Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [280]
ANXIETY SURROUNDING the impending battle did little to curtail the spring social season in Washington. If anything, the pace of social life accelerated, as Washingtonians sought relaxation and entertainment in the traditional round of calls, receptions, soirées, musicales, and dinners. Once the air turned “soft and balmy,” the National Republican reported, the public squares came alive with “crowds of visitors, who either tread its graveled walks, or seat themselves beneath the trees,” listening to the songs of birds and the joyful shouts of children rolling “their hoops over the ground.”
Mary remained in mourning for Willie, however, and the traditional spring receptions in the White House were canceled, along with the Marine Band concerts on the lawn. In the social vacuum, Kate Chase took command of the Washington social scene, making her a powerful asset to her father. Her intermittent romance with the Rhode Island–based Sprague did not diminish her signal commitment to her father, whose household she managed with matchless style.
Her social supremacy derived in part from her striking appearance, enhanced by the simple but elegant wardrobe assembled during her many trips to New York in pursuit of furnishings for her father’s mansion. She was “more of a professional beauty than had at that time ever been seen in America,” noted Mary Adams French, the wife of the famed sculptor Daniel Chester French, “with a beauty and a regal carriage which we called ‘queenly,’ but which no real queen ever has.” In an era when “the universal art of being slim had not been discovered,” Mrs. French continued, the “tall and slim” Kate seemed otherworldly. She had “an unusually long white neck, and a slow and deliberate way of turning it when she glanced around her. Wherever she appeared, people dropped back in order to watch her.” Fanny Villard, wife of the journalist Henry Villard, was one of many who looked with awe on Kate: “I a simple young home body from New England never before had seen so beautiful and brilliant a creature as Kate Chase; and it seemed to me then that nothing could blight her perfection.”
And yet Kate’s grace and beauty accounted for only a small part of her social success. Her emergence as the foremost lady of Washington society resulted as much from hard work and meticulous planning as from her natural assets. She met each morning with her household servants, giving detailed instructions for the day’s activities. Continuing the ritual she had established in Columbus, she and her father hosted regular breakfast parties for out-of-town guests. Her correspondence reveals the elaborate preparations these affairs entailed. A letter to her father’s friend, the Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, requests that he “stop at Van Zant’s where you find the best fruit and have a basketful of the best and prettiest grapes, pears, oranges, apples etc. sent me by Adams Express…so that they may arrive here without fail early Tuesday morning.” She regretted the imposition, but she “could not think of anyone who would do it quite so well,” and was “especially anxious” to make this “an attractive and agreeable occasion.”
In addition to these early-morning breakfasts, Kate presided over weekly receptions known as “Cabinet calling” days. Every Monday, a contemporary Washingtonian wrote, “the wives of the Cabinet officers receive their friends; also Mrs. McClellan is at home on this same day.” Through the late morning and early afternoon, regardless of rain, mud, or snow, the