Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [391]
The game had begun in earnest early in January. Friends of Chase, including Jay and Henry Cooke, contributed thousands of dollars to the publisher of the American Exchange and Review, a small Philadelphia magazine, so he would print a flattering biographical sketch of the treasury secretary. Chase’s friend William Orton warned him that “no matter how able or ‘faithful’ the biography may be,” its publication in a “seedy” magazine with a reputation for selling its space to whomever could pay enough would be seen “as a flimsy political trick.” Orton’s note elicited no direct reply, but at some point the president had apparently questioned the involvement of the Cooke brothers, who were still official agents for selling government bonds. The president’s questions elicited a long, emotional letter from Chase.
Chase opened his letter with the assertion that his actions, as always, proceeded from the purest of motives. He claimed he had “never, consciously & deliberately, injured one fellow man.” He had been told that the publisher intended to print a series of sketches about prominent figures, starting with him. “How could I object?” Treasury business so occupied him that he had paid no further attention to the matter. “What Mr. H. D. Cooke did about the unfortunate biography was done of his own accord without any prompting from me,” Chase insisted. Had Cooke or his brother sought his consent, he would have stopped them. “Not that any wrong was intended or done; but because the act was subject to misconstruction…. You will pardon me if I write as one somewhat moved. It makes me hate public life when I realize how powerless are the most faithful labors and the most upright conduct to protect any man from carping envy or malignant denunciations.”
Embarrassment over the circumstances surrounding the Exchange and Review piece did not stop Chase from writing twenty-five long letters that winter to the Boston writer John Trowbridge. His missives were designed to provide the foundation for a small inspirational book about his life, The Ferry-Boy and the Financier. An excerpt appeared that spring in the Atlantic Monthly. These letters were but a small part of a massive campaign to extol his own virtues at Lincoln’s expense. From early morning until late at night, Chase toiled to maintain his stream of correspondence with friends and supporters. “So far,” he told a friend in Cincinnati, “I think I have made few mistakes. Indeed, on looking back over the whole ground with an earnest desire to detect error and correct it, I am not able to see where, if I had to do my work all over again, I could in any matter do materially otherwise than I have.”
With Kate married and Nettie away at school, Chase resumed his sporadic correspondence with Charlotte Eastman. “I think of you constantly,” he assured her, “and—if any feeling is left in me—with the sincerest affection…. How I wish you were here in our house—in this little library room—and that we could talk, instead of this writing by myself, while you are—where?” Such romantic inclinations were probably never consummated. Similarly, though he enjoyed the company of Susan Walker, an educated “bluestocking” from Cincinnati, the relationship never seemed to deepen. “I wish you could come to Washington,” he wrote Miss Walker in late January, “though I could probably see so little of you that it would be difficult to tell which would be greater, the pleasure of seeing you, or the sensation of not seeing you enough.” Though Chase obviously admired both Eastman and Walker, his intense focus on his ambition for the