Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [13]
Unlike Seward, who frequently attended theater, loved reading novels, and found nothing more agreeable than an evening of cards, fine cigars, and a bottle of port, Chase neither drank nor smoked. He considered both theater and novels a foolish waste of time and recoiled from all games of chance, believing that they unwholesomely excited the mind. Nor was he likely to regale his friends with intricate stories told for pure fun, as did Lincoln. As one contemporary noted, “he seldom told a story without spoiling it.” Even those who knew him well, except perhaps his beloved Kate, rarely recalled his laughing aloud.
Kate Chase, beautiful and ambitious, filled the emotional void in her father’s heart created by the almost incomprehensible loss of three wives, all having died at a young age, including Kate’s mother when Kate was five years old. Left on his own, Chase had molded and shaped his brilliant daughter, watching over her growth and cultivation with a boundless ardor. When she was seven, he sent her to an expensive boarding school in Gramercy Park, New York, where she remained for ten years, studying Latin, French, history, and the classics, in addition to elocution, deportment, and the social graces. “In a few years you will necessarily go into society,” he had told her when she was thirteen. “I desire that you may be qualified to ornament any society in our own country or elsewhere into which I may have occasion to take you. It is for this reason that I care more for your improvement in your studies, the cultivation of your manners, and the establishment of your moral & religious principles, than for anything else.”
After Kate graduated from boarding school and returned to Columbus, she blossomed as Ohio’s first lady. Her father’s ambitions and dreams became the ruling passions of her life. She gradually made herself absolutely essential to him, helping with his correspondence, editing his speeches, discussing political strategy, entertaining his friends and colleagues. While other girls her age focused on the social calendar of balls and soirées, she concentrated all her energies on furthering her father’s political career. “She did everything in her power,” her biographers suggest, “to fill the gaps in his life so that he would not in his loneliness seek another Mrs. Chase.” She sat beside him at lyceum lectures and political debates. She presided over his dinners and receptions. She became his surrogate wife.
Though Chase treated his sweet, unassuming younger daughter, Janette (Nettie), with warmth and affection, his love for Kate was powerfully intertwined with his desire for political advancement. He had cultivated her in his own image, and she possessed an ease of conversation far more relaxed than his own. Now he could depend on her to assist him every step along the way as, day after day, year after year, he moved steadily toward his goal of becoming president. From the moment when the high office appeared possible to Chase, with his stunning election in 1855 as the first Republican governor of a major state, it had become the consuming passion of both father and daughter that he reach the White House—a passion that would endure even after the Civil War was over. Seward was no less ambitious, but he was far more at ease with diverse