By return mail Seward pledged that he desired nothing but to return home, to share the family duties and read by the fireside on the long winter nights, “to live for you and for our dear boys,” to be “a partner in your thoughts and cares and feelings.” With Frances to support him, Seward promised to renew his Episcopal faith and attempt to find his way to God. He was “count[ing] with eagerness,” he concluded, “the hours which intervene between this period and the time when that life will commence.”
As Seward took leave of the many friends he had made in his four years in Albany, he decided against confronting Tracy. The day before his scheduled departure, however, a curious letter from his old friend provoked an immediate response. The letter opened with halcyon recollections of the early days of their acquaintance, when Tracy still possessed “golden dreams, of a devoted, peculiar friendship. How much I suffered,” he wrote, “when I was first awakened to the perception that these were only dreams…. For this you are no way responsible. You loved me as much as you could…but it was less far less than I hoped.” He explained that “this pain, this disappointment is my excuse for the capriciousness, and too frequent unkindness which I have displayed towards you.”
In an emotional reply, Seward explained that Tracy misunderstood completely the nature of the “alienation” that had befallen them. “Availing yourself of the relation existing between us,” Seward charged, “you did with or without premeditated purpose what as a man of honor you ought not to have done—pursued a course of conduct which but for the virtue and firmness of the being dearest to me” would have destroyed his entire family. Seward related his initial reluctance to read the letters Frances had surrendered to him; and his conclusion, after reading them, that Tracy “had failed to do me the injury you recklessly contemplated.
“Thenceforth Tracy,” he wrote, “you lost that magic influence you once possessed over me…. You still have my respect as a man of eminent talents and of much virtue but you can never again be the friend of my secret thoughts. I part without anger, but without affection.” Even at this heavy moment, Seward remained the consummate politician, unwilling to burn his bridges completely.
If Seward believed the crisis with Frances had forever muted the voice of his public ambitions with a contented domesticity, he was mistaken. No sooner had he returned to Auburn than he admitted to a friend: “It is seldom that persons who enjoy intervals of public life are happy in their periods of seclusion.” Within days, he was writing to Weed, pleading with his old friend and mentor to “keep me informed upon political matters, and take care that I do not so far get absorbed in professional occupation, that you will cease to care for me as a politician.”
In the summer of 1835, seeking distraction from the tedium of his legal practice, the thirty-four-year-old Seward organized a family expedition to the South. He and Frances occupied the backseat of a horse-drawn carriage, while their five-year-old son, Fred, sat up front with the coachman, former slave William Johnson. Their elder son, Gus, remained at home with his grandfather. Seward, as always, was thrilled by the journey. “When I travel,” he explained, “I banish care and thought and reflection.” Over a three-month period, the little party traveled through Pennsylvania and Virginia, stopping at the nation’s capital on their way back. While their letters home extolled the warmth and generous hospitality extended to them by Southerners all along their route, their firsthand encounter with the consequences of slavery profoundly affected their attitudes toward the South.
At the time of their journey, three decades of immigration, commercial enterprise, and industrial production had invigorated Northern society, creating thriving cities and towns. The historian Kenneth Stampp well describes how the North of this period “teemed with bustling, restless men and women who believed passionately in ‘progress’ and equated it with growth and change; the air was filled with the excitement of intellectual ferment and with the schemes of entrepreneurs; and the land was honeycombed with societies aiming at nothing less than the total reform of mankind.”
Yet, crossing into Virginia, the Sewards entered a world virtually unchanged since 1800. “We no longer passed frequent farm-houses, taverns, and shops,” Henry wrote as the family carriage wound its way through Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains, “but our rough road conducted us…[past] low log-huts, the habitations of slaves.” They rarely encountered other travelers, finding instead “a waste, broken tract of land, with here and there an old, decaying habitation.” Seward lamented: “How deeply the curse of slavery is set upon this venerated and storied region of the old dominion. Of all the countries I have seen France only whose energies have for forty years been expended in war and whose population has been more decimated by the sword is as much decayed as Virginia.”
The poverty, neglect, and stagnation Seward surveyed seemed to pervade both the landscape and its inhabitants. Slavery trapped a large portion of the Southern population, preventing upward mobility. Illiteracy rates were high, access to education difficult. While a small planter aristocracy grew rich from holdings in land and slaves, the static Southern economy did not support the creation of a sizable middle class.
While Seward focused on the economic and political depredations of slavery, Frances responded to the human plight of the enslaved men, women, and children she encountered along the journey. “We are told that we see slavery here in its mildest form,” she wrote her sister. But “disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, slavery, thou art a bitter draught.” She could not stop thinking of the “wrongs of this injured race.”
One day Frances stopped the carriage to converse with an old blind slave woman, who was at work “turning the ponderous wheel of a machine” in a yard. The work was hard, but she had to do something, she explained, “and this is all I can do now, I am so old.” When Frances asked about her family, she revealed that her husband and all her children had been sold long ago to different owners and she had never heard from any of them again. This sad encounter left a lasting impression on Frances. She recorded the interview in detail, and later read it out loud to family and friends in Auburn.
A few days afterward, the Sewards came across a group of slave children chained together on the road outside of Richmond. Henry described the sorrowful scene: “Ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old, tied together, two and two, by their wrists, were all fastened to a long rope, and followed by a tall, gaunt white man, who, with his long lash, whipped up the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse-trough to drink, and thence to a shed, where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned themselves to sleep.” The children had been purchased from different plantations that day and were on their way to be auctioned off at Richmond.
Frances could not endure to continue the journey. “Sick of slavery and the South,” she wrote in her diary; “the evil effects constantly coming before me and marring everything.” She begged her husband to cancel the rest of their tour, and he complied. Instead of continuing south to Richmond, they “turned their horses’ heads northward and homeward.” For decades afterward, indelible images of Southern poverty and the misery of enslaved blacks would strengthen Seward’s hostility to slavery and mold Frances’s powerful social conscience.
WHEN SEWARD RETURNED to Auburn, a lucrative opportunity beckoned. The Holland Land Company, which held more than three hundred thousand acres of undeveloped land in western New York, was searching for a manager to parcel the land and negotiate contracts and deeds with prospective settlers. The company offered Seward a multiyear contract with an annual salary of $5,000 plus a share in the profits. Though accepting the position meant he would reside for months at a time in Chautauqua County, more than a hundred miles from his family and home in Auburn, Seward did not hesitate.
He took a leave from his law firm and rented a five-bedroom house in Westfield, “more beautiful than you can have an idea,” hopeful that his wife and family would join him during the summer months. In the meantime, he invited Weed’s seventeen-y
ear-old daughter, Harriet, to keep Frances company in Auburn, and to help with the two boys and their new baby girl, Cornelia, born in August 1836.
Seward soon found the land-developing business more engaging than law. The six young clerks he hired quickly became a surrogate domestic circle, though he assured Frances in his nightly letters that he missed her and his children terribly. Once more he reiterated how he yearned for the day when they would read aloud to each other by the fire. He had just finished and enjoyed three of Scott’s Waverley novels, but “there are a thousand things in them, as in Shakespeare, that one may enjoy more and much longer if one has somebody to converse with while dwelling upon them.” His children pined for him and the vibrant life his presence brought to the household. More than a half century later, his son Fred “so vividly remembered” one particular evening when his father read aloud from the works of Scott and Burns that he realized “it must have been a rare event.”
Life in Westfield, meanwhile, settled into a pleasant routine. So long as Seward kept intact the image of his happy home in Auburn, he could fully immerse himself in new adventure elsewhere. His serenity was shattered when his little girl contracted smallpox and died in January 1837. Returning home for three weeks, he begged Frances, who had plunged into depression, to come back with him to Westfield. She refused to leave her two boys and “did not think it would be quite right to take them both from their Grandpa.”
Back in Westfield, Seward wrote anxiously to Frances that the “lightness that was in all my heart when I thought of you and your sanctuary, and those who surrounded you there, was the main constituent of my cheerfulness.” But now “I imagine you sitting alone, drooping, desponding, and unhappy; and, when I think of you in this condition, I cannot resist the sorrow that swells within me. If I could be with you, to lure you away to more active pursuits, to varied study, or more cheerful thoughts, I might save you for yourself, for your children, for myself.”
The following summer, Frances was finally persuaded to join him in Westfield. In an exultant letter to Weed, Seward expressed his contentment. “Well, I am here for once, enjoying the reality of dreams,” he wrote. “I read much, I ride some, and stroll more along the lake-shore. My wife and children are enjoying a measure of health which enables them to participate in these pleasures.” He lacked but one thing to complete his happiness: “If you were here,” he told Weed, “we would enjoy pleasures that would have seduced Cicero and his philosophic friends from Tusculum.”
While Frances enjoyed her summer, she was unable to share her husband’s great contentment. Returning to Auburn in September, she told Harriet Weed she had “found Westfield a very pleasant little village…but it was not my home and you can very well understand that I am more happy to be here—There is a sort of satisfaction, melancholy it is, in being once more in the room where my darling babe lived and died—in looking over her little wardrobe—in talking with those who missed and loved her.”
By the fall of 1837, an economic slump had spread westward to Chautauqua County. This “panic” of 1837 brought widespread misery in its wake—bankrupt businesses, high unemployment, a run on banks, plummeting real estate values, escalating poverty. “I am almost in despair,” Seward wrote home. “I have to dismiss three clerks; they all seem near to me as children, and are almost as helpless.”
Once again, fortune smiled upon Seward in uncanny fashion. Because Democrats were blamed for the depression, the shrinking economy enlarged his party’s political prospects. In the elections that fall, the Whigs swept the state. “There is such a buzz of ‘glorious Whig victories’ ringing in my ears,” Seward wrote Weed, “that I hardly have time to think.” Replying from Albany, where he was back in control, Weed was jubilant. “I have been two days endeavoring to snatch a moment for communion with you, to whom my heart always turns in joy or grief…. It is a great triumph—an overwhelming revolution. May that Providence which has given us deliverance, give us also wisdom to turn our power into healthful channels.”
In the months that followed, Seward and Weed worked together to broaden the Whig Party beyond its base of merchants, industrialists, and prosperous farmers. Hoping to appeal to the masses of workingmen, who had generally voted Democratic since Andrew Jackson’s day, Weed raised money for a new partisan weekly. Horace Greeley was chosen editor for the fledgling journal. The slight, rumpled-looking, nearsighted young Greeley occupied a garret in New York where he had edited a small magazine called The New Yorker. The new partisan weekly became an instant success, eventually evolving into the powerful New York Tribune. For nearly a quarter of a century, Weed, Seward, and Greeley collaborated to build support first for the Whigs and, later on, for the Republicans. For much of that time, the three were like brothers. If they often quarreled among themselves, they presented a united front to the world.
In the summer of 1838, Weed believed the time was right for Seward’s second bid to become governor. At the Whig convention that September, “the Dictator” was everywhere, persuading one delegate after another that Seward was the strongest possible choice to top the ticket. To bolster his case, he distributed statistics from the 1834 gubernatorial race showing that, despite the Whigs’ loss, Seward had claimed more votes than all the other Whig candidates. Weed’s magic worked: his protégé received the nomination on the fourth ballot. “Well, Seward, we are again embarked upon a ‘sea of difficulties,’ and must go earnestly to work.” In fact, most of the work was left to Weed, since it was thought improper in those days for candidates to stump on their own. And Weed did his job well. When the votes were counted, the thirty-seven-year-old Seward was the overwhelming victor.
Seward was thrilled to be back in the thick of things. “God bless Thurlow Weed!” he exulted. “I owe this result to him.” Within a week of the election, however, Seward’s nerve began to fail. “It is a fearful post I have coveted,” he confided to his mentor. “I shudder at my own temerity, and have lost confidence in my ability to manage my own private affairs.” Frances, pregnant with their third son, Will, had suffered weeks of illness and was nervous about the move to Albany. Confessing that he did not “know how to keep a house alone,” he wondered if he could instead take up rooms at the Eagle Tavern.
Weed arrived in Auburn and immediately took charge. He secured a mansion with a full-time staff for the governor to rent, and convinced Frances to join her husband. The yellow brick house, Seward’s son Fred recalled, “was in all respects well adapted for an official residence.” Set on four acres, it contained a suite of parlors, a ballroom, a spacious dining room, and a library in one wing, with a suite of family rooms in another. While Seward combed through books on history and philosophy, preparing what proved to be a brilliant inaugural message to the legislature, Weed stocked the residence with wine and food, chose Seward’s inaugural outfit, and met with hundreds of office seekers, eventually selecting every member of the governor’s cabinet. Seward believed “it was [his] duty to receive, not make a cabinet.”
During the transition period, Seward’s impulsive remarks often aggravated the ever-cautious Weed. “Your letter admonishes me to a habit of caution that I cannot conveniently adopt,” Seward replied. “I love to write what I think and feel as it comes up.” Nonetheless, Seward generally deferred to Weed, recognizing a superior strategic prudence and experience. “I had no idea that dictators were such amiable creatures,” he told Weed, no doubt provoking the approval of his proud mentor. “There were never two men in politics who worked together or understood each other better,” Weed wrote years later in his memoir. “Neither controlled the other…. One did not always lead, and the other follow. They were friends, in the best, the rarest, and highest sense.”
In later years, Seward told the story of a carriage ride he took from Albany shortly after his election. He had struck up a lively conversation with the coachman, who eventually asked him who he was. When Seward replied that he was governor of New York, the coachman laughed in disbelief. Seward said they had only to cons
ult the proprietor of the next tavern along the road to confirm the truth. When they reached the tavern, Seward went in and asked, “Am I the Governor of the State of New York or not?” The man did not hesitate. “No, certainly not!” “Who is, then?” queried Seward. “Why…Thurlow Weed!” the man replied.
The youthful governor’s inaugural address on New Year’s Day, 1839, laid out an ambitious agenda: a vast expansion of the public school system (including better schools for the black population), the promotion of canals and railways, the creation of a more humane system for the treatment of the insane, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt. His vision of an ever-expanding economy, built on free labor, widespread public education, and technological progress, offered a categorical rejection of the economic and cultural malaise he had witnessed on his Southern trip in 1835.
“Our race is ordained to reach, on this continent, a higher standard of social perfection than it has ever yet attained; and that hence will proceed the spirit which shall renovate the world,” he proclaimed to the New York legislature in the year of his election. If the energy, ingenuity, and ambitions of Northern free labor were “sustained by a wise and magnanimous policy on our part,” Seward promised, “our state, within twenty years, will have no desert places—her commercial ascendancy will fear no rivalry, and a hundred cities will enable her to renew the boast of ancient Crete.”
Looking once more to broaden the appeal of the Whig Party, Seward advocated measures to attract the Irish and German Catholic immigrants who formed the backbone of the state Democratic Party. He called on his fellow Americans to welcome them with “all the sympathy which their misfortunes at home, their condition as strangers here, and their devotion to liberty, ought to excite.” He argued that America owed all the benefits of citizenship to these new arrivals, who helped power the engine of Northern expansion. In particular, he proposed to reform the school system, where the virulently anti-Catholic curriculum frightened immigrants away, dooming vast numbers to illiteracy, poverty, and vice. To get these children off the streets and provide them with opportunities to advance, Seward hoped to divert some part of the public school funds to support parochial schools where children could receive instruction from members of their own faith.
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