Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [376]
Over the years, as the Cinderella match would culminate in tragedy and poverty for Kate, journalists and historians have subjected Kate’s feelings for Sprague to considerable analysis. Many have speculated that her decision to marry “was a coldly calculated plan to secure the Sprague millions,” thereby to advance the “two great passions in her life—her father and politics.” It was said that “in her eyes all other men sank into insignificance when compared with her father,” and that no one else had “even the remotest hold upon her affections.” Her marriage to Sprague would relieve her father from further financial worries and provide abundant means for an all-out presidential campaign in 1864.
Even journalists at the time noted that outside of his fortune, Sprague possessed few attractive qualities. Having left school early for the cotton mill, he was “wholly innocent of even an approximate understanding of the arts or sciences, polite or vulgar literature.” Furthermore, he was “small, thin and unprepossessing in appearance.” Still, if he was not physically attractive, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted, “pecuniarily, he is—several millions.” And, as Gideon Welles recorded in his diary, “Miss Kate has talents and ambition sufficient for both.”
Henry Adams was among those who deemed Kate’s marriage a sacrifice for her father. He spoke of her as Jephthah’s daughter, referring to the biblical warrior who promised God that if he gained success in battle, “whatsoever” greeted him at his victorious return would be sacrificed as “a burnt offering.” Jephthah arrived home triumphant and was greeted at his door by his daughter, his only child. As the anguished father prepared the sacrificial pyre, his daughter comforted him with assurances that she accepted her fate, for a promise made to God could not be broken.
The sacrificial nature of this scenario is belied by Kate’s own words, later confided to her diary as the fifth anniversary of her wedding approached. Thinking back to the night before her marriage, she wrote: “Memory has been busy with the hopes and dreams on a calm moonlight night five years ago of a woman, then in the full flush of social influence and triumph whose career had been curiously independent and successful, surrounded by some kind friends and many more ready to flatter and do her homage, accustomed to command and be obeyed, to wish and be anticipated, successful beyond any right or dessert of her own to claim, and yet stood ready, without a sigh of regret, to lay all these and more upon the altar of her love in exchange for a more earnest and truer life: one long dream of happiness and love.”
She remembered spending that evening praying that she might fill her role of loving wife “to completeness,” that she “might become, his companion, friend and advocate, that he might be in a word—a husband satisfied. All there is of love and beauty, nobleness & gentleness were woven with this fair dream & I believed no future brighter than that our united lives spread open before us.” When folded in William’s “loving arms,” she continued, “oh the sense of ineffable rest, joy & completeness.” She felt like “a child, in security and trust. A lover won, a protector found, a husband to be cherished…. Not a reserve in my heart, not a hidden corner he might not scan, the first, the only man that had found a lodgment there.”
In the hours before the nuptials began, “a large crowd of all sexes, ages and conditions” gathered around the Chase mansion to watch the procession of guests. The eager crowd was “very good-natured,” the Washington Daily Chronicle reported, exchanging congenial remarks as the occupants of the long line of carriages stepped down and proceeded inside. One by one the cabinet secretaries arrived; all