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Of all her father’s Senate colleagues, Charles Sumner was her favorite, as he was of Frances Seward. “He was warm-hearted and sensitive,” Kate recalled. “He was full of anecdotes and was a brilliant talker.” When Sumner, in turn, spoke well of little Kate, Chase was overjoyed. “You cannot think, my precious child, how much pleasure it gives me to hear you praised.”

Buoyant at such moments with satisfied expectations, Chase shared with her intimate chronicles of his life in Washington, long descriptions of the protocol followed when a senator visited the president in his office, detailed accounts of dinners at the White House, amusing reports of late-night sessions in the Senate chamber, when all too many of his colleagues “have visited the refectory a little too often, and are not as sober as they should be.”

“The sun shines warm and clear,” he wrote one beautiful June day. “The wind stirs the trees and fans the earth. I sit in my room and hear the rustle of branches; the merry twitter and song of the birds; the chirp of insects.” “I should like to have you with me and we should take a ramble together.”

Not surprisingly, Kate cherished the prospect of living in the nation’s capital, accompanying her father wherever he went, assisting him in his daily tasks. Chase understood her desire and was careful to assuage her fear that he might remarry and deprive her of her rightful place by his side. Describing a visit to the Elliotts, a Quaker family with two remarkable daughters, he confessed that “Miss Lizzie is the best looking of them all, and is really a very superior woman, with a great deal of sense and a great deal of heart. You need not however be alarmed for me, for a gentleman in New York is said to be her accepted lover, and I look only for friends among ladies as I do among gentlemen.”

OF THE FOUR future presidential candidates, Edward Bates was the only one who supported the Compromise wholeheartedly. At last, with what he called the “African mania” finally subdued, he felt the American people might focus their energies once more on the vast economic opportunities provided by the ever-expanding frontier.

With equal ire, he denounced both “the lovers of free negroes in the North & the lovers of slave negroes in the South,” believing that the argument over slavery was simply “a struggle among politicians for sectional supremacy,” with radicals like Seward and Chase in the North, and Calhoun and Toombs in the South, exploiting the issue for personal ambition.

He specifically condemned Seward’s “higher law” supposition invoked to invalidate the Fugitive Slave Law, arguing that “in Civil government, such as we have, there can be no law higher than the Constitution and the Statutes. And he would set himself above these, claiming some transcendental authority for his disobedience, must be, as I deliberately think, either a Canting hypocrite, a presumptuous fool, or an arbitrary designing knave.”

He exhibited similar scorn for Calhoun, who would shatter “the world’s best hope of freedom for the white man, because he is not allowed to have his own wayward will about negro slaves!…Poor man, he is greatly to be pitied!…It is truly a melancholy spectacle to behold his sun going down behind a cloud so black.”

In the early fifties, Bates still believed that the West could refrain from taking sides, trusting that “if we stood aloof from the quarrel & pressed the even tenor of our way, for the public good, both of those factions would soon sink to the level of their intrinsic insignificance.” His hopes would quickly prove futile, for the settlement was destined to last only four years.

“A HUMAN BEING,” the novelist Thomas Mann observed, “lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries…if the times, themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle,” do not provide opportunity, he continued, “the situation will have a crippling effect.”

More than a decade earlier, speaking to the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum, Lincoln had expressed