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His grief was compounded by guilt, for he was away on business in Philadelphia when Kitty died, having been assured by her doctor that she would recover. “Oh how I accused myself of folly and wickedness in leaving her when yet sick,” he confided in his diary, “how I mourned that the prospect of a little addition to my reputation…should have tempted me away.”

Chase arrived home to find his front door wreathed in black crepe, a customary sign “that death was within.” There “in our nuptial chamber, in her coffin, lay my sweet wife,” Chase wrote, “little changed in features—but oh! the look of life was gone…. Nothing was left but clay.” For months afterward, he berated himself, believing that “the dreadful calamity might have been averted, had I been at home to watch over her & care for her.” Learning that the doctors had bled her so profusely that she lost consciousness shortly before she died, he delved into textbooks on medicine and midwifery that persuaded him that, had she been treated differently, she need not have died.

Worst of all, Chase feared that Kitty had died without affirming her faith. He had not pushed her firmly enough toward God. “Oh if I had not contented myself with a few conversations on the subject of religion,” he lamented in his diary, “if I had incessantly followed her with kind & earnest persuasion…she might have been before her death enrolled among the professed followers of the Lamb. But I procrastinated and now she is gone.”

His young wife’s death shadowed all the days of his life. He was haunted by the vision that when he himself reached “the bar of God,” he would meet her “as an accusing spirit,” blaming him for her damnation. His guilt rekindled his religious commitment, producing a “second conversion,” a renewed determination never to let his fierce ambition supersede his religious duties.

The child upon whom all his affections then centered, named Catherine in honor of her dead mother, lived only five years. Her death in 1840 during an epidemic of scarlet fever devastated Chase. Losing one’s only child, he told Charles Cleveland, was “one of the heaviest calamities which human experience can know.” Little Catherine, he said, had “lent wings to many delightful moments…I fondly looked forward to the time when her increasing attainments and strength would fit her at once for the superintendence of my household & to be my own counsellor and friend.” Asking for his friend’s prayers, he concluded with the thought that “no language can describe the desolation of my heart.”

Eventually, Chase fell in love and married again. The young woman, Eliza Ann Smith, had been a good friend of his first wife. Eliza was only twenty when she gave birth to a daughter, Kate, named in memory of both his first wife and his first daughter. For a few short years, Chase found happiness in a warm marriage sustained by a deep religious bond. It would not last, for after the birth and death of a second daughter, Eliza was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which took her life at the age of twenty-five. “I feel as if my heart was broken,” Chase admitted to Cleveland after he placed Eliza’s body in the tomb. “I write weeping. I cannot restrain my tears…. I have no wife, my little Kate has no mother, and we are desolate.”

The following year, Chase married Sarah Belle Ludlow, whose well-to-do father was a leader in Cincinnati society. Belle gave birth to two daughters, Nettie and Zoe. Zoe died at twelve months; two years later, her mother followed her into the grave. Though Chase was only forty-four years old, he would never marry again. “What a vale of misery this world is,” he lamented some years later when his favorite sister, Hannah, suffered a fatal heart attack at the dining room table. “To me it has been emphatically so. Death has pursued me incessantly ever since I was twenty-five…. Sometimes I feel as if I could give up—as if I must give up. And then after all I rise & press on.”

LIKE SALMON CHASE, Edward Bates left the East Coast as a young man, intending, he said, “to go