Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [102]
Seward himself recognized that his marriage was built upon contradictions. “There you are at home all your life-long. It is too cold to travel in winter and home is too pleasant in summer to be foresaken. The children cannot go abroad and must not be left at home. Here I am, on the contrary, roving for instruction when at leisure, and driven abroad continually by my occupation. How strange a thing it is that we can never enjoy each others cares and pleasures, except at intervals.”
The Sewards’ relationship was sustained chiefly through the long, loving letters they wrote to each other day after day, year after year. In her letters, which number in the thousands, Frances described the progress of the garden and the antics of the children. She offered advice on political matters, critiqued his speeches, and expressed her passionate opinions about slavery. She encouraged his idealism, pressing him repeatedly to consider what should be done rather than what could be done. In his letters, he analyzed the personalities of his colleagues, confessed his fears, discussed his reactions to the books he was reading, and told her repeatedly how he loved her “above every other thing in the world.” He conjured images of the moon, whose “silver rays” they shared as they each sat in their separate homes “writing the lines” that would cross in the mail. He recollected pleasures of home, where the children played in the smoke from his cigar, and husband and wife were engaged in free and open conversation, so different from the talk of politicians.
Yet in the end, it was the talk of politicians he craved. As a result, the Sewards, to a far greater extent than the Lincolns, spent much of their married life apart.
CHASE, TOO, found himself in a dispirited state in the months that followed the Compromise. “Clouds and darkness are upon us at present,” he wrote Summer. “The Slaveholders have succeeded beyond their wildest hopes twelve months ago.” It seemed as if, temporarily at least, the wind had been taken out of the sails of the antislavery movement.
Moreover, Chase was isolated in the Senate, the regular Democratic Party having shut him out of committee work and political meetings. Nor could he rely on the camaraderie of the Free-Soilers, who believed he had sacrificed them to achieve his position. With time heavy on his hands, he spent hours writing to Kate at her boarding school in New York, where she had been sent when his third wife, Belle, contracted the tuberculosis that took her life.
The long years away from home must have been bleak and often difficult for the motherless child. Located at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, Miss Haines’s School held the girls to a strict routine. They rose at 6 a.m. to study for an hour and a half before breakfast and prayers. A brisk walk outside, with no skipping permitted, preceded classes in literature, French, Latin, English grammar, science, elocution, piano, and dancing. At midafternoon, they were taken out once again for an hour-long walk. In the evenings, they attended study hall, where, “without [the teacher’s] permission,” one student recalled, “we could hardly breathe.” Only on weekends, when they attended recitals or the theater, was the routine relaxed.
Living ten months a year under such regimented circumstances, Kate yearned to see the one person she loved: her father. Though he wrote hundreds of letters to her, his correspondence lacked the playful warmth of Seward’s notes to his own children. In cold, didactic fashion, Chase alternately praised and upbraided her, instructing her in the art of letter writing and admonishing her to cultivate good habits. If her letters were well written, he critiqued her penmanship. If the penmanship was good, he criticized her flat style of expression. If both met his standards, he complained that she had waited too long to write.
“Your last letter…was quite well written,” he told her when she was