| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Kate Chase and William Sprague: Politics and Gender in a Civil War Marriage. By Peg A. Lamphier. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. xii, 315 pp. $55.00,ISBN 0-8032-2947-X.)

As a glittering presence in Washington's post–Civil War social scene, Kate Chase might have stepped from the pages of Henry Adams's Democracy (1880). From her couture ball gowns to the lavish table she set, the smallest details of her life made their way into the nation's gossip columns. What makes Chase such a revealing figure in this engaging book, however, is her political acumen and real influence on Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age politics. As Peg A. Lamphier demonstrates, Kate Chase shaped the political careers of three diverse men: her father, Salmon P. Chase, Abraham Lincoln's secretary of the treasury and a Supreme Court justice, for whom she served as Washington hostess and unofficial campaign manager; her husband, William Sprague, one-time governor and senator from Rhode Island, with whom she forged a tempestuous relationship that ended in divorce; and Roscoe Conkling, New York senator and power broker, with whom she had a long-term affair that was the talk of Washington. Through these relationships, Lamphier argues, Kate Chase functioned as a political actor. Her ornate dresses, she suggests, served as a kind of drag that afforded her a place in an all-male political culture.

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