Author: Peg A. Lamphier
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803229471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Motherless from an early age, she became her father's official hostess during the Civil War and Reconstruction years as well as his unofficial campaign manager. As the opening of the Civil War, her husband, William Sprague, was a wealthy industrialist, the "boy governor" of Rhode Island, a dashing military figure, and an alcoholic.".
Author: John Oller
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306822806
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
The tumultuous and passionate life of a remarkable woman born ahead of her time
Author: Jennifer Chiaverini
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698148479
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker and Canary Girls reveals Mary Todd Lincoln’s very public social and political contest with Kate Chase Sprague in this astute and lively novel of the politics of state—set against the backdrop of Civil War Era Washington. Beautiful, intelligent, regal, and entrancing, young Kate Chase Sprague stepped into the role of establishing her thrice-widowed father, Salmon P. Chase, in Washington society as a Lincoln cabinet member and as a future presidential candidate. For her efforts, The Washington Star declared her “the most brilliant woman of her day. None outshone her.” None, that is, but Mary Todd Lincoln. Though Mrs. Lincoln and her young rival held much in common—political acumen, love of country, and a resolute determination to help the men they loved achieve greatness—they could never be friends, for the success of one could come only at the expense of the other...
Author: Alice Sokoloff
Publisher: Dodd Mead
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
Author: Thomas Graham Belden
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1839742887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 638
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Book Description
This is the biography of three of the most fascinating personalities of Civil War America. They were Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a man obsessed with the ambition to become President; Chase’s daughter Kate, who was Washington’s reigning beauty and America’s most influential political hostess; and Kate’s husband William Sprague, the young millionaire Senator from Rhode Island. Chase was a man of talent, even of potential greatness. This classic figure of a statesman had fought his way up through the jungle of mid-nineteenth-century American politics to a place of leadership. He was among the most powerful spokesmen of the uncompromising Radical wing of the Republican Party. Chase was bitterly disappointed when the Republican convention of 1860 passed him by, deciding in favor of a compromise candidate, Abraham Lincoln. He was determined that 1864 would not see him unsuccessful again. With his portrait engraved on the nation’s greenbacks, his name and face were continuously before the country.
Author: Mary Merwin Phelps
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1789128064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447
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Book Description
Katherine Jane “Kate” Chase Sprague (1840-1899) was a Washington society hostess during the American Civil War. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of politician Salmon Chase, who served as Treasury Secretary during President Abraham Lincoln’s first administration and later Chief Justice of the United States. She was educated at the Haines School in New York City, where she learned languages, elocution and the social graces along with music and history. On her return to Columbus, Ohio, she served as official hostess for her father, the newly elected Governor of Ohio. In 1861, Salmon P. Chase became Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln’s administration and set up residence at 6th and E Streets Northwest in Washington, with Kate as his hostess; her soirees were eagerly attended in the nation’s capital, and she effectively became the “Belle of the North.” She married Rhode Island Governor William Sprague, a textile magnate, on November 12, 1863. Kate Chase, Dominant Daughter represents genuine research. Author Mary Merwin Phelps first went to Philadelphia to gather available material in the archives of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, and next to Washington, to examine the Chase papers in the Library of Congress. “They will require six months merely to read,” she was told on the morning of her arrival in the Manuscript Division. The author remained a year and a half in Washington, building up the Chase characters and the scene. She visited the Chase home of the Sixties, where Kate Chase was married to Governor Sprague, and Edgewood, three miles north of the Capitol, where Kate Chase died in 1899. Phelps then went to Rhode Island to gather scraps of material still left on the Sprague terrain, and met the few living persons who knew Kate Chase and her husband. A long and devoted quest was consummated with the publication of Kate Chase, Dominant Daughter in 1935.
Author: Gore Vidal
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307784231
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 673
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Book Description
Lincoln is the cornerstone of Gore Vidal's fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr, 1876, Washington, D.C., Empire, and Hollywood. It opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him. During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation. Isolated in a ramshackle White House in the center of a proslavery city, Lincoln presides over a fragmenting government as Lee's armies beat at the gates. In this profoundly moving novel, a work of epic proportions and intense human sympathy, Lincoln is observed by his loved ones and his rivals. The cast of characters is almost Dickensian: politicians, generals, White House aides, newspapermen, Northern and Southern conspirators, amiably evil bankers, and a wife slowly going mad. Vidal's portrait of the president is at once intimate and monumental, stark and complex, drawn with the wit, grace, and authority of one of the great historical novelists. With a new Introduction by the author.
Author: John Niven
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195364384
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 575
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Book Description
Salmon P. Chase was one of the preeminent men of 19th-century America. A majestic figure, tall and stately, Chase was a leader in the fight to end slavery, a brilliant administrator who as Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury provided crucial funding for a vastly expensive war, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the turmoil of Reconstruction, and the presiding officer of the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. Yet he was also a complex figure. As John Niven reveals in this magisterial biography, Chase was a paradoxical blend of idealism and ambition. If he stood for the highest moral purposes--the freedom and equality of all mankind--these lofty ideas failed to mask a thirst for power so deeply ingrained in his character that it drove away many who shared his principles, but mistrusted his motives. Niven provides a vivid description of Chase's early years--his childhood in New Hampshire (where his father's failed business venture and early death left the family all but destitute) and in Ohio (where he was sent to live with his uncle Philander, an Episcopal bishop), his education at Dartmouth, and his early law career in Cincinnati. Niven shows how the plight of the slaves stirred this reticent young lawyer, and how Chase gradually moved to the forefront of the antislavery movement. At the same time, we see how he used his growing prominence in the antislavery movement to forward his political ambitions. Niven illuminates Chase's long tenure as a public man. Twice elected United States Senator, twice chosen governor of Ohio (then the third most populous state in the Union), Chase organized the widespread but diffuse anti-slavery movement into a workable political organization, the Free Soil party (whose slogan "Free Soil, Free Labor, Freemen" Chase coined himself). We read of Chase's work in Lincoln's war cabinet and his tenure as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and we also follow his many political maneuvers, his attempts to undercut rivals, and his poorly run campaigns for presidential nominations. Niven also provides an intimate portrait of Chase's family life--his loss of three wives and four of his six children, and the unfortunate marriage of his beautiful daughter Kate to a rich but dissolute man--and a vivid picture of life at mid-century. What emerges is a portrait of a tragic figure, whose high qualities of heart and mind and whose many achievements were ultimately tarnished by an often unseemly quest for power. It is a striking look at an eminent statesman as well as a revealing glimpse into political life in 19th-century America, all set against a background of the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War, and the turmoil of Reconstruction.
Author: Cokie Roberts
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062199285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
In this engrossing and informative companion to her New York Times bestsellers Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty, Cokie Roberts marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War by offering a riveting look at Washington, D.C. and the experiences, influence, and contributions of its women during this momentous period of American history. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the small, social Southern town of Washington, D.C. found itself caught between warring sides in a four-year battle that would determine the future of the United States. After the declaration of secession, many fascinating Southern women left the city, leaving their friends—such as Adele Cutts Douglas and Elizabeth Blair Lee—to grapple with questions of safety and sanitation as the capital was transformed into an immense Union army camp and later a hospital. With their husbands, brothers, and fathers marching off to war, either on the battlefield or in the halls of Congress, the women of Washington joined the cause as well. And more women went to the Capital City to enlist as nurses, supply organizers, relief workers, and journalists. Many risked their lives making munitions in a highly flammable arsenal, toiled at the Treasury Department printing greenbacks to finance the war, and plied their needlework skills at The Navy Yard—once the sole province of men—to sew canvas gunpowder bags for the troops. Cokie Roberts chronicles these women's increasing independence, their political empowerment, their indispensable role in keeping the Union unified through the war, and in helping heal it once the fighting was done. She concludes that the war not only changed Washington, it also forever changed the place of women. Sifting through newspaper articles, government records, and private letters and diaries—many never before published—Roberts brings the war-torn capital into focus through the lives of its formidable women.
Author: Edward Achorn
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 080214876X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 490
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Book Description
This vividly rendered Civil War history presents “a lively guided tour of Washington during the 24 hours or so around Lincoln’s swearing-in” (Adam Goodheart, Washington Post). By March 4, 1865, the Civil War had left intractable wounds on the nation. Tens of thousands crowded Washington’s Capitol grounds that day to see Abraham Lincoln take the oath for a second term—and witness what was perhaps the greatest inaugural address in American history. Lincoln stunned the nation by arguing that both sides had been wrong, and that the war’s unimaginable horrors might have been God’s just verdict on the national sin of slavery. In Every Drop of Blood, Edward Achorn reveals the nation’s capital on that momentous day—with its mud, sewage, and saloons, its prostitutes, spies, reporters, social-climbing spouses and power-hungry politicians. Swirling around the complex figure of Lincoln, a host of characters are brought to life, from grievously wounded Union colonel Selden Connor to the embarrassingly drunk new vice president, Andrew Johnson, to poet-journalist Walt Whitman; from soldiers’ advocate Clara Barton and African American leader Frederick Douglass to conflicted actor John Wilkes Booth. In indelible scenes, Achorn captures the frenzy and division in the nation’s capital at this crucial moment in America’s history. His story offers new understanding of our great national crisis, and echoes down the decades to resonate in our own time.
