning: Many more people would use one-dollar notes, and use them more often, than those of significantly higher denominations. If Father’s name and handsome face appeared on the one-dollar bill, the people would soon learn them by heart, and men tended to vote for candidates they felt they knew.

In a letter that arrived more quickly than Kate would have believed the mails capable of in wartime, Father praised her idea as ingenious and assured her he would see to it. “Your clever suggestion was to me a rare bright spot in a week saturated with gloom,” he added. “The people are despondent over McClellan’s losses. We ought to have won a victory and taken Richmond. Instead the country sinks to its lowest point since the birth of the Republic.”

Kate’s own mood mirrored the low spirits of the country, and although she tried to conceal her lingering sadness from her father, unhappiness must have cast faint shadows upon the pages of her letters. From his questions, it became apparent that he suspected she was hiding something from him, and when she pretended not to understand his circumspect inquiries, he became more direct. In one missive, after his usual complaints about the discrepancy between the date on her letter and the date of its arrival, he wrote:

Your appreciation of my long letter as a mark of love and confidence and the gratification it gave you are more than ample reward for the time & trouble of writing it. It is quite as agreeable to bestow love and confidence as it can be to receive it. You have my love always and I confide greatly in you on many points. My confidence will be entire when you entirely give me yours and when I feel—that is am made by your acts & words to feel that nothing is held back from me which a father should know of the thoughts, sentiments & acts of a daughter. Cannot this entire confidence be given me? You will, I am sure be happier and so shall I. One other thing now that I am upon this subject. A daughter ought in all things to respect a father’s feelings and if wishes conflict and no moral principle is compromised by yielding she ought to yield gracefully, kindly, cordially. You will easily remember instances in which you have tried me pretty severely by not doing so.

Kate could remember every one of them all too well, but although it pained her to worry her father and earn his stern rebuke, she simply could not tell him why she was so unhappy. Even as a child at boarding school when he had complained that her letters were not written “freely” enough, she had been unable to confide in him completely because the headmistress had read every one of her students’ letters before they were sealed and put in the post. Now that she was older, Kate knew that some confessions would hurt him too much, and she must keep them to herself. If her mother had lived, perhaps she could have been the confidante that Father wanted to be, but his good opinion was too difficult to earn to jeopardize it by sharing her mistakes and weaknesses and uncertainties—especially where William Sprague was concerned. She shuddered to think her father might ever know the mistakes she had made with him.

Kate endeavored to make her letters more sprightly, but even as she did, she grew indignant as she mulled over his rebuke. Father wanted her confidence, and yet he did not give his own. She knew from mutual friends in Washington that Father had been paying frequent calls on her friend, the lovely widow Mrs. Douglas; that he corresponded regularly with two New England ladies, each of whom was probably unaware that he corresponded with the other; that he enjoyed a close friendship with Charlotte Eastman, the widow of a former congressman; and that he spent quite a lot of time with Miss Susan Walker, a remarkably intelligent and accomplished friend from Cincinnati, whenever her work for the abolitionist cause brought her to the nation’s capital. Kate suspected that any one of those ladies would be happy to become the fourth Mrs. Chase, but she was not anxious for that to happen. Perhaps, Kate thought, somewhat miffed, she would consider confessing her secret romance when Father confessed his.