Part 13 (1/2)

The idealistic Frances accepted her husband's rationale for the eulogies but could not countenance his reluctance to resist the reactionary zeal that enveloped the country after the Compromise. When it appeared that the 1852 Whig Convention was on the verge of endorsing the Compromise in an attempt to create a moderate platform for its presidential candidate, General Winfield Scott, Frances begged her husband to come home. ”I do not wish you to be held responsible for the doings of that Convention if they are to endorse the Compromise in any manner or degree,” she wrote. ”It will be a sad disappointment to men who are true to liberty.”

Nor did she spare him whenever she detected a blatantly conciliatory tone in his speeches or writings. While she conceded that ”worldly wisdom certainly does impel a person to 'swim with the tide'-and if they can judge unerringly which way the tide runs, may bring them to port,” she continued to argue for ”a more elevated course” that would ”reconcile one to struggling against the current if necessary.”

In Charles Sumner, Frances found a politician who consistently chose the elevated course she favored, even though he was often isolated as a result. Sumner, a bachelor, who, like Chase, was said to look like a statesman, with imperious, well-chiseled features, would often dine with the Sewards when Frances was in town. When she returned to Auburn, they kept up a rich correspondence. Sumner valued her unflagging confidence particularly during his early days in the Senate when his unyielding position on slavery provoked anger and ridicule. Though his attempt to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act in August 1852 garnered only 4 votes in the Senate, not including Seward's-who, like other antislavery men, refused to support it on the grounds that it would torpedo Scott's chances for the presidency-Frances stood loyally by her friend. ”This fearless defense of Freedom must silence those cavilers who doubted your sincerity,” she wrote. ”It is a n.o.ble plea for a righteous cause.”

That November, when the Southerners' candidate, Franklin Pierce, crushed Scott in what Northern Whigs considered ”a Waterloo defeat,” Frances fell into a state of despair. Her confidence in the mainstream political system gone, she was tempted, she told her husband, to join the abolitionists. Seward persuaded her to hold back, arguing that it would do ”more harm than good” if the Seward name were attached to the abolitionist cause.

Try as he might, Seward could not persuade Frances to stay with him for more than a few months at a time in Was.h.i.+ngton. Her decision to remain in upstate New York, especially in the wretched summer months, was not unusual, but even when the weather began to cool as autumn set in, Frances remained in Auburn. ”Would that I were nearer to you,” he lamented from Was.h.i.+ngton on his fifty-fourth birthday; but he accepted that his ”widened spheres of obligation and duty” prevented him from realizing his wishes.

Had Frances Seward enjoyed good health, the course of their marriage might have been different; everywhere Seward went he rented sumptuous homes, hopeful that she and the children might join him. Burdened with a fragile const.i.tution, Frances was increasingly debilitated by a wide range of nervous disorders: nausea, temporary blindness, insomnia, migraines, mysterious pains in her muscles and joints, crying spells, and sustained bouts of depression. A flas.h.i.+ng light, a b.u.mpy carriage ride, or a piercing sound was often sufficient to send her to bed. As her health deteriorated, she found it more and more difficult to leave her ”sanctuary” in Auburn, where she was attended by her solicitous extended family.

Doctors could not pinpoint the physical origin of the various ailments that conspired to leave Frances a semi-invalid. A brilliant woman, Frances once speculated whether the ”various nervous afflictions & morbid habits of thought” that plagued so many women she knew had their origin in the frustrations of an educated woman's life in the mid-nineteenth century. Among her papers is a draft of an unpublished essay on the plight of women: ”To share in any kind of household work is to demean herself, and she would be thought mad, to run, leap, or engage in active sports.” She was permitted to dance all night in ballrooms, but it ”would be deemed unwomanly” and ”imprudent” for her to race with her children ”on the common, or to search the cliff for flowers.” Reflecting on ”the number of invalids that exist among women exempted from Labour,” she suggested that the ”want of fitting employment-real purpose in their life” was responsible.

Seward himself recognized that his marriage was built upon contradictions. ”There you are at home all your life-long. It is too cold to travel in winter and home is too pleasant in summer to be foresaken. The children cannot go abroad and must not be left at home. Here I am, on the contrary, roving for instruction when at leisure, and driven abroad continually by my occupation. How strange a thing it is that we can never enjoy each others cares and pleasures, except at intervals.”

The Sewards' relations.h.i.+p was sustained chiefly through the long, loving letters they wrote to each other day after day, year after year. In her letters, which number in the thousands, Frances described the progress of the garden and the antics of the children. She offered advice on political matters, critiqued his speeches, and expressed her pa.s.sionate opinions about slavery. She encouraged his idealism, pressing him repeatedly to consider what should be done rather than what could be done. In his letters, he a.n.a.lyzed the personalities of his colleagues, confessed his fears, discussed his reactions to the books he was reading, and told her repeatedly how he loved her ”above every other thing in the world.” He conjured images of the moon, whose ”silver rays” they shared as they each sat in their separate homes ”writing the lines” that would cross in the mail. He recollected pleasures of home, where the children played in the smoke from his cigar, and husband and wife were engaged in free and open conversation, so different from the talk of politicians.

Yet in the end, it was the talk of politicians he craved. As a result, the Sewards, to a far greater extent than the Lincolns, spent much of their married life apart.

CHASE, TOO, found himself in a dispirited state in the months that followed the Compromise. ”Clouds and darkness are upon us at present,” he wrote Summer. ”The Slaveholders have succeeded beyond their wildest hopes twelve months ago.” It seemed as if, temporarily at least, the wind had been taken out of the sails of the antislavery movement.

Moreover, Chase was isolated in the Senate, the regular Democratic Party having shut him out of committee work and political meetings. Nor could he rely on the camaraderie of the Free-Soilers, who believed he had sacrificed them to achieve his position. With time heavy on his hands, he spent hours writing to Kate at her boarding school in New York, where she had been sent when his third wife, Belle, contracted the tuberculosis that took her life.

The long years away from home must have been bleak and often difficult for the motherless child. Located at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, Miss Haines's School held the girls to a strict routine. They rose at 6 a.m. to study for an hour and a half before breakfast and prayers. A brisk walk outside, with no skipping permitted, preceded cla.s.ses in literature, French, Latin, English grammar, science, elocution, piano, and dancing. At midafternoon, they were taken out once again for an hour-long walk. In the evenings, they attended study hall, where, ”without [the teacher's] permission,” one student recalled, ”we could hardly breathe.” Only on weekends, when they attended recitals or the theater, was the routine relaxed.

Living ten months a year under such regimented circ.u.mstances, Kate yearned to see the one person she loved: her father. Though he wrote hundreds of letters to her, his correspondence lacked the playful warmth of Seward's notes to his own children. In cold, didactic fas.h.i.+on, Chase alternately praised and upbraided her, instructing her in the art of letter writing and admonis.h.i.+ng her to cultivate good habits. If her letters were well written, he critiqued her penmans.h.i.+p. If the penmans.h.i.+p was good, he criticized her flat style of expression. If both met his standards, he complained that she had waited too long to write.

”Your last letter...was quite well written,” he told her when she was ten years old. ”I should be glad, however, to have you describe more of what you see and do every day. Can't you tell me all about your school-mates one by one.... Take pains, use your eyes, reflect.” ”I wish you could put a little more life into your letters.” Four years later, he was still urging improvement. ”Your nice letter, my darling child, came yesterday,” he wrote, ”but I must say that it had rather a sleepy air. The words seemed occasionally chosen and arranged under the influence of the drowsy G.o.d.”

”It will be a great advantage to you to cultivate a noticing habit,” he advised. ”Accustom yourself to talk of what you see and to write details, and in a conversational, & even narrative style. There is the greatest possible difference in charm between the same narrative told by one person and by another.... No doubt a large part of this difference is to be ascribed to const.i.tutional differences of temperament, but any intelligent person can greatly increase facility of apprehension & expression by careful self culture.” The ascetic refrain of Chase's instruction to Kate is that an effort of will can surmount most obstacles and self-denial can lead to its own gratifications: ”I know you do not like writing.... You can overcome if you will.... I dislike for example to bathe myself all over with cold water in the morning especially when the thermometer is so low as at present: but I find I can when I determine to do so overcome my feeling of dislike and even subst.i.tute a certain pleasurable sensation.”

In his efforts to discipline and educate his daughter, Chase did not spare Kate his own morbid thoughts about death. ”Remember, my dear child, that the eye of a Holy G.o.d is upon you all the time, and that not an act or word or thought is unnoticed by Him. Remember too, that you may die soon.... Already eleven years of your life are pa.s.sed. You may not live another eleven years.... How short then is this life! And how earnest ought to be our preparation for another!” To ill.u.s.trate his point, he described the death of a little girl just Kate's age, the daughter of a fellow senator. The Monday before her death, he had seen her in the capital, ”strong, robust, active, intelligent; the very impersonation of life and health. A week after and she had gone from earth. What a lesson was here. Lay it to heart, dear Katie, and may G.o.d give you grace.”

If Kate's school reports were unfavorable, Chase refused to allow her to return home for vacation. ”I am sorry that you feel so lonely,” he told her one summer. ”I wish I could feel it safe to allow you to visit more freely, but your conversations with Miss Haines have made known to you the reasons why.” He urged her to understand: ”you have it in your power greatly to promote my happiness by your good conduct, and greatly to destroy my comfort and peace by ill conduct.”

More often she excelled, relying on her nearly encyclopedic memory and hard work to please her exacting father. If unsparing in his criticism, he was extravagant in his praise. ”To an affectionate father” nothing was more gratifying, he told her-not even the thought that he might someday ”be made President”-than ”a beloved child, improving in intelligence, in manners, in physical development, and giving promise of a rich and delightful future.”

He rewarded her with invitations to Was.h.i.+ngton, visits she vividly recalled years later. ”I knew Clay, Webster and Calhoun,” she proudly told a reporter when she was in her fifties. As a small girl, she was particularly impressed by Clay, so tall that ”he had to unwind himself to get up.” At ease with children, Clay ”made much of me and I liked him.” Daniel Webster appeared to Kate an ”ideal of how a statesman ought to look,” the very words later used to describe her father. ”He seldom laughed, yet he was very kind and he used to send me his speeches. I don't suppose he thought I would read them, but he wanted to compliment me and show that he remembered me and I know that I felt very proud when I saw Daniel Webster's frank upon pieces of mail which came to me at the New York school.”

Of all her father's Senate colleagues, Charles Sumner was her favorite, as he was of Frances Seward. ”He was warm-hearted and sensitive,” Kate recalled. ”He was full of anecdotes and was a brilliant talker.” When Sumner, in turn, spoke well of little Kate, Chase was overjoyed. ”You cannot think, my precious child, how much pleasure it gives me to hear you praised.”

Buoyant at such moments with satisfied expectations, Chase shared with her intimate chronicles of his life in Was.h.i.+ngton, long descriptions of the protocol followed when a senator visited the president in his office, detailed accounts of dinners at the White House, amusing reports of late-night sessions in the Senate chamber, when all too many of his colleagues ”have visited the refectory a little too often, and are not as sober as they should be.”

”The sun s.h.i.+nes warm and clear,” he wrote one beautiful June day. ”The wind stirs the trees and fans the earth. I sit in my room and hear the rustle of branches; the merry twitter and song of the birds; the chirp of insects.” ”I should like to have you with me and we should take a ramble together.”

Not surprisingly, Kate cherished the prospect of living in the nation's capital, accompanying her father wherever he went, a.s.sisting him in his daily tasks. Chase understood her desire and was careful to a.s.suage her fear that he might remarry and deprive her of her rightful place by his side. Describing a visit to the Elliotts, a Quaker family with two remarkable daughters, he confessed that ”Miss Lizzie is the best looking of them all, and is really a very superior woman, with a great deal of sense and a great deal of heart. You need not however be alarmed for me, for a gentleman in New York is said to be her accepted lover, and I look only for friends among ladies as I do among gentlemen.”

OF THE FOUR future presidential candidates, Edward Bates was the only one who supported the Compromise wholeheartedly. At last, with what he called the ”African mania” finally subdued, he felt the American people might focus their energies once more on the vast economic opportunities provided by the ever-expanding frontier.

With equal ire, he denounced both ”the lovers of free negroes in the North & the lovers of slave negroes in the South,” believing that the argument over slavery was simply ”a struggle among politicians for sectional supremacy,” with radicals like Seward and Chase in the North, and Calhoun and Toombs in the South, exploiting the issue for personal ambition.