Team of Rivals (58 page)

The Taft boys and their sixteen-year-old sister, Julia, were now almost daily guests at the White House. Like Willie, Bud was “rather pale and languid, not very robust,” but a “pretty good” student. Holly, as described by his father, Judge Taft, resembled Tad—“all motion and activity, never idle, impatient of restraint, quick to learn when he
tries,
impetuous, all ‘go ahead.’” In Bud and Holly, Willie and Tad each found a best friend. Julia, meanwhile, formed a friendship with Mary Lincoln. For the rest of her life, Julia retained warm memories of both the first lady and the president. “More than once,” she recalled, Mary had said to her: “I wish I had a little girl like you, Julia.” Mary even shared her memories of the death of her son Edward, and they “wept together.” In the evenings, when the president unwound in the family sitting room, the four boys would beg him to tell a story. Julia long remembered the scene, as the president launched into one of his amusing tales: “Tad perched precariously on the back of the big chair, Willie on one knee, Bud on the other, both leaning against him,” while Holly sat “on the arm of the chair.”

As a proper young lady, Julia was appalled by some of the boys’ antics. She refused to join in when she found the four of them sitting on the president, attempting to pin him to the floor. She was embarrassed when they interrupted cabinet meetings to invite members and the president to attend one of their theatrical performances in the attic. Though Lincoln himself never seemed to mind, taking great pleasure in their fun, Julia felt she was responsible for curbing their youthful exuberance. Sometimes Willie would help to restore order. He was, Julia wrote, “the most lovable boy” she had ever known, “bright, sensible, sweet-tempered and gentle-mannered.” More often he would simply retreat to his mother’s room, where he loved to read poetry and write verses.

Despite Julia’s great affection for Mary, she was stunned by the first lady’s overbearing need to get “what she wanted when she wanted it,” regardless of how others might be hurt or inconvenienced. A curious example of such behavior took place when Julia’s mother attended a White House concert, decked out in one of her fashionable bonnets. When Mary greeted her, she looked closely at the beautiful purple strings on the bonnet and then took Mrs. Taft aside. Watching the scene, Julia was “puzzled at the look of amazement” on her mother’s face, not fathoming why she “should look so surprised at a passing compliment.” It turned out that Mary’s milliner had created a purple-trimmed bonnet but lacked sufficient purple ribbon for the strings. Mary hoped to acquire Mrs. Taft’s purple strings!

Few recognized the insecurity behind Mary’s outlandish behavior, the terrible needs behind the ostentation and apparent abrasiveness. While initially thrilled to move into the White House, Mary soon found herself in the compromising situation of having one full brother, three half brothers, and three brothers-in-law in the Confederate Army. From the start, she was not fully trusted in the North. As the wife of President Lincoln, she was vilified in the South. As a Westerner, she did not meet the standards of Eastern society. Feeling pressure on all sides, she was determined to present herself as an accomplished and sophisticated woman; in short, the most elegant and admired lady in Washington.

Driven by the need to prove herself to society, Mary Lincoln became obsessed with recasting her own image and renovating that of her new home, the White House. Unattended for years, the White House had come to look like “an old and unsuccessful hotel.” Elizabeth Grimsley was stunned to find that “the family apartments were in a deplorably shabby condition as to furniture, (which looked as if it has been brought in by the first President).” The public rooms, too, were in poor shape, with threadbare, tobacco-stained rugs, torn curtains, and broken chairs.

The sorry condition of the White House provided the energetic Mary with a worthy ambition. She would restore the people’s home to its former elegance as a symbol of her husband’s strength and the Union’s power. In another era, this ambition might have been applauded, but in the midst of a civil war, it was regarded as frivolous.

In the middle of May, Mary went on a shopping trip to Philadelphia and New York, taking along her cousin Elizabeth Grimsley and William Wood, the commissioner of public buildings. Having discovered that each president was allotted a $20,000 allowance to maintain the White House, she bought new furniture, elegant curtains, and expensive carpets for the public rooms to replace their worn predecessors. For the state guest room, she purchased what later became known as the “Lincoln bed,” an eight-foot-long rosewood bedstead with an ornate headboard carved with “exotic birds, grapevines and clusters of grapes.” Again, merchants at the clothing stores were more than willing to extend the first lady credit. The press exaggerated her shopping spree, claiming she had purchased thousands of dollars of merchandise in stores she had never even visited. Exaggeration notwithstanding, when she returned to Washington, the bills added up. She received a $7,500 invoice for curtain materials and trimmings, and owed $900 for a new carriage. And the redecorating process to make the nation’s house a fit emblem for the country and for herself had just begun.

Never one to be outdone, Kate Chase was hard at work decorating her father’s new home—a large three-story brick mansion at Sixth and E Street NW. Though the secretary of the treasury worried constantly about money, he understood the importance of having an elegant home with expansive public rooms appropriate for entertaining senators, congressmen, diplomats, and generals. In the years ahead, he intended to gather friends and associates who would be ready to back him when the time came for the next presidential election. The lease on the house came to $1,200 a year; when the furnishing costs were added on, Chase found himself in debt. Unable to sell off his Cincinnati and Columbus properties in the depressed real estate market that prevailed in Ohio, he was forced to borrow $10,000 from his old friend Hiram Barney. It must have been painfully awkward for the straitlaced model of probity to request the loan, particularly since Barney, as collector of customs in New York, was technically his subordinate. Nevertheless, Chase persuaded himself that a person in his position, who had given so much to the public for so many years, deserved to live in a distinguished home.

So, like Mary Lincoln, Kate traveled to New York and Philadelphia to purchase carpets, draperies, and furniture. The house, complete with six servants, would prove perfect for entertaining, although Chase later complained that the distance from the White House, in comparison with Seward’s new lodgings at Lafayette Square, denied him an equal intimacy with the president. He apparently never considered that Lincoln might simply find Seward more lively and amiable company.

None of her father’s social demeanor or leaden eminence hindered Kate. As the mistress of his Washington household, she managed “in a single season” to be “as much at home in the society of the national capital as if she had lived there for a lifetime.” Dozens of young men paid court to her. A contemporary reporter noted that “no other maiden in Washington had more suitors at her feet.” Yet, he continued, “it was early noticed that among all the young men who flocked to the Chase home, and who were eager to obey her slightest nod, there was not one who seemed to obtain even the remotest hold upon her affections”—until Rhode Island’s young governor, William Sprague, came to Washington and drew her attention.

Kate had first met the fabulously wealthy Sprague, whose family owned one of the largest textile manufacturing establishments in the country, the previous September in Cleveland. Sprague had come to Ohio at the head of an official delegation to dedicate a statue of Rhode Island native Commodore Oliver Perry, which was to be placed in the public square. Introduced at the festive ball that followed the ceremony, the two immediately hit it off. “For the rest of the evening,” one observer recalled, “whenever we saw one of them we were pretty sure to see the other.”

For his part, Sprague would never forget his first sight of Kate, “dressed in that celebrated dress,” when “you became my gaze and the gaze of all observers, and you left the house taking with you my admiration and my appreciation, but more than all my
pulsations.
I remember well how I was possessed that night and the following day.” Years later, he assured her he could “recall the sensation better than if it was yesterday.”

Ten years Kate’s senior, William Sprague had assumed responsibility for the family business at an early age. When William was thirteen, his father, Amasa Sprague, was shot down on the street as he walked home from his cotton mill one evening. The elder Sprague had been involved in a nasty fight over the renewal of a liquor license. The owner of the gin mill shut down by Sprague was arrested and hanged for the murder. Control of the company passed to William’s uncle, who determined that young William should cut short his education to learn the business from the bottom up. “I was thrust into the counting-room, performing its lowest drudgeries, raising myself to all of its highest positions,” he later recalled. When his uncle died of typhoid fever, William, at twenty-six, took over.

As the largest employer in Rhode Island, with more than ten thousand workers, young Sprague wielded enormous political influence. He capitalized on his resources when he ran for governor in 1860 and won on the Democratic ticket, spending over $100,000 of his own money. After the attack on Fort Sumter, Sprague organized the First Rhode Island Regiment, providing the state with “a loan of one hundred thousand dollars to outfit the troops,” while his brother supplied the artillery battery with ninety-six horses. When the lavishly supplied volunteer regiment arrived in the threatened capital, the men were received as heroes. On April 29, the regiment was officially sworn in before the president and General Scott after a dress parade from its headquarters at the Patent Office to the White House. “The entire street was filled with spectators from Seventh to Ninth street,” the
Evening Star
reported, “and many were the complimentary remarks made by the multitude upon the general appearance and movements of the regiment.”

All the members of the cabinet were present at the ceremony, joining in the rousing greeting for the resplendent troops. Though Sprague stood only five feet six inches tall, his military uniform and his “yellow-plumed hat” undoubtedly increased his stature. John Hay commented after meeting the young man with brown wavy hair, gray eyes, and a thin mustache that while he appeared at first “a small, insignificant youth, who bought his place,” he “is certainly all right now. He is very proud of his Company of its wealth and social standing.” Hay, too, was impressed by the number of eminent young men in Sprague’s regiment. “When men like these leave their horses, their women and their wine, harden their hands, eat crackers for dinner, wear a shirt for a week and never black their shoes,—all for a principle, it is hard to set any bounds to the possibilities of such an army.” Washingtonians nicknamed the First Rhode Island “the millionaires’ regiment” and dubbed Sprague the most eligible bachelor in the city.

It was only a matter of days before Sprague called on Kate. Unlike earlier tentative suitors, intimidated perhaps by Kate’s beauty and brains, Sprague moved confidently to establish a place in her heart, becoming “the first, the only man,” she said afterward, “that had found a lodgment there.” Years later, writing to Kate, Sprague vividly recalled their earlier courtship days. “Do you remember the hesitating kiss I stole, and the glowing, blushing face that responded to the touch. I well remember it all. The step forward from the Cleveland meeting, and the enhanced poetical sensation, for it was poetry, if there ever is such in life.”

For Kate, who acknowledged that she was “accustomed to command and be obeyed, to wish and be anticipated,” Sprague’s cocksure attitude must have presented a welcome challenge. In the weeks that followed, the young couple saw each other frequently. By summer’s end, Nettie Chase told Kate that she liked Sprague “very much” and hoped the two would marry. Nettie’s hopes were put on hold, however, as the war continued to escalate, changing the course of countless lives throughout the fractured nation.

The tragedies of war came home to the Lincolns with the death of Elmer Ellsworth on May 24, 1861. Young Ellsworth had read law in Lincoln’s office and had become so close to the family that he made the journey from Springfield to Washington with them, catching the measles from Willie and Tad along the way. Once in the capital, Ellsworth joined the war effort by organizing a group of New York firemen into a Zouave unit, distinguished by their exotic and colorful uniforms. After Virginia seceded from the Union, Ellsworth’s Zouaves were among the first troops to cross the Potomac River into Alexandria, a town counting ardent secessionists among its residents, including the proprietor of the Marshall House. Spying a Confederate flag waving above the hotel, Ellsworth dashed up to the roof to confiscate it. Having captured the flag, Ellsworth met the armed hotel manager, secessionist James Jackson, on his way down the stairs. Jackson killed Ellsworth on the spot, only to be shot by Ellsworth’s men.

Ellsworth’s death, as one of the first casualties of the war, was national news and mourned across the country. The bereaved president wrote a personal note of condolence to Ellsworth’s parents, praising the young man whose body lay in state in the East Room. Nicolay confessed that he had been “quite unable to keep the tears out of my eyes” whenever he thought of Ellsworth. After the funeral, Mary was presented with the bloodied flag for which Ellsworth had given his life; but the horrified first lady, not wanting to be reminded of the sad event, quickly had it packed away.

W
ITH MORE THAN ENOUGH TROUBLES
to occupy him at home, Lincoln faced a tangled situation abroad. A member of the British Parliament had introduced a resolution urging England to accord the Southern Confederacy belligerent status. If passed, the resolution would give Confederate ships the same rights in neutral ports enjoyed by Federal ships. Britain’s textile economy depended on cotton furnished by Southern plantations. Unless the British broke the Union blockade to ensure a continuing supply of cotton, the great textile mills in Manchester and Leeds would be forced to cut back or come to a halt. Merchants would lose money, and thousands of workers would lose their jobs.