After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

William Henry Seward

  CHAPTER 2

  WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD (1865)

  WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD—CALLED HARRY FROM boyhood, Henry afterward—had always scoffed at the threat of assassination. It was “so vicious and desperate” that it simply could not occur in the United States. “Assassination is not an American habit,” Seward had chided a Parisian informant in 1862 who warned of a plot against Lincoln and his cabinet.

  And when Seward was laid low three years later, the cause was not a bullet. He had been out for a carriage ride with his daughter Fanny and son Frederick when their coachman pulled to the side of the road to let Fred jump down and repair a broken door. At that point, their horse bolted.

  The sixty-four-year-old Seward lunged for the reins. Instead, he fell out of the coach, fracturing his jaw, breaking his right arm, and wrenching his shoulder from its socket.

  Seward had already dislocated a shoulder in a similar accident two decades earlier. At that time, a coach wheel had broken free, throwing him from the top of the carriage, where he had been riding so that his cigar smoke would not annoy other passengers.

  This second time, he was carried unconscious to his house, where he awoke in great pain. His doctor pronounced his injuries serious and fitted his head with a metal frame to allow the broken jaw to knit. Seward’s wife, Frances, at home as usual at her father’s house in Auburn, New York, was notified by wire and hurried to Washington. She wrote to her sister that, seeing him for the first time, “It makes my heart ache to look at him.”

  President Lincoln had gone to Virginia to wait outside Richmond until Lee’s surrender was ensured. He had been informed of Seward’s accident and, returning to Washington, walked across Lafayette Park to his bedside. The family had been turning away most well-wishers as Seward moved in and out of delirium, but the sight of the president roused him.

  Barely able to speak, Seward whispered, “You are back from Richmond?”

  “Yes,” Lincoln replied, “and I think we are near the end at last.”

  As the nurse and family members withdrew, Lincoln stretched across the bed, resting on his elbow to get closer to Seward. For half an hour, he spoke of the situation on the war front. When Lincoln stepped back outside, he gestured to the family that Seward had fallen asleep.

  • • •

  The warm regard between the two men had not come easily. Grandson of a Revolutionary War officer, son of a successful land speculator, Henry Seward had been a small and frail child with a jutting nose, unruly red hair, and an unusually quick mind. At fifteen, he entered Union College in Schenectady, New York, but after two years he quarreled with his father over his meager allowance and ran away with a friend to Augusta, Georgia. In a newly opened academy, Seward set himself up as a teacher of Latin and Greek.

  Eight weeks later, Henry’s father read in a newspaper about his being hired and wrote to the headmaster that his “much-indulged son” had plunged his parents “into profound shame and grief.”

  Contrite, the boy returned home, but his escapade in the South—and what he had seen there—fortified a lifelong aversion to slavery.

  • • •

  Graduating from Union College at nineteen with highest honors, Henry went to New York to pursue the law and any willing young women. On being admitted to the bar, however, he settled down in Auburn, New York, and married Frances Miller, the daughter of his law firm’s senior partner. Because his high-strung bride felt secure only in her childhood home, the newlyweds moved in with her family.

  As Henry became drawn to politics, he broke with New York state party leader Martin Van Buren and his Democrats because they supported slavery. In the 1824 presidential election, he declared publicly for John Quincy Adams.

  During that campaign, Seward denounced the practice in New York State of a political party passing over the best-qualified applicants for public jobs to fill them instead with “supple and needy parasites of power.” Seward was describing the spoils system that Van Buren and his candidate, Andrew Jackson, would introduce into the federal government four years later.

  Seward found a home in the Anti-Masonic movement, the faction formed to protest the influence of Freemasonry in American life. The apparent murder of William Morgan, who disappeared after threatening to publish Masonic secrets, had ignited enough outrage that Seward was nominated for Congress by the Anti-Masons.

  He withdrew, to avoid losing with John Quincy Adams in his re-election campaign. In defeat, Seward soured on politics but remained with the Anti-Masons. He found Adams’s political heir, Henry Clay, unacceptable because Clay owned slaves.

  As it happened, however, Seward’s political career had just begun.

  Four years earlier, he had been coming back from an excursion to Niagara Falls when his coach suffered another mishap and lost a wheel. As Seward struggled to get back on the road, he was grateful for help from a strapping newspaper editor from Rochester named Thurlow Weed.

  At that first meeting, Weed detected in Seward—four years his junior—enough political promise that he resolved to know him better.

  • • •

  Edward Thurlow Weed, son of a father in and out of debtor’s prison, had a passion for books that compensated for the few months of formal education he got in a family that was always obliged to move on.

  Sixteen at the time of the War of 1812, Weed volunteered for the Fourteenth Regiment of the New York State Militia. He patrolled along Lake Ontario but saw no action. At war’s end, Weed worked as an apprentice journalist, following the jobs from Auburn to Albany. His fledgling career was interrupted briefly in Cooperstown when he was arrested and charged with assault and battery.

  According to the complaint, Weed had been with two other youths when one of them offered to assist a girl onto her wagon. She claimed that during the hoisting, he had been “guilty of some rudeness to her person.”

  With no money, Weed spent a night in jail as an accomplice. But the trial itself was brief. Jury members did not leave their seats before they acquitted all three defendants.

  His reputation restored, Weed courted sixteen-year-old Catherine Ostrander, the daughter of his Cooperstown landlady. By the time they were allowed to marry, he had spent an interlude in New York City, where he printed political tracts and indulged his love of the theater. Only the offer of a foreman’s job at the Albany Register lured him back to the state capital.

  When a paper that had backed Martin Van Buren was put up for sale, Weed and a partner bought it and converted it to the Republican Agriculturalist, a four-page weekly dedicated to farm news. Very soon, however, politics proved irresistible, and Weed made his first endorsement; his candidate lost.

  Moving on to Rochester, a flourishing mill town, Weed became an influential columnist with an intemperate style, attacking opponents as “Van Buren’s pimps” or as mentally damaged. Weed drew the line at a candidate’s family, however, and never joined in the scurrilous onslaught against Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel.

  • • •

  Weed used the coach-wheel incident to foster an unlikely friendship—he, burly and aggressive, given to mispronouncing words and committing spelling errors that betrayed his spotty education; Seward, acknowledged to be brilliant but lacking Weed’s sharp insights into human nature.

  As they exchanged letters, Seward began to call on Weed whenever his legal practice took him to Rochester. Their wives swapped recipes; the Seward children took to calling the bluff, generous editor “Uncle Weed.”

  Weed’s notoriety had won him a seat in the state assembly, but after a term he had drifted home to his newspaper and his regular softball games. By 1830, however, Weed was confessing that he “liked the excitement of politics” and was ready to return to the state capital. He decided that Seward should join him as a member of the state senate, and by that time Weed could make it happen.

  • • •

  Seward’s move to Albany set a pattern for his family. While he was mastering the intricacies of practical po
litics, Frances stayed behind in her father’s house with their two small sons, Augustus and Frederick. In the capital, Seward developed a lifelong interest in the banking system and in transportation—the canals and railroads of New York State.

  When Andrew Jackson assailed the Bank of the United States, Thurlow Weed saw it as a shrewd political maneuver on the president’s part. Weed himself favored the bank as a necessary tool for conducting the nation’s business. But he had also found it “easy to enlist the laboring classes against a ‘monster bank’ or ‘moneyed aristocracy.’ ”

  Other leaders of his party, including Seward, disdained that populist tactic. In 1834, he rose in the state senate to subject his colleagues, who were accustomed to folksy homilies, to a formal discourse on high finance.

  The chamber was filled with Albany’s prominent citizens, come to hear one of the state senate’s youngest members. Driving home his central point, Seward did not disappoint them. If Jackson’s Democrats were so afraid that a national bank would create an aristocracy, why did his administration want to charter state banks that would foster similar elites in every corner of the state?

  His audience agreed that Seward’s rhetoric had been impressive, even when delivered in his flat and uninflected voice. They came away feeling, in the words of one observer, “lost in admiration at the power of intellect.”

  • • •

  In recent months, the Anti-Masons had joined with some Southern Democrats and the National Republicans of New England to form the Whig Party, which promised to speak for an emerging middle class. With his banking speech and others like it, Seward was becoming more than a one-note Anti-Mason spokesman.

  His new stature led the Whigs to nominate him for governor. Jacksonians struck back by shaving eleven years off Seward’s age and claiming that, at a mere twenty-two, Seward was far too young for a governor’s responsibilities.

  Their deceit had been unnecessary. Andrew Jackson’s popularity was too strong to withstand, and his party’s candidate beat Seward by twelve thousand votes.

  Thurlow Weed granted that his “disappointment occasioned temporary depression.” It certainly dampened Seward’s normal ebullience. Then, at home, he found further cause for dismay.

  While he had been traveling in Europe with his father, Frances had been courted by Seward’s good friend, a state senator named Albert Tracy. Handsome, a few years older than Seward, and a better listener, Tracy’s ardent letters had convinced Frances that she was in love with him.

  And yet Frances was pious. Being unfaithful, even by mail, caused her such guilt that she confessed her temptation to her husband and handed him Tracy’s letters. Seward burned the letters without reading them, but the marriage seemed ended.

  Then, after he lost the governorship, Seward wrote his own letter to Frances at home in Auburn, to assure her that he had always loved her despite his being led astray by political ambition. He regretted that he could not share her Christian fervor, but he was ready to try to repair their marriage.

  “My heart turns to you,” Seward wrote, “possibly with less than its original force but still with all the energy . . . left to it.”

  Frances replied that she accepted the fact that she would always love him more deeply than he cared for her, but the flirtation with Tracy had convinced her that she could never love anyone but Henry.

  • • •

  As Seward was reconciling with his wife, his feelings toward Albert Tracy remained convoluted. He wrote to his former friend, pointing out that, except for Frances’s virtue, Tracy would have destroyed Seward’s peace, “if not my honor.” He concluded, “I have long since forgiven you this wound, for weakness I knew it was, but I cannot forget it.”

  Tracy’s enthusiasm for politics had declined, however, and he withdrew from public life just as Seward was returning to the fray with renewed vigor.

  During the 1838 race for governor, Thurlow Weed professed to be impartial even as he went about burnishing Seward’s reputation. Weed had calculated that Seward was the best choice for “awakening enthusiasm especially among the young men of the state.” To mend fences, Weed assured Henry Clay’s supporters that Seward had overcome his distaste for Clay as a slave owner and would support him for president in 1840.

  Despite Weed’s efforts, Seward’s chances for the nomination were looking dim by the time the party met in Utica. Then, after a third ballot, Weed went to work. He took care not to offend delegates pledged to other candidates since he wanted to guarantee that “the nominee would be cheerfully and heartily accepted by the whole convention.”

  After Weed’s night of strenuous lobbying, Seward was nominated, and his nomination made unanimous.

  As the campaign progressed, Seward was cautious to a fault. Pressed by abolitionists to spell out his position in specific terms, he hedged so blatantly that Weed worried a backlash from antislavery voters might lose them the election.

  Weed’s own talents, however, were on constant display. He courted the growing Irish vote, and he oversaw the hiring in Philadelphia of laborers who worked and voted in New York. When Seward won by ten thousand votes, he knew whom to thank.

  “God bless Thurlow Weed!” the new governor exclaimed. “I owe this result to him.”

  • • •

  Weed made creative use of his victory. Lawmakers soon learned that Weed avidly collected information about their lives and was prepared to expose their secrets if he was crossed. Since Whigs now controlled the legislature, he immediately rewarded himself with the post of state printer, the most lucrative contract the legislature could bestow.

  Very soon, Weed had established such sway over the appointment of judges and commissioners that he was being denounced as a dictator or, snidely, as “My Lord Thurlow.”

  • • •

  While Governor Seward preferred to stay aloof from national politics, Weed continued to wield a potent influence. In 1840, he had considered Clay unelectable, managed to undercut him for the presidential nomination, and helped swing the party to William Henry Harrison.

  During the campaign, Weed led the charge against President Van Buren by painting him as a luxury-addicted fop compared with honest, homespun General Harrison. To pursue that line of attack, Weed backed a partisan newspaper called Log Cabin, edited by one of his protégés, a fervent twenty-nine-year-old abolitionist, Horace Greeley.

  Like Weed, Greeley was an early believer in gaudy trappings for a political campaign. Promoting the catchy “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,” he assured Weed that “our songs are doing more good than anything else.” Greeley printed them on the back pages of his newspaper and wrote, “really, I think every song is good for five hundred new subscribers.”

  The campaign produced a landside vote for Harrison, and a jubilant Weed ran an editorial mocking those who had wagered against him in the election. To pay off their bets, he wrote, “please call one at a time, approaching our office from Washington Street and departing through Congress Street, keeping in line, so as not to block up the highway.”

  • • •

  During the second of Seward’s two-year terms as governor, he proved more liberal than other Whig leaders on the issues of improving public education and abolition. His call for a freer immigration policy made him popular with the Irish, even though many went on voting for the Democrats. As he declined to seek a third term, Seward addressed that paradox:

  “My principles are too liberal, too philanthropic, if it be not vain to say so,” Seward observed, with a degree of self-satisfaction. “My principles are very good and popular only for a man out of office.”

  • • •

  At home in Auburn, the Sewards settled into a routine of limited intimacy. Frances’s father had moved his bed into the cooler living room for the summer, and while Frances was visiting friends in Rochester, Seward installed his own parents in one of their parlors.

  Frances had insisted that Seward refrain from conducting his law practice from home because of the unsavory men it
would attract. But on one occasion former president John Quincy Adams, returning from a trip to Montreal, passed through Auburn, and Frances looked on aghast as his admirers led a torchlight parade to her yard, where they broke the gates and trampled her rosebushes.

  • • •

  As he practiced law in Auburn, politics were never far from Seward’s thoughts. When President Harrison died after a month in office, his successor, John Tyler, tried to keep Thurlow Weed appeased with patronage, but as Tyler lost support, Weed drifted reluctantly to Henry Clay. Equally halfhearted, Seward put aside his earlier qualms and went on the campaign trail.

  Since Clay was still waffling on slavery, Seward’s speeches addressed the issue head-on: “You will say that Henry Clay is a slave owner. So he is. I regret it as deeply as you do.” He went on to remind voters that Clay’s rivals would be even less acceptable.

  But the Democrats nominated James K. Polk, who ran on a popular promise to annex the state of Texas. Seward opposed the extension of slavery that Texas would bring and the war with Mexico that was sure to follow.

  Clay lost narrowly to Polk, and war soon broke out. When their son, Augustus, graduated from West Point and was ordered immediately to fight in Mexico, Seward feared that Frances might not survive her forebodings.

  Four years later, Seward was out stumping again for the Whig nominee, this time the victorious general of the Mexican war, Zachary Taylor. For his efforts, Taylor’s brother had promised Thurlow Weed that Seward would be appointed secretary of state.

  Thurlow Weed

  Sticking by the Whigs, Seward and Weed had resisted the appeal of another new party, the Free Soilers, which was more outspoken against slavery. Charles Sumner and the other Northern liberals who became Free Soilers nominated ex-president Martin Van Buren, even though he had been repudiated by his own Democrats.

  The campaign provided Seward with his first look at Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln. He deplored Lincoln’s rambling speeches, which depended more on homespun stories than on a forthright denunciation of slavery. But Seward granted that Lincoln did excel at “putting the audience in good humor.”