widowed while he was relatively young. His third wife was a widow who outlived several of her children. One of Grandpa Stephen’s sons died young and his oldest daughter lost her husband while she was in her twenties. One of my grandmothers lost both parents before she was old enough to vote.
Advances in medical science have made such sad events rare, but until recent times death struck far more indiscriminately than today. Nearly every family, rich, poor or in between, was vulnerable to diseases that no longer threaten us.
Recently I won Dorothy Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals as a door prize. Had I not held the lucky ticket I never would have read the book. It was a pretty good read. To me the most interesting parts were the accounts of the pre-Civil War lives and careers of Salmon Chase, Edwin Stanton, Edward Bates, Gideon Welles and William Seward. I was struck by the myriad personal losses these men and their families endured. As I said, death routinely stalked every family in those days, but Lincoln’s cabinet members suffered far more than average.
I will start with Salmon Chase who, with Lincoln, Bates, and Seward sought the Republican nomination in 1860. Chase married his first wife, Kitty, in 1833. Kitty died in childbirth in 1835. The grief-stricken future Secretary of the Treasury, a devout Christian, was especially haunted by Kitty’s death, as she had not fully embraced the faith when she died.
Chase suffered another blow when the child, Catherine, died at the age of five. Chase remarried. His second wife, Eliza, gave birth to a daughter, who died in infancy. Poor Eliza herself died at the age of 25, a victim of tuberculosis. Chase’s third wife was Sarah Belle. The couple soon had two daughters, one of whom died within a year. Two years later Sarah Belle died. Chase never married again, but he lost another loved one. His sister died of a heart attack while dining at Chase’s home.
ne of my great grandfathers died in the 1930s from an infection which developed after he suffered a minor cut. A great-great grandfather was twice
“Death has pursued me incessantly ever since I was twenty-five,” Chase wrote.
Edwin Stanton, as CWN readers know, was Lincoln’s second Secretary of War, who replaced the problematic and ineffectual Simon Cameron in 1862 and served through the war and beyond.
Stanton and his wife Mary had two children, Edwin Jr. and Lucy. Lucy died of scarlet fever in 1843. Two years later Mary died of a bilious fever at the age of 29. Stanton was devastated. His grief nearly drove him mad. He was unable to work for months. His sister, who stayed with him after Mary’s death, was horrified at his behavior, as he wandered the house throughout the night, lamp in hand, sobbing “Where is Mary?”
The deaths of Lucy and Mary were not the first of Stanton’s misfortunes nor were they the last. His father died at 40, when Edwin was 13. The elder Stanton was a prominent physician, but he died with debts and left his family in a very poor financial condition. To help support his mother and younger siblings, Edwin left school and went to work as a bookseller’s apprentice. He later read law and eventually prospered as an attorney. Able then to provide substantial monetary aid to his family, Stanton financed his brother Darwin’s medical education. Darwin later suffered serious brain damage because of a high fever. He committed suicide in 1846. The gruesome sight of his dead brother, covered with blood, one more trauma on top of all the others, had a permanent effect on Stanton’s personality. He recovered, but the cheerful, friendly Edwin Stanton was no more, replaced by the aggressive, brusque, impatient, and irascible Stanton known to students of the Civil War.
Stanton eventually remarried, in 1856, but his second wife took some convincing. Ellen Hutchinson knew the new Edwin Stanton, not the old one, and this one was not easy to love.
In 1862 came yet another dreadful blow. The Stantons’ infant son died of smallpox when a vaccination administered to protect the child caused a severe case of the disease. James suffered for six months and died in July.