| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Peg A. Lamphier. Kate Chase and William Sprague: Politics and Gender in a Civil War Marriage. University of Nebraska Press. 2003. Pp. x, 315. $55.00.
Against the background of Victorian society, Peg A. Lamphier has constructed a vivid account of personal politics through her case study of the failed marriage of Kate Chase and William Sprague. Although the author calls her work a biography, the volume is much more concerned with comprehensive social and political themes that cover the second half of the nineteenth century. The work also surveys a variety of issues related to gender, power, and the law.	1
While Chase and Sprague are identified as the principal players in the melodrama, Kate Chase's father, Salmon P. Chase, prominent Republican figure, is centrally featured, as evidenced by the fact that he merits more entries in the index than William Sprague. Illustrating her dominant thesis of complex family dynamics, Lamphier expresses the complicated relationship of daughter to father as a "perplexing mix of loving concern and emotional distance that would create a girl and a woman who yearned for demonstrative, unconditional love and who used politics as a means to achieve that end" (p. 11). The reader can only conclude that this passage explains the volatility and uncertainties that affected Chase throughout her life. Ambivalence, estrangement, and rejection would characterize most of her meaningful relationships.	. . .

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