Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [414]
Chase’s gloom was mirrored by the distress of his daughter, whose marriage to William Sprague was in trouble. Kate had seemed to hold “the balance of power” throughout the courtship, yet William now believed he had a right to control his high-spirited wife. Though he had made her responsible for redecorating his several multimillion-dollar households, he angrily rebuked her in private and in public for exorbitant spending. “Can it be,” she later lamented in her diary, “that he would keep this hateful thought of my dependence ever before me, forcing me to believe that every dollar given or expended upon his home is begrudged?” She worried that, “reared in a pinched, prejudiced narrow atmosphere,” with the thought of the “insatiable Moloch—money” always before him, he had vested in it “all the power when after all it is only a tributary…. My father was, in comparison with my husband, a poor man, but he felt himself rich when he was enabled to bestow a benefit upon the needy or a pleasure upon those he loved & a treasure laid up in his home was money well invested.”
Though she was proud of her new husband’s “worldly success” as both a senator and businessman, she had hoped to be a partner in all his endeavors, as she had been with her father. She “would gladly follow all his interests with sympathy & encouragement,” she wrote, “but I cannot make them mine for his effort would seem to be to show me that I have no part in them.” In fact, he rebuffed her when she tried to talk of business or politics, complaining in public that she had “different ideas & ways of life, from his own.”
Most hurtful of all, Sprague had started drinking again. He would lash out at her when drunk, provoking bitter arguments that would take days to resolve. Kate could not restrain herself from replying to his insults with “harsh and cruel words” of her own. When sober, Sprague would vow reform, pledging “to fill & occupy his place, in the home circle he has created…as well as the position he has secured for himself in the world.” These resolves were short-lived, and Kate began to fear that he did not seriously contemplate a worthy future, that his only thought was “to slip through these obligations in life” with the least effort possible. “God forgive me,” she later confessed, “that I had so often wished that I had found in my husband a man of more intellectual resources, even with far less material wealth.”
Though she acknowledged occasionally loathing her husband, she also believed that “few men were loved” as much as she loved him. Perhaps she, too, was at fault. “My hopes were too high,” she confessed. “Proud, passionate and intolerant, I had never learned to submit.” Chase witnessed a fight between the young couple at Narragansett but mistakenly interpreted the problem as a simple “misunderstanding” that time and patience would make right. His hopes seemed justified a few weeks later when he learned that Kate was pregnant with her first child.
THE GOODWILL ENGENDERED among congressional radicals by Lincoln’s appointment of Fessenden was swiftly eroded by his refusal to sign the punitive Reconstruction bill that passed the Congress in the final hours of July 2, 1864, before it adjourned for the summer. Sponsored by Ben Wade and Henry Winter Davis, the bill laid down a rigid formula for bringing the seceded states back into the Union. The process differed in significant ways from the more lenient plan Lincoln had announced the previous December. Lincoln had proposed to rehabilitate individual states as quickly as possible, hoping their return would deflate Southern morale and thereby shorten the war. The Wade-Davis bill, in contrast, postponed any attempts at Reconstruction until all fighting had ceased.