If any woman was ever born to be the first lady of the United States, it was Kate. Glitteringly beautiful and dazzlingly charming, she was an engaging hostess whose table and conversation sparkled.

She once rivaled a president’s wife as queen bee of Washington and came close to living in the White House herself, only to crash and burn in a humiliating scandal.

This is her sad, forgotten story.

Katherine Jane Chase was born in Cincinnati on a muggy Thursday in August 1840. Her father, New Hampshire-born Salmon Chase, was an ambitious Buckeye lawyer who had trouble keeping a wife. They kept dying. The first died shortly after childbirth. Wife #2, Kate’s mom, died after delivering her. The final wife died of consumption.   

Mother and stepdaughter didn’t get along. So, Kate was hustled off to a New York finishing school where she mastered the social graces while her father served in the U.S. Senate. She knew that when she eventually returned to Ohio, her father would need her accomplished flair.

Kate was Daddy’s Girl. She worshipped him. And the timing of her homecoming was especially fortunate since Chase was now both the newly-elected governor of Ohio and a widower yet again.

As her father’s hostess, she did more than throw elegant dinner parties. The teenager was a natural politician and mature beyond her years. She captivated A-List guests such as future president James Garfield and Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, a Boston Brahmin who wasn’t easily impressed. One visitor wrote, “She had something imperial in the pose of her head, and all her movements expressed an exquisite natural charm.”

Kate was also her father’s confidant and closest advisor. In that time when women couldn’t vote, much less hold office, Kate focused her substantial talents on the dream she and her father shared: winning the presidency.

Chase sought the infant Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1860, losing to Abraham Lincoln. Though he was reelected to the Senate that fall, the president-elect had other plans for him. Chase became Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, and Kate was his secret social weapon.

The beautiful young woman took Washington by storm, setting her on a collision course with first lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Washington quickly fell into rival camps: those who preferred Mrs. Lincoln’s Blue Room salon or the Chase’s 6^th and E Street Northwest parlor.

The women were rivals in another arena as well. Both were angling for the same prize—the presidency in 1864.

Washington was filled with dashing young military men as the Civil War began. The beautiful Kate was the city’s prize catch. A Who’s Who of bachelors vied for her affection.

She eventually gave her hand to William Sprague, the fabulously wealthy 32-year-old “Boy Governor” of Rhode Island who’d just been elevated to the Senate. He gave her a tiara of matching diamonds and pearls (valued at $1.25 million today) as a gift at their November 1863 wedding. When she entered the room for the reception, the U.S. Marine Band played the “Kate Chase March” composed for the occasion. Abraham Lincoln was on hand. Mary Lincoln was not.

With Lincoln’s popularity dropping as the war’s casualties rose and with Sprague’s millions now secured, Chase seemed destined to reach the presidency at last.

Then everything fell apart.

It turned out Sprague was an alcoholic. A scandal involving him dealing in contraband cotton from the Confederacy (which was desperately needed by his family’s lucrative textile mills) erupted. The war turned in the North’s favor in time to save Lincoln’s reelection prospects. Topping it all off, the Supreme Court’s chief justice died, creating the perfect opening for Lincoln to dispatch his rival Chase once again. When Chase put on the justice’s robe, his presidential dreams ended.

As Sprague’s drinking worsened, the couple drifted apart. Both spouses had multiple affairs. It was so bad Washington whispered about the true paternity of their second child.

The bottom fell out in 1873 when Kate’s adored father died, and a severe economic depression crippled Sprague’s businesses. In 1879, Kate was caught in an affair with New York Sen. Roscoe Conkling. Sprague is believed to have run Conkling out of their Newport mansion with a shotgun.

When the Spragues divorced in 1882, Kate returned to her maiden name. Their three daughters lived with her while their only son went with the dad (and committed suicide a few years later).

Losing what was left of her fortune, Kate peddled chickens and eggs door to door, relying on purchases from old friends to stay financially afloat, a recluse who looked years older than her age. She refused to allow herself to be photographed in her fallen condition.

When kidney disease finally claimed her at age 58 in 1899, The New York Times wrote, “She was the most brilliant woman of her day. None outshone her.”

Yet, The Cincinnati Inquirer reported after her funeral, “Hardly more than two or three—and they her nearest relatives on earth—were gathered around her gave.”

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