She was the daughter of Ohio politician Salmon P. Chase, who served as Treasury Secretary during President Abraham Lincoln's first administration and later Chief Justice of the United States.

Kate Chase was educated at the Haines School in New York City, where she learned languages, elocution and the social graces along with music and history.

Beautiful and intelligent, Kate impressed such friends of her father as Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator and fellow anti-slavery champion; future President James Garfield; and Carl Schurz, a German-born American politician, who described her as follows: She was about eighteen years old, tall and slender and exceedingly well formed.

Her little nose, somewhat audaciously tipped up, could perhaps not have passed muster with a severe critic, but it fitted pleasingly into her face with its large, languid, but at the same time vivacious hazel eyes, shaded by long dark lashes and arched over by proud eyebrows.

After the usual commonplaces, the conversation at the breakfast table, in which Miss Kate took a lively and remarkably intelligent part, soon turned itself upon politics.In 1861, Salmon P. Chase became Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln's administration.

She visited battle camps in the Washington area and befriended Union generals, offering her own views on the proper prosecution of the war, often contrary to the wishes of the administration.

[citation needed] She married Rhode Island Governor William Sprague, a textile magnate, on November 12, 1863 (the social event of the season) at Chase's home in Washington.

[1] As the bride entered the room, the U.S. Marine Band played "The Kate Chase March" that composer Thomas Mark Clark had written for the occasion.

[2] Sprague had problems with alcohol, had affairs with other women, and lost huge sums of money in poorly conceived business ventures.

The evidence conflicts as to whether Kate welcomed this prestigious appointment or rued it as an attempt to put her father "on the shelf" so as to preempt any hope of his attaining his most-cherished ambition for the highest office in the land.

In the summer of 1868, Kate ran her father's campaign for the Democratic nomination from their hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York City, where the convention was being held in famed Tammany Hall.

Although tradition prevented her appearance, as a woman, on the convention floor, she did much of the back-room maneuvering with the goal of winning the nomination after the first ballot.

Kate wrote her father after the convention, "You have been most cruelly deceived and shamefully used by the man [Tilden] whom you trusted implicitly and the country must suffer for his duplicity."

Chase would make one final bid for the presidency in 1872, with Kate's full support, but by then he was physically weakened and a political has-been; he ran as a Liberal Republican, challenging the incumbent Ulysses S. Grant.