Early Life
Kate was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of Salmon Chase and his second wife Eliza Ann Smith. Eliza Chase died shortly after Kate's fifth birthday; Chase later married a woman with whom Kate had a difficult stepmother/stepdaughter relationship. Kate Chase was educated at the Haines School in New York City, where she learned languages, elocution and the social graces along with music and history. After nine years of schooling, Kate returned to Columbus, Ohio, to serve as official hostess for her father, the newly elected Governor of Ohio, and by now widowed a third time. Beautiful and intelligent, Kate impressed such friends of her father as Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator and fellow anti-slavery champion; James Garfield, the future President; and Carl Schurz, the German-born American politician, who described her as follows:
| “ | She was about eighteen years old, tall and slender and exceedingly well formed. . . . Her little nose, somewhat audaciously tipped up, could perhaps not have passed muster with a severe critic, but it fitted pleasingly into her face with its large, languid, but at the same time vivacious hazel eyes, shaded by long dark lashes and arched over by proud eyebrows. The fine forehead was framed in waving, gold-brown hair. She had something imperial in the pose of the head, and all her movements possessed an exquisite natural charm. No wonder that she came to be admired as a great beauty and broke many hearts. After the usual commonplaces, the conversation at the breakfast table, in which Miss Kate took a lively and remarkably intelligent part, soon turned itself upon politics. | ” |
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