Team of Rivals

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Seward’s school proposal provoked a violent reaction among nativist Protestants. They accused him of plotting “to overthrow republican institutions” by undoing the separation of church and state. Handbills charged that Seward was “in league with the Pope” and schemed to throw Protestant children into the hands of priests. In the end, the legislature passed a compromise plan that simply expanded the public school system. But the nativists, whose strength would grow dramatically in the decades ahead, never forgave Seward. Indeed, their opposition would eventually prove a fatal stumbling block to Seward’s hopes for the presidential nomination in 1860.

  If Seward’s progressive policies on education and immigration made him an influential and controversial figure in New York State, his defiant stand against slavery in the “Virginia Case” brought him into national prominence in the late 1830s and early 1840s. In September 1839, a vessel sailing from Norfolk, Virginia, to New York was found to have carried a fugitive slave. The slave was returned to his master in Virginia in compliance with Article IV, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution that persons held to service or labor in one state escaping into another should be delivered up to the owner. When Virginia also demanded the arrest and surrender of three free black seamen who had allegedly conspired to hide the slave on the vessel, the New York governor refused.

  In a statement that brought condemnation throughout the South, Seward argued that the seamen were charged with a crime that New York State did not recognize: people were not property, and therefore no crime had been committed. On the contrary, “the universal sentiment of civilized nations” considered helping a slave escape from bondage “not only innocent, but humane and praiseworthy.”

  As controversy over the fate of the three sailors was prolonged, the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted a series of retaliatory measures to damage the commerce of New York, calling upon other Southern states to pass resolutions denouncing Seward and the state of New York for “intermeddling” with their time-honored “domestic institutions.” Democratic periodicals in the North warned that the governor’s stance would compromise highly profitable New York trade connections with Virginia and other slave states. Seward was branded “a bigoted New England fanatic.” This only emboldened Seward’s resolve to press the issue. He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from involvement in the apprehension of fugitive slaves.

  Such divisive incidents—the “new irritation” foreseen by Jefferson in 1820—widened the schism between North and South. Though few slaves actually escaped to the North each year—an estimated one or two hundred out of the millions held in bondage—the issue exacerbated rancor on both sides. In the North, William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator, called for immediate emancipation and racial equality, denouncing slavery as sinful and inhumane, advocating “all actions, even in defiance of the Constitution,” to bring an end to “The Empire of Satan.” Such scathing criticisms moved Southern leaders to equally fierce defenses. They proclaimed slavery a “positive good” rather than a mere necessity, of immense benefit to whites and blacks alike. As discord between North and South escalated, many Northerners turned against the abolitionists. Fear that the movement would destroy the Union incited attacks on abolitionist printers in the North and West. Presses were burned, editors threatened with death should their campaign persist.

  In 1840, Seward was reelected governor, but by a significantly smaller margin. His dwindling support was blamed on the parochial school controversy, the protracted fight with Virginia, and a waning enthusiasm for social reform. Horace Greeley editorialized that Seward would “henceforth be honored more for the three thousand votes he has lost, considering the causes, than for all he has received in his life.” Nonetheless, Seward decided not to run a third time: “All that can now be worthy of my ambition,” he explained to a friend, “is to leave the State better for my having been here, and to entitle myself to a favorable judgment in its history.”

  Throughout the dispute with the state of Virginia, and every other controversy that threatened Seward’s highly successful tenure, Weed had proved a staunch ally and friend, answering critics in the legislature, publishing editorials in the Albany Evening Journal, ever sustaining Seward’s spirits. “What am I to deserve such friendship and affection?” Seward asked him in 1842 as his second term drew to its close. “Without your aid how hopeless would have been my prospect of reaching the elevation from which I am descending. How could I have sustained myself there…how could I have secured the joyous reflections of this hour, what would have been my prospect of future life, but for the confidence I so undenyingly reposed on your affection?”

  Returning to Auburn, Seward resumed his law practice, concentrating now on lucrative patent cases. He found that his fight with Virginia had endeared him to antislavery men throughout the North. Members of the new Liberty Party bandied about his name in their search for a presidential candidate in 1844. Organized in 1840, the Liberty Party was born of frustration with the failure of either major party to deal head-on with slavery. The abrogation of slavery was their primary goal. Though flattered by the attention, Seward could not yet conceive of leaving the Whig Party.

  Meanwhile, he continued to speak out on behalf of black citizens. In March 1846, a terrifying massacre took place in Seward’s hometown. A twenty-three-year-old black man named William Freeman, recently released from prison after serving five years for a crime it was later determined he did not commit, entered the home of John Van Nest, a wealthy farmer and friend of Seward’s. Armed with two knives, he killed Van Nest, his pregnant wife, their small child, and Mrs. Van Nest’s mother. When he was caught within hours, Freeman immediately confessed. He exhibited no remorse and laughed uncontrollably as he spoke. The sheriff hauled him away, barely reaching the jail ahead of an enraged mob intent upon lynching him. “I trust in the mercy of God that I shall never again be a witness to such an outburst of the spirit of vengeance as I saw while they were carrying the murderer past our door,” Frances Seward told her husband, who was in Albany at the time. “Fortunately, the law triumphed.”

  Frances recognized at once an “incomprehensible” aspect to the entire affair, and she was correct. Investigation revealed a history of insanity in Freeman’s family. Moreover, Freeman had suffered a series of floggings in jail that had left him deaf and deranged. When the trial opened, no lawyer was willing to take Freeman’s case. The citizens of Auburn had threatened violence against any member of the bar who dared to defend the cold-blooded murderer. When the court asked, “Will anyone defend this man?” a “death-like stillness pervaded the crowded room,” until Seward rose, his voice strong with emotion, and said, “May it please the court, I shall remain counsel for the prisoner until his death!”

  Seward’s friends and family, including Thurlow Weed and Judge Miller, roundly criticized Seward for his decision. Only Frances stood proudly by her husband during the outburst that followed, assuring her sister that “he will do what is right. He will not close his eyes and know that a great wrong is perpetrated.” To her son Gus she noted that “there are few men in America who would have sacrificed so much for the cause of humanity—he has his reward in a quiet conscience and a peaceful mind.” Though her house and children were her entire world, she never flinched when retaliation against Seward’s decision threatened her family. She remained steadfast throughout. Then in her early forties, she was a handsome woman, despite the hard, drawn look imparted by ill health. Over the years she had grown intellectually with her husband, sharing his passion for reading, his reformer’s spirit, and his deep hatred of slavery. Defying her father and her neighbors, she sat in the courtroom each day, her quiet bearing lending strength to her husband.

  Seward spent weeks investigating the case, interviewing Freeman’s family, and summoning f
ive doctors who testified to the prisoner’s extreme state of mental illness. In his summation, he pleaded with the jury not to be influenced by the color of the accused man’s skin. “He is still your brother, and mine…. Hold him then to be a man.” Seward continued, “I am not the prisoner’s lawyer…I am the lawyer for society, for mankind, shocked beyond the power of expression, at the scene I have witnessed here of trying a maniac as a malefactor.” He argued that Freeman’s conduct was “unexplainable on any principle of sanity,” and begged the jury not to seek the death sentence. Commit him to an asylum for the term of his natural life, Seward urged: “there is not a white man or white woman who would not have been dismissed long since from the perils of such a prosecution.”

  There was never any doubt that the local jury would return a guilty verdict. “In due time, gentlemen of the jury,” Seward concluded, “when I shall have paid the debt of nature, my remains will rest here in your midst, with those of my kindred and neighbors. It is very possible they may be unhonored, neglected, spurned! But, perhaps years hence, when the passion and excitement which now agitate this community shall have passed away, some wandering stranger, some lone exile, some Indian, some negro, may erect over them a humble stone, and thereon this epitaph, ‘He was Faithful!’” More than a century afterward, visitors to Seward’s grave at the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn would find those very words engraved on his tombstone.

  While Seward endured the hostility of his hometown, his defense of Freeman became famous throughout the country. His stirring summation was printed in dozens of newspapers and reprinted in pamphlet form for still wider distribution. Salmon Chase, himself a leading proponent of the black man’s cause, conceded to his abolitionist friend Lewis Tappan that he esteemed Seward as “one of the very first public men of our country. Who but himself would have done what he did for that poor wretch Freeman?” His willingness to represent Freeman, Chase continued, “considering his own personal position & the circumstances, was magnanimous in the highest degree.”

  So in the mid-1840s, as Seward settled back into private life in Auburn, his optimism about the future remained intact. He had established a national reputation based upon principle and a vision of national progress. He trusted that when his progressive principles once more gained favor with the masses, he would return to public life.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN, like Seward and Bates, was drawn to politics in his early years. At the age of twenty-three, after only six months in New Salem, Illinois, he decided to run for the state legislature from Sangamon County. While it must have seemed next to impossible that a new settler who had just arrived in town with no family connections and little formal education could compete for office, his belief in himself and awareness of his superior intellectual abilities proved to be powerful motivators. Both his ambition and his uncertainty are manifest in the March 1832 statement formally announcing his candidacy on an essentially Whig platform that called for internal improvements, public education, and laws against usury: “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition,” he wrote. “I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.”

  Lincoln already possessed the lifelong dream he would restate many times in the years that followed—the desire to prove himself worthy, to be held in great regard, to win the veneration and respect of his fellow citizens. “I am young and unknown to many of you,” he continued. “I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of this county, and if elected they will have conferred a favor upon me, for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.” At the same time he made it clear that this try would not be his last, telling voters that only after being defeated “some 5 or 6 times” would he feel disgraced and “never to try it again.”

  His campaign was interrupted when he joined the militia to fight against the Sac and Fox Indians in what became known as the Black Hawk War. Mustered out after three months, he returned home shortly before the election. Not surprisingly, when the votes were tallied, the little-known Lincoln had lost the election. Despite his defeat, he took pride that in his own small town of New Salem, where he “made friends everywhere he went,” he had received 277 of the 300 votes cast. This astonishing level of support was attributed to his good nature and the remarkable gift for telling stories that had made him a favorite of the men who gathered each night in the general store to share opinions and gossip. “This was the only time,” Lincoln later asserted, that he “was ever beaten on a direct vote of the people.” Two years later, he ran for the seat a second time. By then he had widened his set of acquaintances beyond New Salem and won easily, capturing the first of four successive terms in the state legislature. Until he joined the new Republican Party, Lincoln would remain a steadfast Whig—as were Seward, Bates, and, for a brief moment, Chase.

  Lincoln’s four successful campaigns for the legislature were conducted across a sparsely populated frontier county the size of Rhode Island. Young Lincoln was “always the centre of the circle where ever he was,” wrote Robert Wilson, a political colleague. “His Stories…were fresh and Sparkling. never tinctured with malevolence.” Though his face, in repose, revealed nothing “marked or Striking,” when animated by a story, “Several wrinkles would diverge from the inner corners of his eyes, and extend down and diagonally across his nose, his eyes would Sparkle, all terminating in an unrestrained Laugh in which every one present willing or unwilling were compelled to take part.” This rapid illumination of Lincoln’s features in conversation would be observed by countless others throughout his entire life, drawing many into his orbit.

  During the campaigns, candidates journeyed on horseback across “entirely unoccupied” prairies, speaking at country stores and small villages. “The Speaking would begin in the forenoon,” Wilson recalled, “the candidates Speaking alternately until all who could Speak had his turn, generally consuming the whole afternoon.” Nor were the contests limited to speeches on public issues. At Mr. Kyle’s store, west of Springfield, a group of Democrats made a wager. “‘See here Lincoln, if you can throw this Cannon ball further than we Can, We’ll vote for you.’ Lincoln picked up the large Cannon ball—felt it—swung it around—and around and said, ‘Well, boys if thats all I have to do I’ll get your votes.’” He then proceeded to swing the cannonball “four or Six feet further than any one Could throw it.”

  When he moved to Springfield in 1837, Lincoln began to attract the circle of friends and admirers who would play a decisive role in his political ascent. While he worked during the day to build his law practice, evenings would find him in the center of Springfield’s young men, gathered around a fire in Speed’s store to read newspapers, gossip, and engage in philosophical debates. “They came there,” Speed recalled, “because they were sure to find Lincoln,” who never failed to entertain with his remarkable stories. “It was a sort of social club,” Speed observed. Whigs and Democrats alike gathered to discuss the events of the day. Among the members of this “club” were three future U.S. senators: Stephen Douglas, who would become Lincoln’s principal rival; Edward Baker, who would introduce him at his first inaugural and become one of the first casualties of the Civil War; and Orville Browning, who would assist his fight for the presidential nomination.

  Throughout his eight years in the state legislature, Lincoln proved an extraordinarily shrewd grassroots politician, working to enlist voter support in the precincts for his party’s candidates. While Seward could concentrate on giving voice to the party platform, relying on Weed to build poll lists and carry voters to the polls, Lincoln engaged in every aspect of the political process, from the most visionary to the most mundane. His e
xperience taught him what every party boss has understood through the ages: the practical machinery of the party organization—the distribution of ballots, the checklists, the rounding up of voters—was as crucial as the broad ideology laid out in the platform. The same intimate involvement in campaign organization that he displayed in these early years would characterize all of Lincoln’s future campaigns.

  His 1840 campaign plan divided the party organization into three levels of command. The county captain was “to procure from the poll-books a separate list for each Precinct” of everyone who had previously voted the Whig slate. The list would then be divided by each precinct captain “into Sections of ten who reside most convenient to each other.” The captain of each section would then be responsible to “see each man of his Section face to face, and procure his pledge…[to] vote as early on the day as possible.”

  That same year, Lincoln and four Whig colleagues, including Joshua Speed, published a circular directed at the presidential campaign of William Henry Harrison. “Our intention is to organize the whole State, so that every Whig can be brought to the polls.” To this end, the publication outlined a plan whereby each county would be divided into small districts, each responsible for making “a perfect list” of all their voters, designating which names were likely from past behavior to vote with the Whigs and which were doubtful. Committees in each district would then “keep a constant watch on the doubtful voters, and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence.” These committees were to submit monthly progress reports to the central state committee, ensuring an accurate survey of voters in each county before election day. Party workers could then be dispatched to round up the right voters and get them to the polls to support the Whig Party. In setting forth his campaign plan, as meticulously structured as any modern effort to “get out the vote,” Lincoln did not neglect the necessity of fund-raising, asking each county to send “fifty or one hundred dollars” to subscribe to a newspaper “devoted exclusively to the great cause in which we are engaged.”