Kate Chase - Political Action

Political Action

Kate worked behind the scenes to foster her father's calculated efforts to wrest the 1864 Republican Party nomination for President from Lincoln, but the plot blew up in Chase's face when it became public, requiring Chase to settle back into his Treasury Secretary position. One of Chase's many perfunctory offers of resignation from the Cabinet was accepted by Lincoln (much to Chase's surprise and consternation) in 1864, but the cunning President appointed Chase Chief Justice upon the death of Roger Taney that year. The evidence conflicts as to whether Kate welcomed this prestigious appointment or rued it as an attempt to put her father "on the shelf" so as to preempt any hope of his attaining his true goal of the highest office in the land.

Despite his position on the Supreme Court, Chase let it be known in 1868 that he was available as a candidate for the Presidency. He switched parties from the Republicans (of whom he had been an important early member) to the Democrats, hoping they would nominate him. In that summer of 1868, Kate ran her father's campaign for the Democratic nomination from their hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York City, where the convention was being held in famed Tammany Hall. Although tradition prevented her appearance, as a woman, on the convention floor, she did much of the back-room maneuvering with the goal of winning the nomination after the first ballot. At times the prize seemed within their grasp, but the convention ended up nominating Horatio Seymour, the Democratic Governor of New York, whom Kate and other Chase operatives had been counting on to place her father's name in nomination. Kate placed the blame for the defeat on a conspiracy of New York politicians including Samuel Tilden. Kate wrote her father after the convention: "You have been most cruelly deceived and shamefully used by the man whom you trusted implicitly and the country must suffer for his duplicity." Kate would reputedly have her revenge on Tilden eight years later when her paramour Conkling, the most powerful member of the Senate, maneuvered to throw the disputed 1876 election to the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over the Democrat Tilden, who had won the popular vote.

Chase would make one final bid for the presidency in 1872, with Kate's full support, but by then he was physically weakened and a political has-been; then he ran as a Liberal Republican, challenging the incumbent Ulysses S. Grant. The effort went nowhere and Chase died a year later, with Kate (and Sprague, her husband in name only) at his bedside.