Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [489]
Edward Bates spent his remaining years with his close-knit family, reunited with his son Fleming, whom he had welcomed home from the Confederate Army once the war ended. When Bates died in 1869 at the age of seventy-six, he was revered as much for his character as for his public accomplishments. Above all, one eulogist noted, “it was in his social and domestic relations that his character shown brightest; it was as a husband, as a father and a friend that he has endeared himself to others by ties which death cannot sever.”
After presiding over the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, Salmon Chase turned his addicted gaze to the 1868 presidential race, his hopes resting with the Democrats after Grant had secured the Republican nomination. With Kate serving as his campaign manager, he had his name placed before the delegates, but when Ohio announced for New York’s Horace Seymour, Chase’s candidacy was doomed. Once more, his home state had derailed his ambitions. Four years later, still hoping for the presidential nod, he switched his allegiance to the Liberal Republican Party. Again the nomination eluded him, going instead to Horace Greeley. His physical condition weakened by a heart attack and a stroke, Chase fell into depression, confiding to a friend that he was “too much of an invalid to be more than a cipher. Sometimes I feel as if I were dead.” Death came on May 7, 1873, with Kate and Nettie by his side. He was sixty-five.
After her father’s death, Kate saw her marriage to Sprague fall apart. An affair with New York senator Roscoe Conkling ended in scandal when Sprague, finding the couple together at his Narragansett mansion, went after Conkling with a shotgun. Following a violent argument during which Sprague tried to throw Kate from a bedroom window, she sued for divorce. She returned to Washington, where she died in poverty at fifty-eight.
The Blairs returned to the Democratic Party. Though Frank Blair was selected as Seymour’s vice presidential candidate in 1868, his intemperate denunciations of opponents cut short what might have been a promising political future. He died from a fall in his house in 1875 at the age of fifty-four. Old Man Blair outlived his son by one year, maintaining “his physical vigor, his mental faculties and his sprightliness of disposition” until his death at eighty-five. Montgomery served as counsel to Democrat Samuel Tilden in the disputed election of 1876, which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes eventually won. Blair was writing a biography of Andrew Jackson when he died in 1883 at the age of seventy.
Gideon Welles supported Andrew Johnson during the impeachment trial, remaining in the cabinet until 1868. Returning to Connecticut, he wrote a series of historical essays and was among the first to depict Lincoln as “a towering figure, coping admirably with herculean tasks.” His perceptive diary, which he edited in his last years, remains one of the most valuable sources on the dynamics within the Lincoln administration. Welles was seventy-five when he died from a streptococcus infection in 1878.
John Nicolay and John Hay remained friends until the end of their lives, coauthoring a massive ten-volume study of Lincoln based on his then-unpublished papers. Nicolay was at work on an abridged version of their study when he died in 1901 at sixty-nine. Hay served as secretary of state under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Shortly before he died from a blood clot at the age of sixty-six