After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  Twenty years later, Seward reminisced about one night on the campaign trail in Worcester, Massachusetts, when limited accommodations at an inn forced him to share a bed with Lincoln.

  As they talked throughout much of the night, Seward exhorted Lincoln to speak out more boldly for abolition. Finally, in Seward’s telling, Lincoln “admitted that I was right in my anti-slavery position and principles” and rolled over and went to sleep.

  • • •

  Zachary Taylor’s election as president in 1848 encouraged Seward to seek a U.S. Senate seat, and on January 31, 1849, the New York legislature chose him by a four-to-one margin. The birth of their fifth child had left Frances Seward even more housebound, but since she regarded her husband’s election as a victory for the forces of virtue, she was almost cheerful as she sent him off to Washington.

  In debates over the Compromise of 1850—which excluded slavery from California and New Mexico but also included the Fugitive Slave provisions—Seward seemed to imply in one speech that the dictates of God overruled the U.S. Constitution.

  Looking on, Thurlow Weed fretted that the ensuing outcry would be politically damaging. Seward remained unrepentant, however, even after Frances forwarded a packet of threatening letters from South Carolina.

  Seward had grown close to President Taylor. Then in July, Taylor died and Millard Fillmore succeeded him. When Seward realized that Fillmore would not honor Taylor’s Whig principles, he predicted doom:

  “All is dark for him and for the country, and there is not a ray of light to enable me to see through it.”

  Although Weed was urging caution for political reasons, Seward had come to see himself as fervently antislavery. He remembered rejoicing “almost as heartily as the slaves themselves” after a law passed in New York State to provide for gradual emancipation.

  Given that mood in the north, Weed’s Evening Journal was finally prepared to throw down a challenge to the South: Rather than wrangling over the status of Kansas and Nebraska, those territories should be settled immediately by antislavery homesteaders.

  Seward took up the cry in the Senate:

  “Come on, then, gentlemen of the slave states! Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in a competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in number, as it is in the right!”

  When thousands of Northerners responded, the ensuing battles caused the territory to be called “Bloody Kansas,” and Seward’s wish to see Kansas enter the Union as a free state would go unrealized until January 21, 1861, the same day that Jefferson Davis resigned from the Senate to join the Confederacy.

  For the present, Weed was directing his energies to fusing support from Northern Democrats and Whigs with the new Republican Party, aiming for a unity that would guarantee Seward the presidency in 1856. As for the anti-immigrant Know Nothings, Seward predicted that, despite their current strength, they would “inevitably disappear.” He said, “The heart of the country is fixed on higher, nobler things. Do not distrust it.”

  Preparing for his campaign, Seward tried to lure Frances to Washington by taking a house on Twenty-first and G streets. When the pull of Auburn remained too great, Seward excused her absence to Charles Sumner on the grounds that life in the capital was raw and uncongenial: “She is too noble a woman to think of parting from and too frail to hope to keep long.”

  To inspire voters, Seward authorized the publication of a campaign biography and a three-volume collection of his letters. Weed began extolling him in the Evening Journal as heir to the lofty principles of John Quincy Adams.

  But by the time the Republicans convened, Weed considered the timing premature and arranged that Seward’s name not be entered. The nomination went instead to John C. Frémont, who proceeded to lose to the Democrat James Buchanan.

  • • •

  With Weed’s tutoring, Seward had learned his way around the nation’s financial centers at a time when New York, with the largest population, was also the wealthiest state. Leading the new Republicans, Seward was increasingly well regarded in the Senate, even by Democrats and Southerners. His easy amiability allowed him to count among his friends both Douglas of Illinois and Davis of Mississippi.

  With Frances in Auburn, Seward’s daughter-in-law acted as his hostess, providing a convivial background for lavish dinner parties and lively conversation. Soon after Mississippi’s second senator, Henry “Hangman” Foote, had blistered Seward on the Senate floor, he was surprised to be invited to Seward’s house for terrapin, fried oysters, and roast duck.

  When Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina, came near death during childbirth, Seward sent his carriage to brave a Washington blizzard and take the Davises’ nurse to her side. Mrs. Davis later praised his genuine “earnest, tender interest.”

  As threats to the Union grew, Seward’s advice was eagerly sought by Southern Whigs and antisecession Democrats. Above all, he was determined not to commit Charles Sumner’s unforgivable sin: Seward never attacked his fellow senators by name.

  Thirty years earlier, Van Buren, another New Yorker, had been considered a magician for his mastery of the art of politics. Now observers were regarding Seward as the same kind of sorcerer.

  Carl Schurz, a young German-born journalist, saw past “the slim wiry figure, the thin, sallow face, the overhanging eyebrows, and the muffled voice” to glimpse “a sort of political wizard who knew all secrets and commanded political forces unknown to all the world, except himself and his bosom friend, Thurlow Weed, the most astute, skilful, and indefatigable political manager ever known.”

  By the time of the 1860 presidential election, Seward seemed headed inevitably to the Republican nomination. His competition included former congressman Lincoln, but Seward was eight years older and far more experienced. As for renown, Seward’s speeches had been circulated across America in printings of fifty thousand copies while Lincoln had begun to build his national reputation only in 1858, through a series of debates with Stephen Douglas.

  During the fourth debate in the central Illinois town of Charleston, Lincoln had reacted to Douglas’s unyielding defense of slavery with a concession that distressed his Northern allies without winning him the Senate seat. “I am not,” Lincoln had said, “nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

  Lincoln went on to insist that he did not favor Negroes voting, or Negroes serving on juries, or holding public office, or intermarrying with whites.

  • • •

  By 1860, the issue of race dominated the presidential campaign. The attack by John Brown at Harper’s Ferry had churned up emotions to such a pitch that Seward’s former Southern friends in the Senate stopped speaking to him. One of them warned the Republicans, “You may elect Seward to the presidency of the North. But of the South, never!”

  Addressing again the admission of Kansas to the Union, Seward delivered a principled speech that was well received throughout the Northeast. But on February 27, 1860, Lincoln spoke in New York at a hall built by an industrialist and fervent abolitionist, Peter Cooper, for a new school that would offer free classes to workingmen.

  Lincoln’s message at Cooper Union was more equivocal than his audience may have expected. He argued that slavery should be prohibited in the future but not overturned where it already existed, and yet the elegance of Lincoln’s language won over urbane Easterners who had questioned entrusting the presidency to a backwoods lawyer.

  “Let us have faith that right makes might,” Lincoln said, “and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

  • • •

  After counseling against Seward’s run four years earlier, Thurlow Weed now counted on the division among Democrats to elect a Republican president. On the first ballot at the Republican convention in Chicago, Seward’s vote far outstripped those of his challengers, and Weed’s confide
nce seemed justified.

  But Seward’s delegate count still fell short, and by the third ballot, the Republicans had turned to Lincoln as more electable in the Middle West.

  Despite his aching disappointment, Seward took his cue from Henry Clay, who had overcome his bitterness to campaign for William Henry Harrison in 1840 and for Zachary Taylor eight years later. In defeat, Seward remained true to his nature—calm, wry, and detached, even fatalistic. He wrote back to one sympathizer, “Who can certainly know that what has been done in Chicago will not prove better” than if he had been the nominee?

  Gamely, Seward campaigned throughout New York State for the Republicans and moved on by rail through the Middle West. His retinue had picked up Charles Francis Adams, Jr., grandson and great-grandson of presidents. The young man, four years out of Harvard, became a devotee of Seward’s “really remarkable speeches,” sometimes so elevated that Seward forgot to mention his party’s ticket.

  Charles’s brother, Henry, three years younger, described an evening he spent with Seward:

  “I sat and watched the old fellow with his big nose and his wire hair and grizzly eyebrows and miserable dress, and listened to him rolling out his grand, broad ideas that would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language.”

  To bolster Lincoln’s prospects, Seward again tempered his antislavery jeremiads as he campaigned for the Republicans in fifteen states and territories. To a Detroit audience, he described Negroes as “a foreign and feeble element” that was “incapable of assimilation.”

  But Southerners were not placated. Twenty-three Southern representatives and seven senators were already urging the creation of a Southern Confederacy.

  When the ballots were counted, Lincoln had won less than 40 percent of the popular vote, and Republicans took control of neither house of Congress.

  At that, South Carolinians acted on the threats they had been making for more than twenty years. On December 20, 1860, the state withdrew from the Union. Laurence Keitt, who had cheered Preston Brooks’s caning of Charles Sumner four years earlier, announced, “Loyalty to the Union will be treason to the South.”

  As president-elect, Lincoln invited Thurlow Weed to Springfield to spend two days reviewing the political landscape. When they said good-bye, Lincoln asked playfully whether Weed hadn’t forgotten something.

  Weed looked blank. Lincoln prompted him: “You have not asked for any office.”

  Weed hedged. Yes, he said, when the proper time arrived, “I should probably, like hosts of other friends, ask for such favors.”

  Lincoln said confidingly, “I was warned to be on my guard against you. And the joke of the matter is that those who gave the warning are after offices themselves, while you have avoided the subject.”

  • • •

  Weed had merely retreated to his preferred role behind the scenes. He knew that Lincoln had asked his newly elected vice president, Maine senator Hannibal Hamlin, to sound out Seward about accepting the post of secretary of state. Weed had been furious since 1854, when Horace Greeley had defected from his ranks. He could finally revenge himself by blocking Greeley for the Senate seat that Seward might be vacating.

  In contacting Seward about a cabinet position, Hamlin was not initially persuasive. Seward’s loss of the nomination had deflated him, despite his soldiering on for Lincoln through the campaign. And at home, Frances Seward was plainly relieved by the outcome. She wrote to her husband, about to turn sixty, “You have earned the right to a peaceful old age.”

  But when Hamlin presented Seward with a note from Lincoln, its language touched Seward’s heart. In formally tendering the offer, Lincoln expressed his “belief that your position in the public eye, your integrity, ability, learning and great experience” all testified to Seward’s fitness for the position.

  Problems arose almost immediately. During a second visit, Weed learned that Lincoln intended to appoint former Whigs and rival Democrats to his cabinet. Seward joined Weed in protesting, but reluctantly he had to accept the president’s decision.

  • • •

  In the months before Lincoln arrived from Springfield to take office, leadership of the Republican Party in Washington fell to Seward, and he seized the chance to expand his portfolio beyond foreign affairs. Almost alone among Republican officials, Seward promoted further concessions to the South in hopes of staving off civil war. All the same, on January 9, 1861, Mississippi led the procession of states that followed South Carolina out of the Union.

  • • •

  By February, Lincoln’s safety was in sufficient jeopardy that to assume the presidency he had to be smuggled into the capital. Inevitably, he then replaced Seward as the head of their party, and Seward resented his demotion. He particularly objected to Lincoln’s choice of Salmon P. Chase as secretary of the Treasury since he distrusted Chase as one of the Radical Republicans who would insist on a hard line in dealing with the South.

  Not that Seward was entirely without influence. At Lincoln’s request, he went over a draft of the president’s first inaugural address and struck out phrases he considered too partisan. Seward also offered a coda, which Lincoln refined into immortality when he invoked “the better angels of our nature.”

  On April 12, 1861, Jefferson Davis, acting as the Confederacy’s president, ordered that his guns compel the surrender of a Union enclave at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The skirmish confirmed Lincoln’s doubts that the surrounding border states could ever be sufficiently appeased to keep them in the Union, and it silenced Seward’s plea for concessions to the South.

  The onset of the war in earnest provoked new restrictions from the Lincoln administration. For the first time, Washington began to censor reporters by stationing soldiers at the telegraph offices to prevent reports of early casualties.

  Seward explained to the outraged journalists that releasing such information would make reconciliation more difficult later.

  He also urged Lincoln to act when a secessionist mob in Baltimore threatened to disrupt Northern troop movements. To prevent them from tearing up the train tracks between Annapolis and Philadelphia, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ordered General Winfield Scott to arrest summarily anyone who threatened the public safety.

  • • •

  In the despairing days of reversals for the Union forces, Lincoln confronted an insurrection in the Senate. Recent evidence of military incompetence had provoked a growing movement in the North to end the war. The Confederate army had long been plagued by desertions; now two hundred Union soldiers were deserting every day.

  Unwilling to attack the president directly, Radical Republicans looked for a scapegoat to explain a recent battlefield humiliation at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and settled on Henry Seward. They already viewed Seward with suspicion, and lately he had offended Charles Sumner and other Radicals by equating their stubborn insistence on ending slavery with that of the Confederates in defending it.

  Led by Salmon Chase, the Radicals called for Seward’s resignation, accusing him of being a “paralyzing influence” who dominated Lincoln’s thinking. In the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill wryly explained Seward’s dominance: He “has been President de facto and has kept a sponge saturated with chloroform to Uncle Abe’s nose.”

  • • •

  Informed on December 16, 1862, of an impending vote by his former colleagues, Seward wrote out a letter of resignation and sent his son, Fred, to deliver it at the White House along with Fred’s note resigning as assistant secretary of state. Lincoln understood that he, not Seward, was the target and resolved not to part with the man he had come to consider his most valued adviser.

  After their initial awkwardness in the days when Lincoln had felt the need to assert himself, the two men now found themselves united by their humor and by the pleasure they took in sitting together, apart from their wives, in easy camaraderie. Seward repeated to Fred what would become one of Lincoln’s better-known jokes, even though Seward had been its b
utt.

  Seward by then had the run of the White House, and one day he had come upon Lincoln polishing his boots.

  Seward, the New Yorker, chastised the Midwesterner. In Washington, Seward chided the president, we do not blacken our own boots.

  “Indeed?” Lincoln replied. “Then whose boots do you blacken, Mister Secretary?”

  • • •

  Before the Senate resolution attacking Seward could come up for a vote, a compromise was reached that called for a “reconstruction of the cabinet” but did not single out Seward by name. A Committee of Nine called on Lincoln at the White House to urge that he return to the practice of John Quincy Adams and submit his policies to a vote of the cabinet.

  Lincoln received them warmly and promised to study their paper. But he had also invited to the meeting his full cabinet except for Seward, and he compelled Chase to state whether he was being regularly consulted. Reluctantly, Chase fibbed and assured them that the cabinet was working together without dissension.

  When the five-hour session broke up at 1 a.m., not only had the senators backed down, but they had turned on Chase for misleading them about Seward’s role.

  Their denunciation was so harsh that Chase felt compelled to offer his own resignation. When he did, Lincoln received it with what Chase considered an unseemly eagerness. It turned out, however, that the president was simply relieved that he could now refuse to accept both resignations at the same time.

  • • •

  Mary Lincoln agreed with the Radical Republicans in deploring the decision to keep Seward in the cabinet. Since the election, she had worried that Seward would hog the credit for the administration’s achievements, and she had found an excuse not to receive Frances Seward during a visit to Washington. But in fact, Mary Lincoln harbored misgivings about most of Seward’s colleagues as well. To a friend, she complained that “there was not a member of the Cabinet who did not stab her husband & the country daily.”