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By Root 6540 0

the White House, she bought new furniture, elegant curtains, and expensive carpets for the public rooms to replace their worn predecessors. For the state guest room, she purchased what later became known as the “Lincoln bed,” an eight-foot-long rosewood bedstead with an ornate headboard carved with “exotic birds, grapevines and clusters of grapes.” Again, merchants at the clothing stores were more than willing to extend the first lady credit. The press exaggerated her shopping spree, claiming she had purchased thousands of dollars of merchandise in stores she had never even visited. Exaggeration notwithstanding, when she returned to Washington, the bills added up. She received a $7,500 invoice for curtain materials and trimmings, and owed $900 for a new carriage. And the redecorating process to make the nation’s house a fit emblem for the country and for herself had just begun.

Never one to be outdone, Kate Chase was hard at work decorating her father’s new home—a large three-story brick mansion at Sixth and E Street NW. Though the secretary of the treasury worried constantly about money, he understood the importance of having an elegant home with expansive public rooms appropriate for entertaining senators, congressmen, diplomats, and generals. In the years ahead, he intended to gather friends and associates who would be ready to back him when the time came for the next presidential election. The lease on the house came to $1,200 a year; when the furnishing costs were added on, Chase found himself in debt. Unable to sell off his Cincinnati and Columbus properties in the depressed real estate market that prevailed in Ohio, he was forced to borrow $10,000 from his old friend Hiram Barney. It must have been painfully awkward for the straitlaced model of probity to request the loan, particularly since Barney, as collector of customs in New York, was technically his subordinate. Nevertheless, Chase persuaded himself that a person in his position, who had given so much to the public for so many years, deserved to live in a distinguished home.

So, like Mary Lincoln, Kate traveled to New York and Philadelphia to purchase carpets, draperies, and furniture. The house, complete with six servants, would prove perfect for entertaining, although Chase later complained that the distance from the White House, in comparison with Seward’s new lodgings at Lafayette Square, denied him an equal intimacy with the president. He apparently never considered that Lincoln might simply find Seward more lively and amiable company.

None of her father’s social demeanor or leaden eminence hindered Kate. As the mistress of his Washington household, she managed “in a single season” to be “as much at home in the society of the national capital as if she had lived there for a lifetime.” Dozens of young men paid court to her. A contemporary reporter noted that “no other maiden in Washington had more suitors at her feet.” Yet, he continued, “it was early noticed that among all the young men who flocked to the Chase home, and who were eager to obey her slightest nod, there was not one who seemed to obtain even the remotest hold upon her affections”—until Rhode Island’s young governor, William Sprague, came to Washington and drew her attention.

Kate had first met the fabulously wealthy Sprague, whose family owned one of the largest textile manufacturing establishments in the country, the previous September in Cleveland. Sprague had come to Ohio at the head of an official delegation to dedicate a statue of Rhode Island native Commodore Oliver Perry, which was to be placed in the public square. Introduced at the festive ball that followed the ceremony, the two immediately hit it off. “For the rest of the evening,” one observer recalled, “whenever we saw one of them we were pretty sure to see the other.”

For his part, Sprague would never forget his first sight of Kate, “dressed in that celebrated dress,” when “you became my gaze and the gaze of all observers, and you left the house taking with you my admiration and my appreciation, but more than all my pulsations.